When I was a child, being on TV was the greatest possible thing that could happen to a person.
One summer, while I was at my aunt and uncle’s house, a drunk driver drove into a house down the street, directly through the wall and into the living room. We heard the crash from a few blocks away and went running to see what happened. Everybody was safe, except for the living room set, I imagine, but it was a big enough disaster to attract the local news community, and soon enough, vans with satellites started rounding the corners, parking along the curb, and hauling out cameras and tripods. It was a spectacle. This was the suburbs, after all. Nothing exciting happened here to begin with, and now there was something besides a television set or bonfire for all of us to stand and stare at. There were lights, and microphones, and local news reporters furiously dabbing makeup on their sweaty foreheads. All to look at a car that was sitting motionless halfway through a brick wall. But still, whenever one of the camera’s lights went bright, my cousins and I would walk aimlessly behind the reporter, far enough away to seem innocuous, but close enough so our faces were clearly captured on screen. Even then, I knew how to find my light.
That night, we taped every eleven o’clock news program—who the hell knows which station’s cameras we were standing in front of—and the next morning, we went through every tape until they got to the segment about the car, and while the reporter droned on about the damage and how the car would be removed and what hospital the driver was spending the night in, we looked for a hint of ourselves in the back corner, a wisp of hair or even a shadow. In the end, none of us made it on air. Television cameramen are well equipped to crop out menacing children like us. But still, the prospect of getting our fifteen minutes of fame was tantalizing. We could’ve been stars!
I never quite understood this desire to be on television, at least in this way. This was before the Internet was anything beyond instant messaging and chat rooms, when “going viral” meant you needed to see a doctor. This was before some buffoon grabbing a local news reporter’s microphone and shouting something obscene into the camera would end up on YouTube and get a bigger viewership than the news station had gotten that entire year. Even now, I don’t understand the urge to go viral this way—not that there’s a desirable way to go viral, let’s be honest. But then, standing behind a news reporter meant, at the very best, you’d get twenty seconds of uninterrupted airtime blurring into the background.
But I suppose the idea of being on television was titillating, especially to a young, impressionable nerd like myself. Everybody watches TV! Being on TV automatically means you’re famous! And being famous is basically the coolest thing in the world. It’s the reason those annoying people at baseball games lose their shit whenever the camera pans to them for five seconds. It’s the reason the entire city of Los Angeles exists. The magic of television.
• • •
I never thought I’d be on TV after that. In high school, I had a reputation for being a ticking time bomb of embarrassment. Whenever I’d raise my hand to answer a question, or more accurately, whenever I was called on to answer a question—I tried to avoid the spotlight as much as possible—it was only a matter of seconds before all of my blood rushed to my face and my cheeks turned an ungodly combination of beet red and fire. It would take at least another ten minutes for my face to return to normal. And this lasted well into college. In discussion sections—designed, I’m fairly certain, just so insufferable bros in beanies can philosophize about a book they’ve never read—I stuck faithfully to the minimum amount of participation required, and certainly never engaged in anything close to discussion. Honestly, I was sparing everybody the discomfort of having to be in the same room as someone who could turn as hideously scarlet as I could.
This is all to say that I never imagined myself on television, however enticing I found the idea of it, least of all as a nominee for a People’s Choice Award for a series of videos I’d made for the Internet, and least of all as the unceremonious winner.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.
• • •
In the summer of 2014, I was working at the Internet company BuzzFeed, often characterized as a factory of lists, quizzes, and cat videos, which is not an entirely unfair portrait of what working at BuzzFeed was really like. It was a quintessentially millennial workspace, with all the clichés you can possibly imagine: a snack closet stocked with gluten-free candies and granola bars, a row of refrigerators full of seltzer water and beer, iced coffee on tap, visits from Internet-famous cats and one particularly adorable mini-horse named Mystic, and rows upon rows of young, talented, creative people.
