Reality TV and the Working Girl

Let’s make something clear right out of the gate. If you are looking for an article bashing the decline of intelligent television programming, than this may not be the page for you. I unabashedly love Reality TV and yes I know it’s largely contrived but there is something about lying on the couch on a snowy afternoon watching a Real Housewives marathon that really hits the spot for me. Clusters of wealthy women from various cities around America that shop, stir shit, shop, bitch, redecorate, record songs ,manipulate, connive and bitch some more. It’s an unbeatable formula and I could watch hours of it.
That said, I do admit to being a bit of a reality TV snob. I don’t want to see any organized competitions a la Survivor or American Idol. Not interested in any goals or any prizes at the end and definitely no voting mechanisms. I also don’t want to watch 20 something’s drink, scream and screw as in Jersey Shore or The Hills. What I do want to do is indulge in the minutiae of pretend everyday life where some of the biggest decisions are whether to wear the hair up or down. But even within that, I have my standards. I actually feel dirty and ashamed of myself if I succumb to a Saturday night episode of Cheaters.
Being a working girl and self- employed, I am always on the look out for a good way to make money, a catchy idea so I watch these women with a somewhat dumbfounded awe. The Housewives are a no-brainer. They don’t really need the money but have jumped on for a chance at the Page Six brass ring. They are playing along chewing up the scenery and are all but winking at the camera while doing so.
The Kardashian sisters flummox me because as far as I can tell, they really do absolutely nothing. They have managers, agents and personal assistants to schedule numerous events and appearances for the sisters doing absolutely nothing. They take their inertia filled gig on the road in any venue that will have them. I mean at least the unrecognizable drag queen Bruce Jenner ( the sisters hapless step father) is a former Olympian but he barely gets airtime to scrape the shit off their Manolo Blahniks. Of course we all know the Hilton sisters started this Tom foolery but instead of shutting it down right then and there, we watched as Paris and Nicole humiliated poor people from small towns across the mid-west. We encouraged a second season and looked the other way when they developed a solo vehicle for Paris to find a new BFF.
We then graduated to Anna Nicole Smith but somehow as tickled as I was at the prospect of following that train wreck, when it came down to it, it was just too easy. There was no element of surprise watching her slather and slur her way through another drug infested day. And when she died, it all just felt terribly wrong.

Since then, there has been a trend to move to reality shows that follow working people. Real people leading real lives with real jobs and really big problems. I remember years ago thinking I had hit the jackpot when I fell upon a documentary on A&E featuring a couple who ran a bounty hunting business. Of course I am talking about the “Dog” and smelling a good thing they were quickly snapped up for a regular gig. Like everyone, I was initially blinded by the size of Beth’s breasts that started at her chin and ended just above her pubic bone and the shockingly bad mullet that Dog sported. After I got past that and Dog’s blatant insincerity, I started focussing on the other members of the team, particularly “Baby Lisa”. Now Baby Lisa deserves some thought. She looks like a ferret, has a couple kids with no signs of a partner around and lives daily with the slightly queasy making moniker of “Baby Lisa”. On the surface your garden variety trailer trash. If it wasn’t for the family business, I could easily see her leading a quiet life working part time at Target. But as I sat watching her in eager judgement, it occurred to me that Baby Lisa was banging down doors with known felons behind them. Baby Lisa was kicking ass. Baby Lisa was not only getting paid to do her job but likely had an agent or manager negotiate a tidy sum from A&E. So as I sit and mock and wonder how I’ll pay the phone bill, Baby Lisa is having a well-earned butt and Old Milwaukee on a patio in Hawaii.

But eventually that wasn’t real enough. To really bat it out of the park, enter Jon and Kate plus Eight.
A seemingly mundane suburban couple headed by a monumental control freak with a ridiculous haircut. A haircut a dear friend of mine coined the “One Man Band. “In order to keep viewers tuned in, you now had to have no less than eight children. Other shows quickly followed, 12 children, 18 children. TLC basically surrendered itself to the large family and little people channel 24/7. But try as they may, nothing could compete with the flat out implosion of that sweet little couple from Pennsylvania. In solidarity, the “One Man Band” was popping up on heads all across the nation. I admit, after sitting through a few episodes watching Kate drivel on about matching fall jackets, toilet training and homemade granola I was about to bail. But as the kids grew and the camera crew became part of the family, things started to unravel. We watched anxiously as Jon’s nuts were fed into the blender on a weekly basis. We licked our chops as Kate’s veneer began to crack and she took off like a runaway train of melt downs. As Kate roared, Jon took on the look and personality of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and rolled himself into the foetal position. By the final season it was like a real life version of “War of the Roses” with hourly updates including mistresses, tantrums, lock outs and law enforcers.
Fast forward a year and sweet little Kate has gotten hair extensions, horrified us with her dancing, guest hosted talk shows, negotiated a new TLC show and basically torpedoed around with a bodyguard close at hand pitching diva fits that would make Faye Dunaway blush.Jon on the other hand has simply gotten drunk and slept with questionable women. What happened to the granola? What happened to the kids?

