at each table, massive floral centerpieces sat atop giant round mirrors covered with fake Christmas snow. It was very festive. It was very Lance.
One of the live hits I was supposed to do from the party was me at a table chatting with Dream (who for such a fleeting pop band have evidently had a massive impact on my life), and a minute or so before we were to go live, the camera guy removed the floral centerpiece so that nobody at the table would be blocked by it. This left us sitting around a big round mirror topped with fake Christmas snow. I thought nothing of it until one of the Dream girls—Alison? Joanne? Li’l Sneakerz? Who even knew?—took her all-access laminate, and absentmindedly, just as a thing to do with your hands while you’re waiting to go on live TV, started pushing the fake Christmas snow around on the big round mirror. A pile here, a pile there, a big fat straight line right in the middle. The producer counted us in: 3…2…
For the first few seconds of that live hit, my eyes are massive and I have a look of panic on my face, because I realized quickly that it really, really looked like I was at Lance Bass’s New Year’s Eve party doing a massive pile of cocaine with a group of fourteen-year-old girls.
Eminem
When he burst on the scene, people said: Here is a controversial white rapper who will change the game. I said: Oh, look, Carol Kane is playing a Ukrainian male prostitute. Obviously, the guy is very good at what he does, but he also showed up saying “faggot” five million times and wielding a massive, tiresome persecution complex. I mean: “They tried to shut me down on MTV”? When was that? I seem to remember us playing you once an hour and interviewing you every other week. While he projected a tough-guy image to the outside world, inside our walls, he was absolutely the kind of guy who would throw a fit if his bottled water was room temperature. I don’t really have any inside scoop here; he just seemed like kind of a dick.
Tommy Lee
Sometime around 2000 I cohosted some Sports and Music Festival or another out in the California desert with Tommy Lee, who at the time was riding a post-sex-tape career resurgence. He had just released a rock/hip-hop hybrid album with Fred Durst and Lil’ Kim called Methods of Mayhem, and in the rocker style of the day, was speaking at all times like a black character from a story written in a white-supremacist creative writing workshop: a lot of crib, a lot of word, a megadose of yo. He was also being trailed by some extremely tenacious groupies, who made Heather-Graham-in-the-’80s-parts-of-Boogie Nights faces at him and stared lasers into his legendary crotch. As we wrapped on the final day, one such groupie vaulted past his security detail and stage-whispered into his ear: “Tommy, if you take me home, I will suck your cock for twenty-four hours.” “Oh, word?” he replied dispassionately as his bodyguards pulled him away. It immediately became clear that this is how people start conversations with Tommy Lee every single day.
Say What? Karaoke was what television people called a “strip show”: it would air Mondays through Fridays, and we’d record a whole season in three or four days. If TRL took a few days off, they’d clear its set out of the uptown studio, build ours, and we’d crank those episodes out, seven or eight at a time. Audience members who thought they were there to watch a thirty-minute show would be stuck in their seats for nine hours, so PAs would hand out Hershey’s Kisses and Miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to keep their energy up and stop them from revolting. We were quick and efficient, but even when you’re working with the best people in the business, the whole thing can become a blur. You can check out a little bit, and forget to watch what you’re saying.
In what was maybe our fifth episode on our fourth shoot day in a row, a contestant did a cartwheel in a crop top while singing Britney Spears’s “Sometimes.” As I congratulated her on her performance and prepared her for the judges’ critiques, I said: “The straight guys are going to love you.” Our executive producer said “Cut” into my earpiece.
I said, “Why?”
She said, “You said all the straight guys were going to love her. Just say