The Price is... Fixed!
remember to have your pets spayed and neutered
My grandmother has been telling me lately that she thinks I should be on a game show, like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune. Recently my girlfriend and I were visiting her in the hospital (don’t worry she’s okay), and there was an ad on the TV for a casting call for The Price Is Right, at a nearby casino. A ha! A sign!
Wanting to make grandma proud, today my girlfriend and I drove two hours to the casino, with hopes we would be chosen to be contestants. We waited in line with the other “potential contestants”. Mostly normal looking people, leaning older. Many hand-decorated t-shirts saying things like “pick me! I want to go to Los Angeles!” Basically what you’d expect.
The application process entails (1) signing some waivers which give away your rights to the mysterious “Producer” (2) writing your name, town, phone number, and email address on a form and (3) a one-minute audition in front of a camera.
While waiting in line, my girlfriend chatted with the people in front of and behind us, while I shut off from the world around me and channeled The Gods of Good Television. I read a short story from Chuck Palahniuk’s1 book of short stories Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, about a fraternity pledge who eats a tab of acid before going on the Price is Right, makes it to the showcase showdown, only to have a realization he doesn’t want any of this stuff, and he definitely doesn’t want to be an accounting major, so he guesses a price of a million trillion dollars, letting his opponent, an old lady, win the prize.
Then I wrote this little speech on my Notes App, which I excitedly (aggressively?) delivered to the camera man of recording booth A, in about 50 seconds.
Isn’t it funny…
Drew Carey’s original game show was Whose Line is it Anyway, where the slogan was
”Where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”
And now he’s the host of The Price is Right, where also…
Everything’s Made Up and the points don’t matter
That’s right!
I’m here to tell you
Money is FAKE
The Economy is FAKE
The US is 35 trillion dolars in debt and
The Fed can just print money like it’s Monopoly money
We’re making crap faster than the Earth can provide, and today it’s 80 degrees in October, in Connecticut!
As Karl Marx would say — “Everything that is solid mets into air”
Now you might say “Whoa whoa whoa, we can’t just have you saying that on national television!”
Have you never seen a twenty dollar t-shirt with Che Guevara’s face on it?
Have you never seen Episode 2 of Black Mirror?
People love rebellion!
They love a villain!
They love controversy!
Especially the YOOTH
They eat it up.
You need me. Like Batman needs the Joker.
Or… if you don’t want me, you can pick Tanya, the nice black lady behind me. B42. Today is her birthday.
I look forward to hearing my callback.
If not, well at least I can tell grandma I was probably the first ever Price Is Right audition to quote Karl Marx.
Happy Birthday Tanya, I hope you had a nice birthday at Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse.
The guy who wrote Fight Club