My Final Rose, or why you should clean up your board games

This entry was inspired with encouragement from Fella who told me, “See, you still have funny stories even though you’re not single.”

Fella suffered the loss of a close friend this past week. (I promise this gets funnier.) Like most men, Fella handles grief by drinking excessively. This is fine, I understand. He’s usually asleep by 9:00 which leaves the television free for me to watch the Lifetime movies that I can’t watch when he’s awake. However, last night, he went too far.

I came home from teaching a class, excited to watch the Bachelorette finale. Because Fella was asleep (nice way of saying passed out) in the living room, I took to the bedroom and began to watch the long, drawn-out, ridiculous, why-am-I-watching-this mess that is the Bachelorette fi-nah-le, as Chris Harrison calls it.

Thankfully, we’re about to reach the end. Jojo is about to pick the less frightfully dull Stepford husband out of the two frightfully dull Stepford husbands that she has left. The limo pulls up. We see hipster brown shoes with hipster striped socks step out…

All of the sudden, there is a loud crash from the living room, and the TV goes black. I bolt out of bed, screaming, “Son of a biscuit, what happened?!”

Fella is sitting on the couch holding his head. Our tower of board games that we keep next to the TV toppled, lying strewn over wires, one of which had been connected to the back of the television but now has been ripped out. Clearly, Fella, who is a klutz on his most sober day, tried to stand up too fast and fell into the games, starting a chain reaction that ended in me missing the F-ING FINAL ROSE!! (Side note: Fella hates that we keep the board games out like that. We never play them. He says it looks like a college dorm room, and he’s repeatedly asking me if we can put them down in the basement. Possibly, this was part of his plan to get his way. *shrug*)

So what, you ask? Just plug the wire back in. Well, unfortunately for me, my landlord, the not-so-handy man had thought that it would be a great idea to wire our 600 sq. ft. apartment with a multiroom speaker system. Never mind that the apartment is so tiny that if you turn the TV in the living room up a notch, you can hear it in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, the backyard, the neighbors’ backyard probably…well, you get the idea. As a result, and this is no exaggeration, there is a tangled mess of no less than thirty-seven wires that just sit behind the television. I was desperately trying to reconnect the cable box, but I didn’t know which wire was the one that had been connected to it. It was like trying to find your drunkass boyfriend amongst tailgaters in the Gillette Stadium parking lot…nearly impossible.

As I frantically kept trying to reconnect the cable, thinking to myself, “Just hold on Jojo. Please let the boring man drone on per usual and stall him while I set this up,” Fella, who has the memory of a goldfish when he’s drunk, sat on the couch, heckling me. See, he had forgotten that he fell, so he believed that the cable was just out, and that I thought that I was going fix it without calling the cable guy.

By then, I had had enough. I turned to Fella and yelled, “Fella!! THIS IS MY SUPERBOWL!! YOU HAVE RUINED MY SUPERBOWL!!” He looked at me wide-eyed as he had never seen me that angry before, and I had put it in a perspective that, even in his drunken stupor, he could understand. He went silent.

I was able to reconnect the cable, but by that time Chris Harrison was gushing about the most dramatic fi-nah-le we’ve ever had on the Bachelorette, and ABC had moved on to After the Final Rose. I had missed the proposal after all that work of trying to stay awake through Jojo’s candidates’ hokey songs and mundane speeches about how they didn’t know what love was until they shared a woman with 25 other guys and got to spend eight weeks thinking about her without distracting things like television, but with tons of booze at their beck and call.

In the morning, we were able to laugh about it. And, I have grudgingly forgiven Fella as he did have a rough week. But, I do have to say, he better make sure that I’m nowhere near the cable box on a certain night in February.  

Melly J., Reality TV Star!! Extra, Part 3

So, there I was, sitting at the Brahmin, waiting for speed dating to start. The Drunkie's recent outburst made me begin to question what I was actually doing there. However, it did seem to break the tension in the room. We began to laugh at the whole situation and how absurd it was. I goofy-smiled back at Goofy Smile guy. The guys, armed with rum-soaked courage, began to mingle amongst the ladies and sit across from us. We all determined that the Drunkie's tantrum was her own show for the cameras, the joke being on her because they weren't actually on yet. I was praying that neither Townie 1 nor Townie 2 would move their seats over to my table, and my prayers were answered as they were too involved in calling out for more shots and high-fiving each other.