My job, for better or worse, was to make stuff people would find funny and share with their friends. I wrote hundreds of lists and quizzes, and even curated my fair share of cat videos. At one point, I was officially listed as a senior editor on the Animals masthead, an accomplishment my journalism professors surely found worthwhile. About two years into my job there, I asked my boss if I could get drunk at lunch and review a One Direction album—trust me, I’ve had worse ideas—and she said yes. The drunk-at-work barrier officially broken, it was only a matter of time before I proposed getting drunk in the middle of the day and capturing the whole thing on camera.
Now, you might be wondering how someone who hated public speaking to the point of turning into a living beet-human would find himself in front of the camera, and the truth is, like all terrible things in life, because of karaoke. I’d never been a fan of karaoke. I found it terribly unpleasant. My first week at BuzzFeed—and my first ever week in New York City—there was a party to celebrate the launch of some new section of the website, and we all went to a karaoke bar near the office. I’d been to karaoke before, but always as an unwitting bystander, mumbling the words along with everybody else at an undetectable volume.
But this time was different. It was a small private room—one of the rooms where you can scream as obnoxiously as you want, only disturbing your closest friends instead of complete strangers. This night, everybody was wasted. Everybody was screaming along. Nobody could sing. Halfway through the night, the part of the night when everybody’s eyes sort of glaze over, one of my new coworkers was on the tiny stage at the end of the room, crooning away, when another coworker got up behind him and started gyrating sensually to the music before taking something out of his pocket—a Mexican wrestling mask, it became apparent, as he unfolded it—and placed it on his head. “Weird,” I thought, “but OK. I’m drunk. I can go along with this.” And then, still gyrating to the music, he took off his shirt, and underneath, he was wearing a leather Princess Leia bra. It’s unclear to me whether he’d slipped this on in the bathroom sometime in the last hour, or if he’d been wearing it the entire day, or if this was something he wore every day. I still have no idea. But what I do know is that I was utterly and completely baffled by everything I was seeing, and how normal everybody else considered what was happening.
Oh, that’s just Gavin, someone explained when I asked what the hell was going on, as if that should somehow satisfy my curiosity. But that night, I had one of those end-of-a-rom-com kind of moments, when time sort of slows down around you and the lights all fade together and you just kind of sit back and smile at how everything’s played out, while everybody slowly dances around your head, gyrating in Princess Leia lingerie and lucha libre headgear. I don’t even think I got up and sang that night, but it was one of those moments where I felt like I was among my people, where I could do anything and not feel embarrassed or ashamed.
After that evening, karaoke became a main staple of my idea of New York City nightlife. It took a while before I got comfortable enough to get onstage, but watching everybody else, how confident they were even when they could barely sing, was inspiring. When I finally did sing, I performed a stirring rendition of “And I Am Telling You” from the soundtrack to Dreamgirls, and the applause that I got after was one of the greatest feelings ever. Karaoke changed my worldview. “What’s the worst that can happen, besides disappointing Jennifer Hudson?”
So, when on-camera work became a possibility at BuzzFeed, I felt like I could do it, or at least try it. What’s the worst that could happen? Besides disappointing Jennifer Hudson?
So we started filming a series of videos where I’d get drunk at my desk—an entire bottle of wine in only a few minutes—rant about one thing or another, then hastily edit a five-minute cut together, often still drunk, and post it to Facebook. In a matter of weeks, those videos got millions of views, and they soon became our very own version of must-see Internet. Karaoke on the biggest stage. Maybe not the biggest stage, but a much bigger one than I was used to. It was exciting but terrifying. Drunk moms from Minnesota started stopping me in the street. I was interviewed by a Canadian news station. It was all happening.
And then, one afternoon in late 2015—about a year into posting videos—I got a tweet from a random stranger asking if I knew I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award. I had no idea. I didn’t believe it. People tweet me a lot of shit, and of all the shit people have tweeted at me, nobody had ever asked if I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award. I was understandably suspicious. But then I looked it up. And it was true! I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award for favorite social media star. Granted, this was only the short list, some twenty people who might be nominated if all their followers voted for them, and the other people in my category were people who, in some cases, had tens of millions more followers than I had. There’d be no way in hell I’d make it beyond the short list. And sure, like they tell you, it’s an honor just to be nominated—or short-listed—but nobody wants to be short-listed when they could win. I wanted to win.
