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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
I was one of 2,000 contestants in MTV's "Wanna Be a VJ" contest.
Apr 14, 1999 | "I just want to be famous," says Jackie MacMillan.
With her pale blond hair yanked into a ponytail and a rim of purple-brownish liner around her chapped lips, Jackie does not, at the moment, look like a star. But that hasn't stopped her from hoping, or dreaming, or driving, in the rainy wee hours of the morning, from Kearny, N.J., to Times Square for MTV's second annual "Wanna Be a VJ" contest.
Understand that MacMillan, like most of the other 2,000 people in line, plus the thousands more who turned out in Chicago and Los Angeles, does not necessarily wanna be a VJ, per se. Sure, she likes music, and yes, she watches MTV and she even cops to a major crush on Nathan, from "The Real World" Seattle cast. But that's not really why she's here. Jackie wants to be famous. Seen. Admired. Adored. Paid. Well-paid. And she wants all the benefits that fame and money can confer: namely, the ability to visit pain upon her enemies. "I was put on this earth to be famous. I wanna be known," she says. "The people who I hate, I can shove it in their face," she says, staring off into the distance with her eyes squinched into slits. "Like my ex-boyfriends. Look what you gave up, ya dick!"
And MTV, she knows, can make it happen. MTV turns regular people into superstars and grants them their fondest wish: an audience that will watch them just basically being themselves. Didn't the music network pluck 19-year-old Jesse Camp from obscurity and homelessness and give him a job and the $25,000 prize, which he parlayed into a recording contract? Isn't David Holmes, last year's wannabe runner-up, still on the air? Isn't former "Real World" cast member Rachel Campos currently in contention for Debbie Matenopoulos' old job on ABC's "The View"? And so what if Rachel's castmate Puck is in jail in California, and New York "Real World" homeboy Eric Nies went from co-hosting "The Grind" to ... well, nothing? It can happen. It's happened before. It could happen to them.
"It's destined for me to be famous," says 20-year-old Cole DiBiaso from Rehoboth Beach, Del., a community college student with big blue eyes and a spill of honey-blond curls. She doesn't dance or sing or act. She just wants the world to watch her, and she thinks that someday soon, it will. "I believe in creating your destiny," she announces proudly. "I just created mine."
You would like to believe that you are different from Jackie, and from the rest of this crew of wannabes who have driven and flown and paid all kinds of money to be in Times Square to court the network's gaze. You would like to think that you have more reserve, more dignity and, dammit, more pride, than this cavalcade of exhibitionists, this parade of the pierced and tattooed that have waited like so many punked-up sheep for hours and hours, all for the privilege of a purple wristband, a packet of forms and two minutes of Viacom's videotape.
You - OK, fine, enough with this Jay McInerney second-person stuff, I - would hope that there was a vast and yawning chasm separating me from the giggling hordes of 19-year-old, Britney Spears-listening, WB-watching, butterfly hairclip-wearing starry-eyed wonders who, if they found themselves in their own version of "The Truman Show," would be perfectly thrilled. And really, I was doing OK, until I got in front of the camera with that MTV microphone in my hand.
