music: Bad Livers- Industry and Thrift
Not having a TV has left me out of the reality show maelstrom. But a couple months back my roommate Gina came home with some wild news: she was cast in a reality show. For real. She signed her life away for three weeks, and off Gina went for most of last October. None of us really knew what was going on that whole time. The people that ran the show didn’t give Gina much to go on. I don’t know if she knew where she was going to go when she got on the plane. She’s been very tight-lipped (for legal reasons) since getting back, and we at the 1-2 have been following Gina’s adventures for those three weeks on TV of all places. As a result, I have been taking a rare dip into the world of television to support Gina’s efforts with horses, bulls, ropes, and chaps. Gina’s moments of fame on Cowboy U, a reality show that throws city slickers onto a working cowboy ranch, were great, and her adventures chronicled, packaged, and dealt out quite deliberately (albeit in a skewed, edited-for-TV format) every week for the past month or so.
I guess that the angle that Cowboy U took was to let the city slickers flounder about which would give the country folk regulars at CMT something to laugh about. The eight city folk that are featured in this particular reality show received minimal training, an abundance of ridicule, and suffered through a rigorous ranch and farm schedule, all for the entertainment of those with wranglers and big belt buckles. Some contestants deserved every ounce of ridicule they got, without a doubt, but a couple, Gina included, tried their hardest to show all the real cowboys out there what was possible with a little effort. It seems that the premises of almost all reality shows, from the very beginning of the phenomenon, was to put people way outside their comfort zones and watch how they adapted and reacted to others in the same conditions. Gina would be the first to admit that she had never done anything like what she did in Oklahoma before, but knowing that made her tenure on a working ranch that much more respectable. She was also more than happy to point out how the CMT editing team put certain spins on what really happened, which was quite educational.
She didn’t win the grand prize, but cameras and prize money aside, I think she found something very valuable out there in cattle country. One is a certain perspective you really can’t get without picking up and moving far away from home for a little bit. The range is expansive, and those enormous skies (which apparently are not cloudy all day) lend you an idea of just how big the horizon really is. Two is a sense of empowerment. Cameras and television aside, Gina got an amazing chance to do things most citybound tenderfoots would never think of trying. From my eye, she came back from Oklahoma a little more confident and self-assured (and also came back with some sweet carhartt gear and a real-deal cowboy hat). Cowboy U was very much like an Outward Bound type experience for Gina; only difference is it was all recorded and televised.
I haven’t caught all the episodes, only the first three acutally, but there are copies floating around the house. The actual shows, I think, are secondary. I couldn’t work myself into planning my life around TV shows so easily. If her role on Cowboy U gives her a leg up in the world of acting and dance then all the better, but I’d like to think that three weeks working on a ranch out west did things for my roommate beyond her 15 minutes of fame. I’m pretty sure it did.