But I’m not lying when I tell you I have no idea how the hell this shit works. Nobody tells you anything. I didn’t even know I was on the short list until some random person on Twitter told me. They don’t send you an e-mail saying, “Hey, this is how shit works.” You just have to figure it all out yourself. But I made a half-assed effort to try to get people to vote for me. And they did.
A handful of weeks later, they announced the finalists. Some guy from some TV show that I’ve never watched got up to the little podium and read out the nominees for my category, and he mispronounced the hell out of my name, but he said my name! I was officially nominated! Not just a short-lister, but a full-blown, actually could maybe win this shit, will maybe get to go to the show in Hollywood nominee. If I died that night, no matter how grimly, my obituary would still cite me as “People’s Choice Award Nominee Matt Bellassai.” As in “People’s Choice Award Nominee Matt Bellassai died today choking to death on an egg roll in his apartment. He was found peacefully at home, naked in bed, covered in duck sauce, watching homosexual pornography. He will be incinerated in a Krispy Kreme oven this Saturday and his ashes will be thrown at Beyoncé at her earliest possible convenience, as per his last will and testament.”
For the weeks after that, I made a not-so-subtle effort for votes. But of course, there was no way of telling how well I was doing. One of the other nominees, a teen heartthrob with vague abs and a full head of hair, was trending worldwide on Twitter. No matter how many times my mother assured me she was voting, my efforts seemed futile. But I still campaigned till the very last moment.
I didn’t hear anything for weeks, and I still had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even know if I’d get to go to the awards show. I didn’t know what dress I was wearing. I didn’t know if I could bring a guest, or if alcohol would be provided or if I had to bring my own from home. But finally, I got word that I’d be attending the show—all the nominees were indeed invited—and I had only a few weeks to get myself to Los Angeles, get an outfit, and figure out the alcohol situation.
Now, I’m not a particular fan of Los Angeles as a city or as a concept. I’ve been there countless times since then, but before the awards show, I’d only been once or twice and I hadn’t gotten used to the city’s bullshit. Of course, now I understand how to navigate the city: never make direct eye contact with anybody who’s going or recently been to hot yoga, never agree to take a wheatgrass shot, and never disrespect In-N-Out, even though their french fries aren’t even that good. Overall, though, it’s too hot, there’s too much traffic, and everybody is too beautiful for society to function properly. No community can ever last if everybody in it is beautiful all the time. No matter how much I love getting my Starbucks from a barista who looks exactly like Zac Efron, we need ugly people to balance out the world. That’s just how it works. Besides, everybody in Los Angeles is certifiably insane. I had an Uber driver in L.A. who told me her ex-husband kidnapped her children, and before I had a chance to fully express my shock, she told me she was currently working on a screenplay about the entire incident, and every ounce of human emotion I had in that moment evaporated.
The week of the awards show, I had to find something to wear, and I went with someone from BuzzFeed to help me pick out the finest suit we could find at the Men’s Wearhouse in L.A., and yes, before you question whether I’m telling the truth, let me assure you, I did actually wear a Men’s Wearhouse suit to an awards show where I was nominated. Hollywood! You grow up watching televised award shows and assume everybody there is dressed in Versace that Donatella personally stitched onto each of their bodies, but the truth is, half the people at any given awards show—and there are hundreds of these things happening every week—are wearing a bargain dress from Sears and at least five layers of compression underwear. Unless you’re Lady Gaga and show up with a team of specialists who pluck, pinch, and plaster over any semblance of what makes your body a normal human body, you’re on your own. So yes, we picked out a fabulously gray Men’s Wearhouse suit, the color of zombie skin, and paired it with a black shirt and gray-and-black plaid tie. I looked like a slightly more pampered version of a JCPenney store manager. Seriously, if I could go back and change anything about what happens in this entire chapter, I would change this outfit, and we haven’t even gotten to the night of the awards show yet. It was that drab.