By this point, I was exhausted. It was now coming up to 8:15 p.m. and I was getting sleepy and tired of just sitting around. The only thing stopping me from curling up on the booth bench and taking a nap was a vision of the remnants of vomit and sweat lurking on the vinyl.

And then, a tall, handsome man walked in. He was dressed impeccably. He flashed a killer smile at me as he walked by. He clearly knew the two bartenders, as they said hi to him when he arrived, and he walked over to say hello to them. I couldn't tell if he was there for the speed-dating event, or just to hang out. After speaking with the bartenders for a couple of minutes, he came back over and looked at the food spread (kept minimal so as not to soak up our alcohol content for the show). Then, he came over and sat next to me and said, "Hi, I'm Dre". Dre obviously had also been drinking, and when I questioned him about it, he admitted that he had been to the Bruins game earlier that day and had consumed large amounts of tequila since then.

Dre was charming and handsome, but I very quickly realized that he was the African American equivalent of Crazy Pete. He was very open about sharing facts such as "the number of women I've banged", "how many drinks I've had today", and "the amount of money I've dropped".  As I find Crazy Pete-like antics endearing, this was not a complete turnoff for me and I found it more amusing than anything. But, I definitely didn't see any romance in our future.

Since Black Crazy Pete was so drunk in public, I assumed that he was in his 20's. I asked him how old he was and was shocked when he said 41. I asked what he did for work, and he told me that he was a bartender. Imagine my surprise, as the night went on and he admitted that he had gone to Brown. SCREEECH! Back it up. "Why on earth would you waste $250,000 to go to Brown and become a bartender. You can get a college degree anywhere and become a bartender." His answer: Full Academic Scholarship.

Ok, so Black Crazy Pete was growing on me. I hate to think that it was because I realized that he was smart, but I think that's what it was. I dig smart guys. However, I do not dig playboys, and it was clear that that's exactly what he was. He kept telling me that I seemed "proper" and "rigid". That I should give him a shot in the bedroom. He asked me hypothetically speaking, if I were his wife...he would need sex every night. Could I provide that? I get tired of talking to guys when it seems that all they want is in my pants, so after about an hour of speaking with Black Crazy Pete (It's now 9:15 pm, if you're keeping track), I finally yelled out to the Camera Guys that Be and said, "What time are we going to start this thing?" Sensing that I was very close to walking out and that a lot of the girls would be with me, the Camera Guys that Be all answered at once with remarks such as "Thank you so much for your patience." "We're almost all set here" "Just another couple of minutes."

But, you see, even though we actually did start a few minutes later, we were at an awkward impasse. We had all been talking to each other for about an hour and a half. Anything that we were going to learn in 8 minutes, we already knew. And as I mentioned before, the guys had been taking full advantage of the open bar (maybe from nervousness about their television debut), to the point where some were having issues forming coherent sentences and some focusing their eyes in one direction. To make matters worse, when the Date and Dash guy announced that we would be starting soon, Black Crazy Pete yelled out, "What if you've already found your soul mate?" and looked at me. And all the guys said, "awwww." All of the sudden, I was Slater at the Bachelor Auction after Jessi Spano threatened all the girls so that no one would bid on him. So, I finally admitted to myself what I had known all along...this was not going to be a successful speed dating experience.

We went through the motions of speed dating. I spoke with Goofy Smile guy who was weirded out by the whole night and everyone in the room. Lumberjack Flannel tried to fix me up with his friend. Stylish Tall Guy in Awesome Sweater was drunkenly rambling about Elvis and the South or something...I couldn't really follow it. And my last date of the night...Black Crazy Pete.

