A Dog Named Humphrey

When the opportunity to appear on the teen drama Gossip Girl came my way, I felt like I had won a contest. Not a contest it would have occurred to me to enter, but the type of contest of which I am dimly aware as a result of living in the world. Instead of objects, the prizes are people. Yes, people. Be pulled onstage by Bono and have him lick your face! Have lunch with Kate Moss! Many philosophical confusions arise—for both the winner and the prize—when it comes to packaging real people and presenting them as if they were objects to be bid upon and bartered. For one thing, it strikes me as vaguely denigrating to the celebrities. The underlying message to civilians seems to be that a celebrity life is best accessed not through hard work or talent but through lottery-type luck. What a lesson. And what of the civilians? Are we not setting ourselves up to feel badly about our modest level of notoriety, a level with which we were perfectly comfortable just the day before? Then there’s the shame of the thrill, the tiny hope that someone famous will turn around and call you a natural. Is there not something slightly, well, gross about being as tickled as we are by celebrity culture? We are, at best, pleased by the scraps. We are, at worst, validated by them.

This was the kind of social paranoia swirling around my head when I got the call. The prize I’d won—the chance to mingle, and for a moment be an equal, with the actors on the set of Gossip Girl—was not initially meant to be mine. Hollywood is not known for its sensitivity; I was told outright that a more-famous writer had already been offered the walk-on and declined. The news that someone I respected would not do what I was willing to do in a heartbeat had absolutely no effect on me. I knew some people who slavishly followed Gossip Girl and I wasn’t one of them. Still, I knew what it was, I was familiar with the premise, and I knew what channel it was on. The show is what my grandmother used to call “good junk.” Ergo—I wanted to be on Gossip Girl. I told myself that the famous author had clearly said no because she was unfamiliar with the show’s good-junkiness, not because she was weighing the benefits of being on such a show, and making her decision based on what an author who hopes to be taken seriously should and should not do.

But when I hung up the phone, I thought: Which is what, exactly?

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