• • •
The day of the awards is an uncharacteristically gloomy day in Los Angeles, a wonderfully foreboding sign of what’s to come. It’s a Wednesday, and I assume they’re holding it in the middle of the week to get a discount on the theater. Besides, Ellen DeGeneres will be there, and you’re not getting Ellen to come out on a Friday night.
Around 11 a.m. is when the grooming starts, which is a ridiculously early and counterproductive time to start pampering yourself—I sweat through at least three layers of clothing before lunch on a normal day, how am I supposed to make it to the show in one piece if we start this early? But considering that every show taped on the West Coast is recorded for the East Coast prime time audience, everything in Los Angeles has to start three hours earlier than any normal human behavior.
Now, everybody at any event in Los Angeles is groomed to within an inch of their life. Men, women, children, dogs—half of them have their hair and makeup done just to go to Whole Foods, and frankly, considering everybody in that city is so horrifically gorgeous, I don’t blame them. Whenever I’m in L.A., I try wearing the biggest pair of sunglasses to cover as much of my face as possible, to save myself the embarrassment of being compared to the natives. On a day like this, where there’ll be cameras and lights and a red carpet, you better believe the bar is raised.
Fortunately, I was getting pampered. It’s not my favorite thing in the world to have someone painting my face with makeup. I have a bad history with makeup. When I was five, my mother insisted on dressing me up as Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween, a costume that seemed adorable, but required that she apply a thick layer of chalky green makeup to my face every time we needed to pose for pictures. I hated the smell of that makeup. It smelled of melted Tupperware full of old chili, and she absolutely refused to let me wear the costume without the face of makeup. But every time she tried to apply it to my face, I’d start violently gagging and thrashing, and the tears would streak through the makeup, and any bit of it that she would manage to get on my face would be smeared off in seconds anyway. There is no existing picture of this Halloween that doesn’t feature my tear-streaked face.
But it’s a lot easier to get through the makeup process when you’re twenty-five and can legally be wasted during it. And besides, on this day, I was getting the good stuff. BuzzFeed was paying for everything, or rather, BuzzFeed had to pay for everything, because I didn’t have any money. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I would’ve done without a company like BuzzFeed—you can be nominated for an award, and you still gotta fly yourself to the city it’s in, get yourself a hotel room, get an outfit, hair, makeup, shoes, transportation to the venue, a male prostitute to keep you warm that night. It’s a whole big deal. But I guess that’s what credit cards are for.
There was a brief hiccup when the hairstylist decided to give me 2004 Green Day emo throwback comb-over bangs, but we managed to course-correct soon enough.
I squeezed myself into my hideous suit and finally hopped into a van with my entourage—a BuzzFeed publicist (there to ensure that I didn’t embarrass the company, I’m sure), me, and my date for the evening, Jeremy, a video producer who’d helped create the mess that got us there in the first place.
When you pull up to an awards show, it’s absolute chaos. After the initial shock hits that you’re on a red carpet, just like on TV, and there’s lights and cameras and beautiful people wearing horrifying amounts of bronzer, you start to realize that there’s absolutely no order or reason to what is happening. I imagine this is what animals who have been held in captivity feel like when they’re released back into the wild. There’s a faint sense of familiarity to everything—these are human beings with faces and limbs, I recognize those things—but everything else is sheer pandemonium. Or at least controlled pandemonium.
When you get out of the car, it’s like getting onto the world’s worst conveyer belt. You’re whisked into a tent and along a path, through a security checkpoint where a guard with a gun judges you when you empty your pockets and all that’s inside is lip gloss and oil-blotting sheets. Once you’re deemed safe, you step right onto the stretch of carpet where attendees stop and pose for photographers, before taking another ten steps and then stopping again, and so on and so forth until everybody dies a fiery death. There’s no order to it, at least not at the People’s Choice Awards, so the sequence of people walking along the carpet is simply the sequence of people who happened to arrive at that very moment, and in this very moment, I happen to be sandwiched between Kate Hudson and Jack Black. And let me tell you, photographers don’t give a shit about you, especially when someone more famous is within five feet of where you’re standing. But that doesn’t change the order of things! So then you’re walking along the carpet and photographers are shouting at you, but not as loud as they’re shouting at Kate Hudson and Jack Black. You can feel the corners of your mouth shaking, partly because your cheeks are starting to ache from smiling, but partly because you’re afraid your bangs fell back to Green Day status. A typical photographer interaction goes like this:
“Who are you?!”
