dashed hopes, demolished dreams
Posted on April 4, 2007
Filed Under career, snark, suburban joys | 5 Comments
Now what cruel god has decided to tear my heart out with this e-mail? Check out this gem of an offer I found in my Inbox last night.
Dear CCE and her lovely and intelligent business partner,
Blaine from our Knoxville office forwarded me your info.
We are currently casting hosts for a new home improvement series for WEtv and are looking for a hip, attractive, accessible, charismatic, credible GARDENDER/LANDSCAPER. Production will take place in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL in Spring/Summer/Fall 2007. Are you interested in being considered?
If so, do you or does someone you know have a video camera? I’d like for you to each put yourselves on tape (individually and together) and tell me about yourselves, your education, your work experience, your business, your expertise, how you would describe your personality, how you would each describe the other’s personality, and anything else that you think I might find interesting or appealing in casting you to co-host this show. I’m looking for a mixture of credibility/knowledge AND personality.
If you could get me this tape and pics and bios for each of you by the end of this week, that would be ideal.
I look forward to hearing back.
Thank you,
Very Powerful Producer in New York
I cried myself to sleep remembering how cute I looked in those knee high rubber wellies and the great baby-tee with the company logo in orange splashed brightly across the chest. I tossed and turned, lamenting the decision to close the Landscape Design company I owned with a friend and move to suburban New England in order to macerate in my own suburban juices. Who thought it would be a good idea to renovate an antique home by myself in the woods with only a blog for company? Because fuck all if someone doesn’t want me to have my own television show. But it’s TOO late, it’s a year and a half TOO late. Where were you WEtv when we were planning and installing the gardens of the South Florida elite? Why now? 
Picture me banging my head against walls papered in 80 year old damask, cursing and crying and considering a move back to South Florida just to shoot this video, but I’m ‘New England in Winter’ kind of pale and I’ve forgotten the Latin names of all major palm varieties.
How about I pitch you another idea WEtv? Your camera crew could follow me around my house while I type witty comments on other peoples’ blogs in my bathrobe and occasionally put on yoga pants and walk the dog. Because this is the exciting life an ex-landscape architect leads once she’s hung up the drafting pens. I think your audience really might get a kick out of the footage that is me plunging our antique toilet for the tenth time this week. This is something I can do one handed, while smiling and explaining the function of certain toilet parts like flush valves and O rings. I can promise to make this cute and light hearted. And, just for comic relief, there’s always the hour I spend in my son’s second grade class teaching Writer’s Workshop.
Get back to me, let me know if this life I’ve chosen sounds as interesting to you as the life I once led, you know the one where I catered to the elite and lunatic of Miami and drove a big white SUV we called the Bloom Beast to tropical nurseries and dragged back lovely matching Crinum Lilies the size of my dining room table for the illegal immigrant help to plant in the yards of Mario and Maria, a husband and wife team that were living in separate homes because he had taken up with the female tenant living in their carriage house.
I’ll get a new bathrobe. I’ll highlight my hair…as soon as I stop wailing about the cruel irony of being offered my own television show a year and half too late.
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