I ended up giving Black Crazy Pete my phone number, but as I made it quite clear that I don't jump into bed with random guys, I doubt that he will be calling. (It's been a week and a half and he hasn't yet). I did a little bit of googlegating and found out that not only is he a "bartender", he actually owns the bar that he tends at. It's a well known bar in Faneuil Hall and explains the Brown education (and subsequent MBA).

As I left the room, I passed Townie 1 who said, "Hey! I didn't get a chance to talk to you!" And I tossed an "Aw, shucks" over my shoulder.

The night wasn't a total loss however....the Date and Dash guy walked me out and said, "You're so nice. Thank you so much for putting up with all this. I also have a matchmaking business and I'd like to set you up with someone"...so I did get a date out of it, just not the way that I planned.

Boston's Finest premieres on Feb. 27 on TNT, and if you tune in, at some point in the series, you might catch a glimpse of me, scratching my nose or sitting on a bench or something equally exciting. Or, you never know, like Black Crazy Pete, Boston's Finest may leave me on the cutting room floor when they decide there's nothing they can work with.

Melly J., Reality TV Star!! Extra, Part 2

When we last left our heroine, she was sitting at Table Number 3 at the Brahmin, in front of the camera crew for TNT's Boston Finest, waiting for the speed date to begin. The event was supposed to start at 7:30. If you've never been to a speed dating event, here's what happens. The girls sit at a numbered table. Then, they put a guy at each table. You "date" for 8 minutes, someone blows the whistle and the guys all move down one table. At the end of the night, each person writes down who they were interested in, and if there's a match, the speed dating people exchange your information. It typically doesn't take more than an hour. I figured that I'd be home by 9:30 and in bed by ten.

Because I was there a bit early, I was able to sit back and peruse the "merchandise" as it walked in the door. A couple of the guys were cute and looked like really nice guys. There was Adorable Goofy Smile guy. Lumberjacky Guy in Flannel with Beard. Stylish Tall Guy in Awesome Sweater. I was looking forward to meeting them. As they walked in, they all assembled near the bar area across the room from us. The two groups, guys and girls, kept stealing glances at each other, but we weren't mingling or talking to each other. It was like an awkward middle school dance, except there were also five or six guys holding television cameras milling around.

I began a conversation with the girl sitting next to me. We made small talk. She asked if I knew anything about the show and we shared the knowledge that we each had (which wasn't much). As it was already 7:45, she asked if I had done speed dating before and if it usually started late. I told her that I had and it didn't. We surmised that they may be waiting for more people to show up before they start.

We were curious about who the girl was that they were filming. We hadn't seen the cameras pointed at anyone yet. We were also still a bit suspicious about why we were really there. The TV people had been a little too forthcoming with the information that we did have. All of the sudden, two blondes walked in the door. The first walked in with confidence and the camera guys seemed to jump to life, so I assumed that this was our TV star. She sat next to me at Table 4. My stomach flipped a little bit when I thought that I would definitely be in the camera shot the whole time if this was the girl. But, then, she leaned into me and said, "Are you the girl cop?" I realized very quickly by her breath that her confidence was all liquid and if she was asking me if I was the cop, then this couldn't be the girl.

I began to become more suspicious of what we were doing there. We had now been sitting around for a half-hour. This girl next to me was clearly wasted. The camera people were all sitting around and watching us. The guys were on one side of the room and the girls were seated at the other. Maybe this was some kind of weird psychological experiment? How long would we wait around for before we got fed up and stormed out? Would the genders ever start mingling together? What if there was an endless amount of alcohol? Just what would these crazy people do?? I mean, THAT sounded like a great reality show.

To add to my suspicion, at this point, two guys, who I will refer to as "Townie 1 and Townie 2" came in a few minutes later. When you think of the typical Boston guy persona, these are the guys that fit it. There was a "business casual" dress code for this event. They came in wearing ratty t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, all of which were three or four sizes too big. Townie 1 was the "mouth". He led the way and yelled, "Let's get this pah-ty stah-ted!"as he walked into the room. Townie 2 didn't say a word and stood next to him with a blank, empty look on his face.  Townie 1 and Townie 2 walked up to the bar, did a couple of shots and then ordered two jack and cokes and sat across from the Drunkie Next To Me and her friend.

