Well, I think I've blown my chance for minor league TV celebrity fame. Regular, devoted, slavishly obsessed readers will know that I was approached to be on a reality TV game show about how to pick up babes. It was all set for February. They were even going to pay me real money!
But yesterday I got a phone call from the director. After a few seconds of light conversation I could tell that he was sizing me up to see if I could talk funny as well as write funny. I fear I did not do well. I mean, My God! I'm Canadian. And I'm a geek. Hello! Call the Boredom Police.
So he's asking me all these questions about how to pick up women and my brain is whirring because I have no idea. Did anyone in his company even read the blog article about my supermodel party? My entire success with women, such as it is, is based on huge dollops of blind luck, an unabashed tendency to dance like a spastic ungulate, and the deep-seated certainty that I have absolutely no hope of seducing them so I might as well try to befriend them.
It was quite disturbing. He asked me things like, "what kind of lines do I think work on women?" How the hell would I know? It's been more than a dozen years since I was single, and even then I don't think I ever used a line on a woman. I dimly recall (when very drunk many many years ago) beckoning a waitress over and saying in a stage whisper, "You know, I'm not wearing any socks."
But, even then, the line was meant to be ironic and I was actually trying to impress a women sitting at my table (once again a friend of mine – God it's hard to seduce your friends!). And I suppose it worked. The waitress fled in fear, but my friend laughed. Never did sleep with her though.
So I'm talking to this guy on the phone and it's becoming clear to me that he's looking for a suave lounge lizard type of guy and I have to come up with something funny to say and I'm stuck. And I start worrying that I'm blowing my chance to be on a reality tv game show and then I start worrying that I'm concerned about blowing my chance to be on a reality TV game show and how pathetic is that?
And then I get distracted thinking of various guys I could recommend in my place. There was a guy I knew back when I was treeplanting named Preston. When we hit town for a night off he would never bother to get a hotel room and just rely on picking up some woman in the bar -- partly for the sex and partly just to save the price of a room. Now he must have had a few tricks up his sleeve. He would know what lines work on a woman. And then there's my crazy landlord who has had more sexual partners that I have red blood cells.
And so, of course, being distracted, I'm just answering in monosyllables and the guy laughs every now and then but he's a Kiwi and they're easily amused and he works in TV and can I trust him and it just hits me that really, I'm quite dull. And so I panic and start telling him the story about how my wife proposed to me after I impressed her with some frantic air guitar to the song "You Shook Me All Night Long" by ACDC. It was on the empty dance floor of the Fort Nelson Hotel bar in Buttnowhereville, Northern B.C. but it's too late and he obviously doesn't want to hear it. And he hangs up with the immortal line, "We'll call you."
And so, I think, "that's it; no Jade Goody type fame for me." Bugger.