“I’m Matt.”
“What do you do?!”
“Um. I write stuff on the Internet.”
At this point, the photographer’s face always drops. “Oh.”
“I’m nominated for an award,” I shouted at one of them in indignation.
And then, “Fine. Look over here. And try not to look like you’re shitting your pants!”
OK, nobody actually said that. But they might as well have.
When the photographer stands end, someone pushes you out of the way to make room for Jack Black, and the conveyer belt continues. The next part of the carpet is where all the press stands waiting with lights, cameras, and microphones, craning their necks to see who’s coming along the carpet. Typically, this is the part where your publicist walks ahead of you, goes up to some of the reporters, and says, “I have Matt Bellassai, the guy with the wine,” and the reporters will shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Typically, your publicist will try to get far enough ahead of you so that you don’t have to bear witness to this rejection firsthand, but the carpet is far too crowded for you to stray too far without getting lost, so you hear all of it. Nobody wants to talk to an Internet writer when Kate Hudson just walked through.
And of course, I was well prepared for this part of the carpet. After all, I was a writer at BuzzFeed for a couple of years before then, and had found myself on the other side of the carpet rope plenty of times, waiting for one celebrity or another to walk by so I could scream their name and pray they’d stop and give me some innocuous quote. I’d had plenty of hapless publicists come up to me and whisper, “I have so-and-so, from so-and-so,” and I’d shyly wag my head and shrug my shoulders and hope that they didn’t take it personally. It’s all part of the never-ending fuck-fest that is Hollywood. But the conveyer belt plugs along regardless of your feelings. After getting rejected by one too many people with microphones, you’re pushed through another tent and then a walkway and then someone is scanning your ticket and handing you a badge and you’re shoved inside the theater like cattle shoved into a slaughter truck. The conveyer belt has ended, and somehow, you’ve survived.
• • •
We finally got inside the venue, and honestly I don’t even remember what series of hallways and entrances we walked through to get backstage, but the event staff led us to a tiny greenroom where we could hang out before the show started. Now, at this point, I’d seen plenty of celebrities who had, at some time or another, made their way to BuzzFeed for photographs or interviews. I wouldn’t consider myself a person easily star-stricken, no matter how much I fawn over my favorite celebrities on Twitter. But on this night, I was seriously bugging out. Because this greenroom was literally the holding room for every single celebrity who was there that night. On one couch sat the entire cast of Grey’s Anatomy—and sure, that show has been on since the dawn of time, but still, I’d certainly never been in the same room with any of them. In one corner there was Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy and all of the hot people from those CW shows whose names I can never remember but whose abs I’ve seen on the Internet. In another corner stood Chris Hemsworth, in all his meaty glory, and had I not been so deliriously paralyzed by everything that was happening, I would’ve taken a handful of him. But too much was happening all at once. All I could think to do was ask a person with a staff badge where, perhaps, I could find some alcohol, and she looked at me with eyes that suggested she thought I’d somehow snuck inside, before telling me that there was no alcohol backstage. But in any case, the show was starting in only a few minutes, and we had to find our seats inside the theater.
Of course, when you walk into any theater in Los Angeles, especially when you haven’t gotten used to this kind of thing, you sort of lose your breath. It’s almost impossible to tell who’s famous and who’s just a really ridiculously good-looking person, but I didn’t have much time to process everything around me because the show was starting and an army of producers in headsets were barking at everybody to find their seats, sit down, and shut up.
I sat in awe as the show progressed, and one celebrity after another came onstage. We were only a few rows from the front, and could see where each person was sitting, who they were talking to, how nervous they looked before they went onstage (the gratifying thing about Hollywood: nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, except maybe Oprah, and everybody is nervous as hell). Meanwhile, every three minutes, my parents would text me from their viewing party at home to tell me that they caught a glimpse of my face as the camera panned over the crowd.
