A taxi screeches to a halt on Clark Street in front of Goose Island Wrigleyville, where a patient crowd of teenagers and twentysomethings are lined up. Out steps a gentlemen in his early twenties who wears faded jeans, Armani sunglasses and what appears to be Derek Zoolander’s “blue steel” pose. The sad reality is that he is strutting towards the line to audition for the twenty-first season of MTV’s “The Real World,” and he probably has a decent chance at making the cut.
He joins the queue, where the main activity is filling out an application that asks questions like “Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend? Where does the relationship stand now?” (Best answer: “Yes, we cry on the phone a lot.” Also, “Have you ever had a DUI? If yes, please explain.”
What drives young adults who probably have trendier things to do on a Saturday afternoon than stand around in the bitter cold to try out for a reality TV show? For Roger Keith, 22, it’s the women. “I don’t want to say it too loud, but my first mission would be to try to get with all the girls in the house.” On the other side of the spectrum, Jackie Bedolla, 21, has drawn a distinct line on the matter. “I wouldn’t get with everyone in the house,” she says. “Make out, maybe.”
Then there’s Troy Pryor, who manages to not talk sex and says, “I think I’d thrive under a diverse situation, and even if I don’t agree with a certain lifestyle, I’m not one to judge anyone.” Pryor is refreshingly levelheaded and clearly has no possibility of making the show. (Andy Seifert)
The Mass Menagerie: How Suburban TV Pioneers Bruce and Claire Newton Connected and Collected the Ephemera of Al Capone, Garfield… The Newtons were extreme collectors. During the early 1980s, I visited their four-story, eighteen-room house in Aurora filled with antiques. A secret bookshelf door in the basement opened to a modest-sized workshop where dozens of marionettes and puppets were created, including Nautilus the Sea Dragon and Polly the Parrot, the latter of which was used for political campaigns of that…
