Join me now as we take a quick trip of gratitude that led to the other item I had framed recently:
- Hollywood. Technically, this should probably be L.A., but the location is close enough. Plus “Hollywood” is my nickname as an adult at summer camp. Has a nice ring to it, right?
- Paul Jensen. I met him at the Mensa booth at the State Fair back in 2004 and we worked there together for about three hours. He’d heard about a local casting call for some kind of smart person game show and if he hadn’t contacted the casting agency and told them to call me… so insert lots of gratitude here.
- Beauty and the Geek. Yes, that’s a gigantic, overarching number of things to be grateful for squished into just four words, but if I started going into detail, this definitely wouldn’t be done by the end of Day 21. So I’m just gonna stick with that: the reality TV show “Beauty and the Geek.”
- Television. Without TV, I’d be stuck being grateful for plain old reality in #3 and that’s just ridiculous.
- USA Today. They carried a full-page ad for Beauty and the Geek on June 8th, 2005. It used quotes from reviews in TV Guide, the LA Times, and… USA Today. So what’s wrong with a little self-promotion? (Says the guy whose website is shawnbakken.net…)
- Whichever neighbor left the full-page ad in our mailbox. We don’t get USA Today, but one day, we opened up the mailbox and there it was. No name, no nothing, just that one page. You’d think someone knew I was on the show or something.
- Lamination. It’s basically putting thin sheets of plastic on the front and back of a sheet of paper, then melting the outside edges. It protects paper from the elements, wear and tear, browning with age and it’s probably the only reason why this page of newspaper was still in good enough condition to put in a frame 13 years later. (It’s also the reason why you can see some wrinkles behind the glass, but paper typically doesn’t age gracefully, so there ya go.)