Beforehand, the producers told us that my category wouldn’t be announced onstage. Here’s a not-so-secret secret about award shows: nobody gives a fuck about the awards. Everybody is here for the glamour and the cameras and the spectacle. The People’s Choice Awards give out something like sixty awards every year, and only about fifteen of them are handed out onstage to people like Ellen and Selena Gomez who are actually famous and not just on the Internet. But the producers did tell us that they would hand out the award in the audience just when they came back from a commercial break, and they would give us a heads-up when that was about to happen. Otherwise, all we had to do was sit and chill.
Commercial breaks during award shows are absolute anarchy. The second the cameras turn off for a commercial, about half of the room stands up and shuffles about, going to the bathroom, heading backstage for a snack, or ditching the show entirely because they’ve seen what they came for and they’re fucking sick of it. An army of seat-fillers—a bunch of hot young aspiring actors and actresses who want to be around famous people—come in and fill all of the empty seats so that when the cameras return, they return to a nice, big room, full of beautiful people who definitely didn’t just play the biggest, most celebrity-filled game of musical chairs. The last thirty seconds before they come back from commercial is like a scene from a war movie, with producers running up and down the aisles, screaming at everything with a face, shoving every warm body into any available seat, skipping over rolls and rolls of camera cord, and elbowing production interns in the head. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing one of them pull a gun and shoot an assistant in the neck. It’s an absolutely glorious mess, and twice as entertaining as the actual show.
About halfway through the evening, during one of the commercial breaks, just as the cameras shut off, a producer runs up to me, trailed by a cameraman. She leans in.
“You’re Matt Balthazar, right?” she shouts.
“Um. Matt Bellassai? Yeah, that’s me.”
She shouts again, “OK, good, we wanted to make sure you’re in your seat. Get ready.”
At this point, my heart is pounding, or at least beating as hard as it can beneath the layers of Spanx I’m wearing. I mean, she’s making sure I’m in the right seat, she’s saying “get ready,” that’s gotta be a good sign, right?
She goes back to the cameraman a few rows in front of us and points to me. The cameraman cranes his neck around the camera to get a look at me, he points at me to make sure he has the right fat, balding ginger, and the producer nods.
I’m freaking out. My stomach is churning. I’m sweating through my disgusting Men’s Wearhouse suit because their cheap fabrics aren’t breathable enough to handle my superhuman levels of body humidity.
We hear someone shout, “THIRTY SECONDS TO AIR,” and everybody starts moving in different directions. Producers are screaming into microphones, hustling people this way and that way, barking orders at everyone in sight. “TEN SECONDS,” someone else shouts, and the final chaotic dash for open seats commences. In the aisle where I’m sitting a woman in a dress appears holding a glistening award statue. None of the other nominees in my category are sitting nearby, which can only mean one thing. I prepare my least nervous smile. I get ready to act surprised, to wave to the camera in glee as I hoist my award—my award!—to the sky.
“FIVE. FOUR. THREE . . .”
And just as the cameras get ready to blaze back to life, just as the audience roars back to on-air applause, a seat-filler—some woman in tacky heels and a tight black dress—rushes in front of the camera to try jumping into a seat in the row directly in front of us. The producer’s veins bulge from her neck as she screams, “GET OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” But people are standing to make room for the woman in the black dress to sit. Everybody finally lowers to their seats, but by then, the cameraman is already moving forward, and in the confusion, he stops on the man sitting directly in front of me. And for a moment, time stops entirely.
