A 27-Year-Old Looks Back On Life

By Joel Stein

Eventually, we'll all be on TV. There are 500 channels plus the Internet, and they all need warm bodies. We Americans are being drafted into the global USO, and I, for one, am fit and ready to serve. This is what I was thinking when, five years ago, I walked into my local MTV headquarters and signed up for the tryouts for the London cast of The Real World. I was rejected in the final round, after spending three months undergoing seven stages of vigorous testing that included a 10-page application, many videotaped interviews and a blind date with a woman who was accurately described as "a bald chick."

I remembered all this last month as MTV began airing its newest and highest-rated season ever of The Real World. In an effort to relive my past, and possibly give MTV enough busywork to prevent it from developing any more non-music-video programming, I asked the station to dig up my tryout tapes.

It turns out MTV has a vault in Hollywood where they keep files on more than 100,000 people under 30. I print this information here in the hopes that conspiracy theorists will get off the U.N.'s back and start freaking out about Viacom. I think this will help my parent company, Time Warner, and thus get me in good with whoever runs this place. This is my version of a business plan.

Watching the tape of me simultaneously trying to impress MTV producers and score with a shorn woman was the second most embarrassing moment of my life. The first, according to my application, was getting drunk in high school and badmouthing the sexual talents of my already graduated girlfriend, a claim that was posted on the school message board the next day. Her most embarrassing moment, of course, is happening right now.

But even as I watched tape after tape of my awkward, pimply self trying to justify my life, my apparently indestructible ego was still wondering how MTV could have not picked me. So I called Jonathan Murray, one of the show's producers. "We weren't sure what was going on with your dating life. It seemed pretty dormant," he said. When I sounded confused, he clarified. "You definitely weren't going to be the hunk in the show." I said that depended on what point viewers were in their menstrual cycle. He didn't know what I was talking about, but I think it made him feel even more assured about not picking me.

But while it was clear why MTV didn't cast me, I wonder why I had wanted to live in an apartment that makes Biosphere 2 look like J.D. Salinger's house. I think I was willing to make that sacrifice because I saw an opportunity for ultimate fame. Not being famous for hitting home runs or getting my breasts reduced but simply for being me. Ed McMahon kind of fame.

Looking back, though, I'm glad Murray didn't choose me. If I couldn't deal with seeing myself on those tapes, I don't think I could have handled having my dorkiness deconstructed by 16-year-old girls around the world. So instead, I'll gladly do my entertainment duty by taking a ball in the groin for America's Funniest Home Videos, just like everybody else. Because, I now realize, after watching loads of The Real World, that there are few things quite as cringe-inducing as listening to people try to describe who they are. Except, of course, in a magazine column.