So the gauntlet has been dropped. My dreams of a camera crew trailing me as I procrastinate, piss and moan, feed the dogs and watch TV are fading into nothingness. Not a complete loss though. A tradition has been passed down, lessons have been learned. I must confess, I get a little misty when I hear my 12 year old son bellow from the living room, “Mom, five minutes until Celebrity Rehab!!”

Pursuit of Happiness

I awoke to a familiar sense of dread. Before I opened my eyes, I felt the weight on my chest and sure enough there it was, Depression sitting cross legged, impatiently waiting for me to wake up.
“Don’t you dare get up” he said in a weary drawl. “There’s nothing out there for you, trust me, there is absolutely no reason for you to get out of bed.”
“But I have to get my son to school”, I meekly replied, knowing it was futile.
“All-right but after that, get your ass right back here, nothing good can come of you out there.”

At least he didn’t bring his cohort Anxiety this time. Anxiety usually waits until the merde has really hit the fan. Anxiety is in high demand and often books in around 3am with an urgent slap upside the head as he repeats, “Turn over, turn over again, do it again, okay now sit up , turn on the light, put that book down, you aren’t going to be able to concentrate on that. Nice try!!”

“Piss off, I have to get some sleep”, I counter.
“Well, be my guest, but before you drift off, let’s do a quick review. You have no job, you haven’t had a relationship in eons, you’re of an age where even construction workers don’t give a second glance, your car is making that clunking noise again and I’m pretty sure your phone didn’t ring once today.”

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being happy. When the going is good, I can out happy you under the table. But when a series of life’s inevitable beatings had me up against a wall, I thought it was time I look for some back-up. I’d recently returned to Niagara and found a physician located in a Superstore. Yes, you read that correctly, my doctor’s office was in a Superstore. I could have a pap smear and pick up a pork loin on the same trip. The idea of streamlining my life with time saving measures like this was appealing to me. I was feeling profoundly lazy, so lazy that sometimes I would lie in bed and be too lazy to roll over.


The first thing that struck me about her office was the amount of photocopied notices on her walls that seemed to scream from the page, “ONE QUESTION PER VISIT!!” I’m talking 3 postings in an examining room the size of a small walk in closet. Of course I pretty well blew my first appointment by asking her why I could only ask one question, thus using my one question up in the first 3 minutes of my scheduled 10 minute appointment. We were off to a rocky start. The fact that she bore an uncomfortably close resemblance in style and manner to Kathy Bates in “Misery” didn’t exactly sweeten the deal.


This time I cut right to my question, my quest for a therapist, someone to help me wade through buckets of grief having left a marriage, relocating and losing both parents to cancer in the space of a year. She listened in a you’ve got 7 minutes left kind of way and summed it up by stating in a pitch perfect Bates cadence, “Well your life is really bad and it isn’t going to get better anytime soon so I will give you the name of someone who can help but you will have to make another appointment with me to discuss medication options”

I was a bit taken back by her insistence that my life wasn’t going to get better anytime soon. What did she know that I didn’t? Of course I was itching to ask her but the one question sign came into sharp focus behind her head so I had to keep that one in the vault for one of our other 20 appointments per month. I stopped by aisle 6, picked up some laundry detergent and went home safe in the knowledge that help was on the way.

Going to a therapist for the first appointment is not unlike a blind date on steroids. The expectation is that you walk into a room with a complete stranger and in the sober light of day reveal your innermost thoughts, fears, doubts and insecurities. You basically have to give it away without the dinner and movie. The exchange of money helps. By the time I walked into my therapist’s office, not only were all my friends exhausted by my litany of bad news but I couldn’t even stand to hear it anymore. It really helped knowing that someone was going to at least make some dough out of this.

