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Authors: Benjamin Svetkey
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sorry.”
“Oh, no!” Lacy all but shouted. “I’m not going to the party by myself. You have to go with me! We’re on a date!”
People all around the balcony were starting to shush us. I’d never been shushed in a theater before and didn’t know what to do. So I started shushing, too. Big mistake. “YOU’RE SHUSHING ME?!” Lacy yelled into my face, so loudly that people in the orchestra section began turning around to glower. “YOU DON’T SHUSH ME!” A few more seconds of this and we’d draw the attention of the entire theater, including Mars and Samantha. I did the only thing I could. I hid my face in my jacket lapels, climbed over Lacy’s seat, and dashed as quickly as I could out of the theater. The last thing I heard was Lacy yelling after me. “ASSHOLE!”
Once again, I had to concede this point.
6
As a member of the Hollywood press, I saw fame from the outside looking in. I was a Talmudic scholar of pop culture, but never part of the biblical text. On one occasion, though, I did get a tiny taste of what life was like inside the fishbowl. In the fall of 1999, my picture was in
KNOW
magazine. Not even my father recognized me—my face was covered in fur and I was wearing large prosthetic rodent ears—but I was in
KNOW
all the same, just like a real celebrity.
This was for a story on a sci-fi TV show called
Dark Matter
, about a microscopic alternate universe that existed in subatomic space. The concept was based almost entirely on the classic stoner epiphanot in
Animal House—
“Okay, so that means our whole solar system could be, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being …”—but the series became an instant cult hit. So my editors arranged for me to appear in one of its episodes as an alien extra—a sort of human-hamster hybrid—then write about the experience for the magazine.
I arrived at the Paramount lot at six in the morning and spent three hours in a makeup chair being turned into a “VIP alien,” as my hamsteroid character was described in the call sheet. I learned that I’d be making my TV debut as part of a crowd of aliens waiting in line at Passport and Immigration Control at an interdimensional space-port—a long panoramic shot of assorted otherworldly travelers getting their space luggage checked and their space documents stamped by customs officer robots. But when I stepped onto the soundstage and saw the other extraterrestrials, I felt a pang of alien envy. They had much cooler makeup than I did. One guy looked like a Rastafarian orangutan; another like the love spawn of Jabba the Hutt and Mrs. Potato Head. All I did during my seven seconds on film was stand next to a scantily clad reptile woman with four breasts and pretend to make small talk. “Whadya expect?” the lizard lady asked me between takes. “That we’d do scenes from
Hedda Gabler
?”
When the article came out, the same week my episode aired, I stopped at newsstands all over New York to gaze upon my furry face. Within days I started getting letters from readers requesting autographed copies. I felt like an idiot writing my name on my picture with a Sharpie, but I answered every piece of mail, just like a real star (or a real star’s assistant). It didn’t take long for me to grow a star-size ego, as well. When I scrutinized my face in
KNOW
, I started to notice a tiny red vein in my left eye—a flaw that would have been airbrushed away had I been a real celebrity. I cursed myself for not demanding photo approval.
A few weeks later, as I was waiting in line at a videostore, I experienced another drawback to fame. Let’s just say I was doing research for that big exposé on the adult movie industry I’d been planning to get around to writing. When it was my turn at the register, I removed the video from under my arm and discreetly slid it—my renter’s ID card covering the naughty bits—to the skinny, bespectacled nerd behind the counter. He read my name, looked at my
“Oh, no!” Lacy all but shouted. “I’m not going to the party by myself. You have to go with me! We’re on a date!”
People all around the balcony were starting to shush us. I’d never been shushed in a theater before and didn’t know what to do. So I started shushing, too. Big mistake. “YOU’RE SHUSHING ME?!” Lacy yelled into my face, so loudly that people in the orchestra section began turning around to glower. “YOU DON’T SHUSH ME!” A few more seconds of this and we’d draw the attention of the entire theater, including Mars and Samantha. I did the only thing I could. I hid my face in my jacket lapels, climbed over Lacy’s seat, and dashed as quickly as I could out of the theater. The last thing I heard was Lacy yelling after me. “ASSHOLE!”
Once again, I had to concede this point.
6
As a member of the Hollywood press, I saw fame from the outside looking in. I was a Talmudic scholar of pop culture, but never part of the biblical text. On one occasion, though, I did get a tiny taste of what life was like inside the fishbowl. In the fall of 1999, my picture was in
KNOW
magazine. Not even my father recognized me—my face was covered in fur and I was wearing large prosthetic rodent ears—but I was in
KNOW
all the same, just like a real celebrity.
This was for a story on a sci-fi TV show called
Dark Matter
, about a microscopic alternate universe that existed in subatomic space. The concept was based almost entirely on the classic stoner epiphanot in
Animal House—
“Okay, so that means our whole solar system could be, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being …”—but the series became an instant cult hit. So my editors arranged for me to appear in one of its episodes as an alien extra—a sort of human-hamster hybrid—then write about the experience for the magazine.
I arrived at the Paramount lot at six in the morning and spent three hours in a makeup chair being turned into a “VIP alien,” as my hamsteroid character was described in the call sheet. I learned that I’d be making my TV debut as part of a crowd of aliens waiting in line at Passport and Immigration Control at an interdimensional space-port—a long panoramic shot of assorted otherworldly travelers getting their space luggage checked and their space documents stamped by customs officer robots. But when I stepped onto the soundstage and saw the other extraterrestrials, I felt a pang of alien envy. They had much cooler makeup than I did. One guy looked like a Rastafarian orangutan; another like the love spawn of Jabba the Hutt and Mrs. Potato Head. All I did during my seven seconds on film was stand next to a scantily clad reptile woman with four breasts and pretend to make small talk. “Whadya expect?” the lizard lady asked me between takes. “That we’d do scenes from
Hedda Gabler
?”
When the article came out, the same week my episode aired, I stopped at newsstands all over New York to gaze upon my furry face. Within days I started getting letters from readers requesting autographed copies. I felt like an idiot writing my name on my picture with a Sharpie, but I answered every piece of mail, just like a real star (or a real star’s assistant). It didn’t take long for me to grow a star-size ego, as well. When I scrutinized my face in
KNOW
, I started to notice a tiny red vein in my left eye—a flaw that would have been airbrushed away had I been a real celebrity. I cursed myself for not demanding photo approval.
A few weeks later, as I was waiting in line at a videostore, I experienced another drawback to fame. Let’s just say I was doing research for that big exposé on the adult movie industry I’d been planning to get around to writing. When it was my turn at the register, I removed the video from under my arm and discreetly slid it—my renter’s ID card covering the naughty bits—to the skinny, bespectacled nerd behind the counter. He read my name, looked at my
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