Somebody told me a week or three ago that MTV's The Real World is currently being filmed in Paris, to be aired next year. When the filming was taking place in Chicago, my sister - who lived there at the time - said people knew and would see them around and yada yada. This sounded appealing to me, and in the same way that I only sort of try without success not to rubberneck when passing by car accidents, I halfheartedly fought the quickly-developing vision of being that "outside" person that all the cast members meet, think is either cool, a freak, or way too slutty, and audience members' love to hate or hate to love.
I got excited at the possibility of an innocent Parisian encounter with one of the single male cast members, our fun and exciting nights out on the town where he "discovers" the City of Lights, his early but expected profession of love for me over the air waves, his inability to tell me personally because of his shy, quiet nature and the fact that I just seem so out-of-his-league, his later discovery of my three+ year-long thing going on with my beloved, the ensuing confessional where he says that if we can't be boyfriend-girlfriend he'll still want me around because I am THAT cool, the understood sexual tension created by editing tricks and the accurate use of whatever love-related pop song is in at the moment of airing, the female cast members' slightly psychotic territorial protection of the poor, innocent boy who had the misfortune of falling for me, the one really psychotic female cast member who outright calls me a "pretentious bitch" in the confessional but who later "really opens up" to me and admits she had only misunderstood me, the eventual heart-to-heart initiated by the boy-in-question regarding his profound love for me and my heartfelt yet crushing response (perhaps my exceptional guest-confessional?), the appropriate scenes of him moping around the house following said discussion (dramatically enhanced by editing and music as well), the over-the-top departure of the group and much-discussed au revoir during which Boy gets very emotional with me and maybe even cries, and my eventual yet inevitable takeover of their SWEET loft at Oberkampf or Abesses or somewhere equally as hip immediately following their departure.
But now I see it's in Las Vegas. I am going to have to reconsider some of my Real World infiltrating strategies.
Actually, the LV episodes are already done, so they might be shooting in Paris next...
The funny thing was, when they were shooting in Chicago, there were tons of protests because the neighborhood they were in is a formerly immigrant-and-artist heavy neighborhood that is now way overpriced, so some enterprising young Chicagoans thought they'd protest the gentrification (and resulting near-forced relocation of the urban poor) by picketing the Real World building and splashing red paint on the front door.
The funny thing? That may have been why the "protest" started, but many people actually showed up because they thought MTV was holding *auditions*.
Read about it Here:
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/071501_Ns_realworld.html
Oh, and, holy run-on sentence, Batman!
Hah...should I go protest whenever and wherever they are filming in Paris? Maybe that will be the beginning of my Real World career? You know how the French love protests.