I entered the waiting room and sunk into an overstuffed chintz couch. I looked up and locked eyes with a 3ft tall stuffed rabbit standing on its hind legs, dressed casually in overalls with a bandana loosely tied around its neck. Come to think of it, the room was littered with teddy bears but it was the embarrassed stare of the ridiculously attired rabbit and the fact that it was standing up that really started me second guessing the whole idea. Just as I was contemplating my get-away, the door to the inner sanctum opened and an attractive woman with bright red hair called me in. I sunk into another floral overstuffed couch and took stock of my new saviour, someone who walked a fine line between Laura Ashley and Pippi Longstockings.

We settled in and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes and then I took a deep breath and launched into the whole sad tale, guilt over leaving my marriage, bottomless pit of grief over the death of my parents, panic, fear, the whole enchilada. She’s really going to work her chops on this one, I’m thinking. Pip, tucked her legs under her butt and asked, “Did you really still need your parents?” Wow, what a loaded question. Sure I’d learned to make my own lunches, clean up my room and get myself from A to B but yes indeed I still needed my parents! I had years of fuck-ups ahead that I would have liked to include them in. I wanted to eat lukewarm vegetables and wear stupid hats at Christmas dinner like I had every other year of my life, Sunday visits with my son and his grandparents. I wanted to fall asleep on their threadbare couch to the distorted volume of “Jeopardy” for eternity. Still she was quite insistent that I didn’t actually need them and therefore we should be able to tidy that little nuisance up fairly quickly.

Okay, next, loneliness and being single. Hmm, internet dating get on it now she advised. It worked wonders for her and now she was madly in love and engaged to be married.I stalled on that so we moved on. Single motherhood, guilt, managing the ex and damaged self -esteem. For this she shared with me that she had had a similar path, raised her son on her own after leaving an abusive marriage, struggled to put herself through school with no family anywhere near and in the midst of all of it was diagnosed with cancer, went through treatment and came out the other side with a degree in psychology and a new life.


Okay, I’d been trumped within 42 minutes of my first appointment. Of course I sounded like a big fat cry baby compared to her and was ashamed of myself for bothering her. That rabbit in the foyer wasn’t embarrassed, it was defeated. So we wrapped up our first session and I went home feeling, well frankly a little baffled.
Our second session I decided to keep it light and basically did my best to entertain her for an hour. She laughed and laughed which only encouraged me, a sucker for a captive audience.


Before our third session she called me en route and said she was desperate for a French vanilla cappuccino and asked if I could pick one up for her at the Timmy Ho’s drive through on the way. As we sat and sipped our cappuccinos, I tried to steer back to the initial issues that had brought me here but she was having none of that. If the conversation started getting too heavy, she would quickly change the subject and I would feel like an ass for bringing her down.

We would move back to internet dating, basically a couple of gals dishing about boys. In the same meeting she would exclaim adamantly that there was no way, no way I was ready to date and the between the lines on that sounded like, “ Are you nuts, do you really think it’s fair to set your crazy ass on some poor unsuspecting guy?” But also chastise me for not trying online dating as she had advised the week before. So finally, the week came when she asked if I had taken her advice and I confidently answered yes. I had gone online and began a correspondence with a potential match. He invited me to go hiking with him, one of his passions and why I pretended it was also mine I will never come to terms with.


We met at a Tim Hortons on a wet snowy February afternoon and after a quick, unfamiliar discussion, set out for a hike through the Niagara gorge. Remember, I said February and wet snow. He leant me a toque because even though I was a seasoned hiker, I didn’t come equipped with a hat or gloves. After a 2 hour hike through a deserted slippery gorge, my hair was plastered to my head, I had slipped and was covered in mud and my mascara was who knows where. When he asked if I wanted to continue for another hour or so I yelped, “NO”. My calves felt like they had been put through a cement mixer and I really just wanted to cry.

Afterward we went for a cozy, well -earned drink where we struggled through a conversation until he confided that his wife had left him for a woman. I immediately perked up, seeing something to distinguish him from the norm and naturally asked about 10 questions too many about how and why until he started impatiently waving for the cheque.

When I recounted the date to a friend, she wisely advised me that the next time I went tromping through a deserted gorge with a stranger to please bring my phone as the ringing may come in handy when they tried to locate my body. I was out of practice, what can I say and I never heard from him again.

So now I have a sore throat and am paralyzed from the knees down and I have to devise a plan to ask Dr. Bates for muscle relaxants and something for my strep throat in one question. I try merging it into a body pain that starts at my throat and follows down just below my ankles. “Oh, aren’t you cute” she barks. I limp away after booking a second appointment for my throat having made the painful choice between talking and walking. I headed gingerly towards the barbeque chicken aisle but depression slipped a cart in front of me to block my way and said, “ Keep walking” so I headed out the door, determined to get to the bottom of this one question business on my next appointment.


