Transamerican Love Story – Episode 05 Thoughts

Screencaps courtesy of my iTunes Season Pass for Transamerican Love Story

LINKS:

Transamerican Love Story site on Logo

Watch Transamerican Love Story via iTunes

TLS Group on FaceBook

Read Andrea’s TLS Blog

Read Shawn’s TLS Blog

Hear Jim’s TLS Phone Message

See Alec Mapa’s “MapaCam” behind the scenes

Watch Andrea and me chat about this episode in “NEXT!” on LogoOnline.com

Episode 04 Recap – Showgirl Episode

Episode 03 Recap – Yacht Episode

Episode 02 Recap – Cooking Dinner

Wow, my hair was imported via time machine from a mid-season episode of “Falcon Crest” for this episode’s interstitials. By this point, we were down to four guys… Mike, Jim, Shawn and Mark. We had all been in our respective seclusions for a few weeks at this point, so for me the realities of my regular life had begun to recede into the background and the dreamlike experience of being in the show was allowing the drama to loom larger in my head than I had thought possible. When you work on a movie or TV show, the outside world tends to fade into gray as you spend more and more intense, emotional time with the small band of makeup, hair, wardrobe and tech artists who make the experience happen. It’s kind of like going away to summer camp… new friendships spring up and burn intensely, while experiences are bathed in a heightened golden light and burned into your memory. Strangely enough, I was becoming close friends Alec Mapa and with Autumn and Desirae the makeup/hair stylists, and Andy the wardrobe stylist… but my time with the guys was so closely controlled that they were still very mysterious to me. I only really saw them when I was overseeing a challenge or doing an elimination, so any moments of actual conversation were very important to me.


Click below to READ MORE… SPOILER ALERTS!!!

I was really excited to get to play my fiddle a little bit in this episode. You can hear a little more of my fiddle playing in my recording of the traditional folk song “One, I Love” on my MySpace Music page. I played a nice double-stop Bluegrass version of “Amazing Grace”, but they didn’t end up using it in the shots.


My favorite “funny moment” of this episode was Andrea’s clip, saying “Gee, I hope they like what’s in my box.” Perfect. I was so concerned with “doing the right thing” during this show that I think I ended up coming off as a little more “controlled” than I usually do. Andrea was her natural, hilarious self the whole time, while I obsessed about boys… wait, that’s pretty close to normal life, hmm…


Of course, my real favorite part is THE MEN!!! OMG YUM!!! aside from the tragic loss of Rich, I had somehow managed to keep the hottest guys around, coincidentally based strictly on their merits as intellectual and emotional paragons.


OMG, LOL. Poor Andrea. They gave her this getup to wear for the scenes at Oil Can Harry’s. I liked the blue boots (I own some pink cowgirl boots… I think I may be wearing them in this episode.) She was such a good sport.


Attack of the 50 ft. Woman, Ahhhhh! I remember Mark being a pretty good dancer, actually, but looking back at the footage I see that perhaps my nerves were coloring my memories. If only I were not so tall, sigh. 5’10″ of hotness, that’s me, ha ha.

Awww, everybody looked so cute. Jim was so brooding, like James Dean in “Giant”, Mike was all innocent looking like the “good guy” in those 1950′s Westerns, Shawn was the modern cowboy and Mark… well, Mark was terribly comfortable in his Western gear, but he looked cute in it.


Andrea and I had a hard time deciding who was the best dancer… as you’ll see in the show, there was drama here and there as it became more clear to me that the boys were kinda chafing against each other and getting less and less happy living with each other. I decided to take the coward’s way out and said that “they all won!” We left to ride separately back to the mansion, and as you’ll see on the show, the boys had a very tense and argument-filled ride back home. Once home, the drinking began. (Cue ominous reality show music)


We settled down to what I was expecting to be a delicious BarBQ dinner, but almost right away the boys starting sniping at each other. I get very uncomfortable around emotional tension, as I am a bit of a psychic sponge and absorb stuff like that until I end up losing it. I desperately hate arguments, and one of the big challenges of my emotional maturity has been learning to deal with arguments without getting rattled. I’m a pretty strong person when I have to be, but in the context of a dinner table, alongside guys with whom I had let my guard down, I was getting more and more upset. That poor ear of corn… I tried to focus on it and hack away all my discomfort…


The boys got ever more intense arguing with each other, and before you knew it, I lost it and brought out the ugly cry face. I’m no Renée Zellweger… when I cry, it’s not cute. At this point, some important things happen. Mike moves to comfort me, and we go to the game room to let me calm down. Jim and Shawn follow, and are both comforting. But Mark has no response to my emotional disarray.


Once the evening was firmly established as a complete disaster, we call it a night and I go back to my cottage. I admit it. I’m a sucker for emotional comfort. Andrea and Alec were very much there for me… such good friends!


So, much to the relief of so many who have written to me via email and MySpace, I had to let Mark go. I was a little surprised that he didn’t hug me or show any emotion… but when I thought about it, it was never Mark’s style to show any of the “delicate” emotions. He seemed comfortable only sharing “sexy”, “aggressive” and “upset”, but he is a human being so I trust that all the other things are in there, too. Lots of people loved to watch Mark, because he’s cute, sexy, funny, outrageous… all the reasons that people like “Reality Show Villains”. But most wondered why I kept him around over guys like Rich and Peter and Barry… even the guys in the house wondered. To be honest, there isn’t a good definite answer… I honestly didn’t know how mean he was to the other guys when I wasn’t around. And I guess with some of the previous guys certain things happened that showed me that although they were (1) Actually interesting to me as a possible romance, they (2) were not interested in me or would not work out as such. With Mark, although I found him sexy in some ways, I don’t know if I ever really thought we might work out as boyfriend/girlfriend but I knew we would have some fun, funny and exciting experiences together for as long as I kept him around.  In any case, like everyone on the show, he was a cool person in many ways, and I’m glad to have met him. I wish him all the best!