My 15 minutes of fame

Last week I was a guest on "The View From The Bay", a local afternoon talk show which includes cooking tips, interviews with a movie star plugging his latest release, and hints on how to defuzz your old sweaters. I was on as a 'mom comic' promoting an upcoming one-woman show, and it was a wonderful taste of celebrity on a minor, mixed level. On the one hand, it was a real thrill to be asked; lots of my friends saw it (especially the ones I asked to watch!), and people who didn't even know me saw it and came to the performance - wow, TV exposure works! And it was really fun to be in 'the green room', where the producers offered me an array of snacks and water bottles, and to chat with talk show hosts who really are as personable as they appear on camera. On the other hand, the hair and makeup people were only there for the woman who was the 'After' in the makeover segment, so there I crouched trying to make myself look 10 lbs. thinner, while a crowd of experts ignored me. Plus it turned out the hosts & crew had a location shoot immediately afterwards - since I was the last guest, that meant that 10 seconds after I was done, the studio was completely empty until a production assistant remembered he'd forgotten to show me out.

But the weirdest part was realizing what that kind of exposure must be like for people who are out there every day, given the range of people we all deal with. I mean, huge celebrities probably have a coterie of attendants who follow them around, but there have got to be some B-listers who buy their own groceries and drive themselves to the mall. So there are salespeople, accountants, and aestheticians out there, seeing someone on TV and thinking, Hey, I just did his taxes! I just talked her into a brazilian bikini wax! I kept thinking, if my hairdresser sees this, she's going to yell at me, I know I didn't do it the way she does!

My 15 minutes may be over, or just starting - but it's fun to have kids in one of my classes say, Hey, I saw you on TV! You're famous!, or to email my mom a link to the website with clips, saying, Okay, NOW do you understand why I didn't go to law school?