A few days later, I sat eye to eye with the rabbit/farmer trying to suss out this mania for stuffed animals. She wasn’t a child psychologist that much I knew, so what was the not so subtle message she was trying to convey to us, her wounded herd. I was in a slump and there weren’t enough teddy bears in the world to pull me out of it. Again, I tried describing how I felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. I didn’t know how to cope on my own and I was worried sick about the effects on my son. I felt like there was a great party going on and I was standing on the other side of the street watching it. She thought for a moment, flipped her eggplant hair over her shoulder and said, “Come on, your life is pretty good.”
“Look, a lot of people have good lives,” I replied, “but if they feel like driving into oncoming traffic while their having them then something isn’t working”
I gave a quick nod to the rabbit on my way out, thinking maybe this therapy thing wasn’t for me.

Meanwhile Dr.Bates had devised a plan to have me take 5 blood pressure readings and report to her and then send me away to take 5 more blood pressure readings and report to her and then take 5 more blood pressure readings and on and on and on. Finally I confronted her in exasperation and said, “I have more important things to do then run back and forth like a goof with bp readings so when are you going to decide if I have high blood pressure or garden variety panic attacks?” She informed me that we really should make an appointment to address some behaviour modification options and gave me that look that K.Bates gave James Caan when he tried to get out of bed.


My pursuit of happiness was killing me. I barely had time to revel in my shitty life because I was too busy ping ponging between Bates and Holly Golightly. Surely there was more to this than stuffed animals with questionable fashion sense. I picked up a couple caps and forged on to my appointment.
I was feeling pretty good so I thought things were sailing along quite nicely. Pippi kept looking at me with an odd expression like she was hesitant or distracted. As I prattled on about needing to remarry so I wouldn’t have to cut the lawn anymore she interrupted me and said, “You should change the colour of your hair, it would make you look younger. I wanted to tell you last week but you were so depressed I didn’t think it would be a good idea.” I was speechless, literally speechless. When I recovered, I meekly asked her what colour she thought I should be aiming for. “Red”, she confirmed my suspicions.


As I left the office for the last time, I’m pretty sure I heard the rabbit say in his best Tony Soprano voice, “What are ya gonna do?” I got into my car and had the first really good laugh I’d had in months. I guffawed all the way home. Jesus, if I had only known this could all be fixed with a little Nice and Easy!
Things settled into a manageable routine. I wrote a polite note to Pippi explaining I thought we had covered about as much as I thought we were going to and wished her the best.


A friend of mine, a former Buddhist Monk in fact had once told me that happiness was just a fleeting thing that everyone wanted more of. That pretty much summed it up the more I thought about it.

I still ran a pretty tight schedule of unnecessary appointments with Dr. Bates though. On a recent appointment I noticed my file was open on the computer screen behind her head. As she gave me the rundown on my latest physical and suggested I do another 5 blood tests for her, I strained to read a sentence in bold on my chart. It said, “She complains of pain but is resistant to seeing doctors. There must be something in that.“ You see it wasn’t that I was resistant to seeing doctors; I just didn’t want to see them more than I saw my friends or family members.
I asked her if she could write a note for a referral to a new psychologist she had given me two days before just in case I needed it for my drug plan. She sighed deeply and said, “No, that’s not what this appointment is about. You’re going to have to make another appointment for that but not the one that was already scheduled for two days later to answer another question I had about my physical results.
I very calmly told her I thought she was a ridiculous doctor, left the office, picked up some hair colour in aisle 3 and went home.

Three days later, a registered letter arrived from Dr.Bates office advising me that she would no longer be able to treat me as a patient. Too many questions I suspect.
Another sage friend had told me that it was very important to see something beautiful every day. I have to admit, I pretty much blew that advice off but as I sat in my backyard, I watched two Cardinals flit from branch to branch around my yard, gathering food and basically going about business. Cardinals are my favourite bird so I felt this was fortuitous and maybe a sign. I spent about 30 minutes a day for the next week sitting in the same spot and each time they returned. This was my something beautiful and it made me feel so content and at peace. He was right, silly as it sounds, we must look for a slice of beauty in our day. It’s there and if I’m saying that, it’s really there.


I arrived for my first appointment with my new therapist with some trepidation. An elderly woman called me into her tastefully decorated office. She had a warm smile and a soothing British accent. As I settled into her neutrally coloured couch she asked,
“ So, have you been to a therapist before?”