At this point, we were coming up on 8:15. We had been sitting there for 45 minutes waiting for this to start. The girls were getting impatient. The guys were getting drunk. No one was saying a word and the only sound was the house music playing in the lounge.  Suddenly, the Drunkie Next To Me yelled at Townie 1, "How could you say something like that to me??? F*** you! F*** YOU!" and got up and marched to the door. She turned back to her friend, who was sitting there open-mouthed, and yelled, "Get my purse." The friend sat there stunned. "Get my F***-ING purse!!" she yelled one last time and stormed out. We all turned to the friend to see what she was going to do. The friend sheepishly and silently grabbed the purse on the bench and followed her out.

I turned to the girl on the other side of me and said, "There's definitely something fishy going on here." Was the Drunkie's tantrum all an act? Will we ever get to speed-date? Will any of the guys be sober enough to talk to? Tune in for Part 3...

Melly J., Reality TV Star!! Extra, Part 1

I received an e-mail from Date and Dash asking me if I wanted to attend a free speed-dating event. I saw "free" and immediately said yes. When they sent me the details of the event, I scanned through and my eyes stopped at one sentence: "This will be filmed for a television segment." WHAT?? I started to freak out a bit. This was taking an already stressful event and skydiving it parachute-less into a lion-surrounded, piranha-covered, anthrax-powdered, burning ring of fire. What if I was signing up for a reality show? What if it was like one of those shows where you think you'll be speed-dating, but then they offer you $1000 to eat an elephant testicle or something? I didn't want to look stupid(er).  I almost backed out. But, then I started to think...what if it's not any of that? What if it's actually Dateline or 20/20 or Good Morning America. And they're doing a segment on dating. And then they become so engaged by me after interviewing me and realize that the camera LOVES me so much, that they decide to turn it into a docu-series, starring me and I become an overnight sensation and end up trading witty banter with Ellen DeGeneres, and then some movie producer sees it and believes that he's looking at the next America's Sweetheart and I blow up and a year from now I'm accepting my Oscar. I decided that it was worth a shot.

I arrived at the The Brahmin and the Date and Dash guy met me at the door. He signed me in and then called over the television people. They took my picture, had me sign a release, and told me about what would be happening that night. Yes, it was a reality show. No, they didn't care about having me on it. It was called Boston's Finest, premiering on TNT next month, produced by Donnie Wahlberg, and it was following a female police officer in Boston who was "looking for love". The guys would all be miked and they would be the ones on the show, as they would be "dating" the girl that the show was focusing on. The girls would all be in the background. While I was a little bit disappointed that I may not get a shot at film success, I was a bit relieved as well. The potential for me to say something ridiculously dumb on national television was eliminated. It was up to the men for that.

When we went down the stairs into the lounge area, where the numbered tables were set up, they sat me down at number 3. And here is when my first suspicion about reality television was confirmed. They get you liquored up on purpose. They gave us all drink tickets. Typically drink tickets are good for beer or wine or cheap vodka only. Our drink tickets were good for anything behind the bar. A double of Johnnie Walker Blue? Sure, did you want that neat or on the rocks? Dom Perignon White Gold? I have some chilling right over here for you. Because the more you drink, the dumber you act, and the better television it makes.

Also, I had always suspected that reality television was scripted. I just didn't know HOW scripted! They do re-takes. If it doesn't come out the way they want it the first time, they film it again. The Date and Dash guy had to go through his "how we speed-date" speech twice and we all looked interested like he was saying it for the first time, both times. They even had the guys re-do their 8 minutes of dating a few times.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The "reality" is that while this thing was supposed to start at 7:30, around 9:00, it still hadn't begun. The boys had been enjoying their drinks a little too much and were so hammered by this point, that I didn't even really want to talk to any of them. The atmosphere was awkward as we weren't sure whether we were supposed to mingle, or wait for the official speed date to start. So, we all just sat there looking at each other. When people get drunk and impatient and feel awkward, it breeds drama. Tune in for Part 2 to watch the drama unfold...