I should point out, for the record, that the man sitting in front of me looks absolutely nothing like me. I could understand, even sympathize with the cameraman—the very same cameraman who had pointed directly at me seconds earlier—had the man in front of me been wearing glasses, or had a comb-over, or was wearing a similarly appalling Men’s Wearhouse suit hastily purchased the day before. But none of these things was true. The man in front of me had jet-black hair, a beard, and giant, gleaming teeth, and to top it all off, he was approximately thirty-five years older than me. And sure, maybe that cameraman suffers from one of those diseases where you can’t tell faces apart, or maybe he had recently sustained one of those debilitating injuries to the part of the brain that remembers things for longer than five seconds, but in either case, I might kindly suggest that he pursue a different line of work until he’s able to correctly distinguish an overweight bespectacled ginger from an old coot with fluorescent teeth. But now we’ll never know.
I look sidewise at Jeremy beside me and chuckle nervously. It’s the only thing I can do.
Meanwhile, the cameraman is screaming now. “You won!” he screams at the man in front of me. “Act excited!”
The man in front of me, just as confused as the rest of us, of course, gives the camera two thumbs-up and smiles wildly. On the jumbo screens above us, the man is grinning frantically, and below his face it says “MATT BELLASSAI, Favorite Social Media Star.”
Behind the cameraman, all the while, the producer is hysterically waving her hands. “NOT HIM!” she’s shouting in vain, pulling at her hair. “NOT HIM!” But everything around us is too loud, the cameraman can’t hear, and the man in front of me is waving too wildly for anybody to care.
The woman with the statue comes forward and hands the award to me, but it’s too late. The cameraman is already moving back up the aisle to his next shot, and the producer is following, shaking her head behind him. The lights are dimming. Flames are shooting from the stage. The music begins to blare. And Jason Derulo walks out to thunderous applause.
It’s all over in about twenty seconds.
• • •
The moments afterward are still a little blurry, in no small part because Jason Derulo was screaming onstage. I believe the first words that came out of my mouth afterward were “What the fuck just happened?” Jeremy’s mouth hung open and he started nervously laughing beside me. “Dude,” he said, “I have no idea.” His concern in that moment, I imagine, was making sure I didn’t run directly into Jason Derulo’s flames. “That . . . was a mess,” he said. And then I think I said something like “I want to use this award to bash someone’s head in.”
And yes, to be perfectly fair, they did hand it to me and it did have my name on it—all very exciting, I won! I got to take it home!—but it was also quite heavy and in that moment, I thought, it would have made the perfect blunt object with which to smash a certain cameraman’s soft skull.
Soon enough, my phone started buzzing as people expressed a combination of elation and mourning, like I’d just won a brand-new puppy that someone subsequently stabbed to death in front of me. “Sorry, dude, that sucks,” one friend texted me. “But at least you won!” And then from my mother: “We still love you.” As if the entire incident had cast their love in doubt, however briefly.
The next commercial break, as chaos broke out again, a different producer came to see me and asked if I wanted to go backstage and talk to the press. That’s what all winners do, typically when they walk offstage—you go to a room backstage and the press asks you dumb questions like, “How does it feel to win?”
“Um. Sure, I guess,” I told him. I still barely knew what was going on. My heart was still beating violently in my chest.
The producer led me backstage, back through the doors we’d entered to take our seats, back through the hallway past the holding room. The producer is a few feet ahead of me, and as we walk through a door, another staffer stops me and says, “Do you have a badge to be back here?”
And this, I admit, was my most aggressive diva moment of the night. Because in that moment, I held up the statue with my name on it, looked that wretched staffer directly in the face, and shouted, “DOES THIS COUNT!?”
And I’ll concede, it felt damned good. Almost as good as I imagine it would have felt to smash in that cameraman’s head.
But then she was like, “No. It doesn’t. Do you have a badge?” The producer who’d been leading me realizes I’m not behind him anymore and comes back to fetch me. “He’s with me,” he tells the door staffer. And the door staffer is like, “I don’t care. He needs a badge.”
So I had to stand there like a fool, shamefully digging into the pockets of my wilting Men’s Wearhouse suit for the badge I’d stuffed in one of them an hour before. Meanwhile, Sharon Osbourne walks past us, no badge—and no award (just saying)—while I’m furiously reaching into my jacket for a hint of plastic. Finally, I dig out the badge and I’m like, “HERE. ARE YOU HAPPY?!” And she waves me through like nothing happened.
When I get to the pressroom, someone shouted for me to stand in the corner while they stuck a camera in my face. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I held up my award and forced an awkward smile and gave a tiny uncomfortable wave. The camera lingered for what felt like ten whole minutes, then disappeared. That footage, I’d learn after, would be aired later in the show to make up for the mistake, but hilariously, in the background, you can hear someone say, “Who’s he?” And someone else replies, “No idea.”
A man in a suit and white-blond hair approached me and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said with a laugh. He introduced himself as the president of the People’s Choice Awards—yes, there’s a president of the People’s Choice Awards.
“Do you know what happened out there?” he asked me.
I laughed at first, because I thought he was joking, but then I realized he was seriously asking me if I knew what just happened.
“Yes?” I said. “The camera was on the wrong person.”
“Did you plan that?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I asked back. In my head, I was thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is your show!”
“Oh,” he said. “We thought maybe you told the camera guy to do that.”
I’m sure my mouth was gaping, because he patted me on the shoulder, said something like “Well, sorry about that, but congrats anyway,” and walked away, leaving me to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next.
A backstage producer came up to me and asked, in the same tone that you ask a child you’ve found lost in a grocery store, “Would you like to find your publicist?” And I nodded my head sheepishly, so we tracked down Liz, the BuzzFeed publicist, who similarly greeted me like a child she’d lost at a grocery store and looked at me with a searching gaze, trying to detect what mood I was in, whether I found this all hilarious or maddening or both.
“What the fuck happened?” she asked me, and I was like, “I still have no idea. I just want alcohol.”
She led me farther backstage, where a row of photographers took the obligatory pictures of me holding my award. I’m clearly sweating my face off in all of those photos, and my smile looks like the smile of a person who just strangled a man in a motel shower, but what beautiful memories I’ll have forever.
Afterward, we walked back to the greenroom. There was still no alcohol there, just Sharon Osbourne and a platter of brownies. I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure I ate approximately seventy of those brownies in that moment.
To top it all off, John Stamos—who’d won for some show he was in—walked into the greenroom and went to set down his own award next to mine. And I said something like, “Uh-oh, we don’t wanna mix those up,” and he looked at me, dead serious, and said, “You can have mine.” But then he smiled that Uncle Jesse smile, even though I was already furiously stuffing his award into my back pocket. And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for my goddamn Men’s Wearhouse suit.
• • •
When everything finally died down, Jeremy and I went to the after-party. The heads of the accounting firm that tabulates the results of the awards—those people you always see on television carrying the suitcases—came up to me while I was double-fisting champagne with my award under my armpit (yeah, you just have to carry it with you the rest of the night) and apologized for the mix-up, but they assured me the results were all very real and I’d really, truly won the thing, which in some small way was a genuine comfort, since a part of me assumed they had only picked me out of pity over my laughable chances. I told them thank you between mouthfuls of appetizers, and we all took a lovely picture together that I’m sure exists somewhere in the universe.
At this point, it was still only 8 p.m., but I was physically exhausted, and the only real famous person at the after-party was celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, so Jeremy and I left. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped and got tacos, and I dragged those tacos back to my hotel bed and ate them in my underwear with my award cradled beside me. And yes, I kissed her good night. And tucked her in. And was glad she was covered in taco grease, and not the juices of a cameraman’s skull.
• • •
The next day, I got a text message from a number I didn’t recognize, from a man named Eric who introduced himself as the man with the teeth who was sitting in front of me the night before. He asked if he could call me, and a few minutes later, we were on the phone together.
“I’m so sorry about what happened,” he told me. “I wasn’t even supposed to be in the audience, but I’m a vocal coach, and Jason is one of my students.”
Jason, I realize, was Jason Derulo.
“He was performing and he wanted me in the audience to watch him,” he said. “I had no idea why the cameras were on me, but they told me to smile!”
I assured him he did nothing wrong, it was the cameraman’s fault! And then I made him promise to give me vocal lessons. Because if this ever happens again, I sure as hell better be able to sing my way out of it.