Glowfest: A Beautiful Disaster

Right now I’m somewhere over Arizona en route back home to LA. I am sitting next to the cover model of this month’s Playboy and she is editing a video she made for some random old man in Texas. “It’s a fetish video, he is very specific about what he wants. No nudity, heavily orally fixated and it has to involve candy.” The funny part is she shot this video Saturday night while we were pregaming before dinner. She is literally rolling around on the floor on the La Quinta Inn, sucking on a Blow Pop while I am 5 feet away laughing my ass off in the corner ripping shots of vodka. For this 10 minute video she is getting paid $1,500.

That hasn’t even been the most interesting part of my ride so far. The first hour we spent looking through her entire nude catalogue, she showed me the progression of her four breast enhancement surgeries and asked which hair color I preferred. This is one of the characters on our new pilot.

I must say, I fucked up this weekend. I was given one real responsibility…blog the experience, reflect on what was happening. However, like I often do, I started boozing Friday afternoon at the airport, and I haven’t yet stopped. Gin and tonics are only $4 on Southwest this month so you can hardly blame me. But although I failed as a writer I’m sure you will all soon see that I was perfectly able to encapsulate the exaggerated degenerate version of myself on film. However, in an effort to redeem myself slightly, I will attempt to give those interested a general recap of the weekends’ events. I won’t be able to remember all details due to how much happened and my general state of intoxication so I encourage you all to follow our tv show once it eventually gets picked up. But for those of you who enjoy brevity, let me sum it up in one sentence. It was a fucking disaster.

I’ve written, deleted and rewritten this post a thousand times. It’s now Wednesday, I’m not on the plane anymore, and my hangover has subsided. The first iterations of this draft had a breakdown by day of exactly what we did while in Denver. I read it a few times and it was fucking boring. Suffice to say, we were extremely debaucherous the entire trip.

I think I understand now why reality stars are portrayed so poorly when the show goes to air. For example, we shot 100 hours of footage this weekend. That will get trimmed down to 22 minutes. You can cut those 100 hours anyway you like, to tell any story you want. So what story should we tell, should we tell the story of 7 fame whores that threw a concert and filmed it so they could experience their 15 minutes of fame? Should we show 22 minutes of me shirking my responsibilities and getting drunk instead because it’s so much easier? Perhaps we just show 22 minutes of Sydney dancing on tables, flashing her tits and screaming “Google me bitch.” All the stories are moderately entertaining, and hopefully you will see a piece of all of this in our finished product.

But the only story I can tell you is my story. 7 days ago I had a barbecue with the 7 misfits who I was traveling to Denver with. Each person is remarkable in their own way. We have our token bimbo, we have the more serious introspective brunette. I play the bro, we have our nerdy virgin, our token Jew and a couple of budding entrepreneurs who are supposed to give aspiring small business owners at home hope. It’s funny really, I’m sure each character on the show has a demographic that will root for them. Maybe that’s what we’re going for.

So instead of this massive set-up why don’t I just tell you what happened? Well the first 2 days we were pretty much horrible, unlikable people. I did nothing but drink, I quit promoting Friday night when I found a bar with 2 dollar shots of Jim Beam and blacked out harder than any college kid at the bar. Saturday we went downtown and decided to take a bike ride which quickly turned into a side mission to score some herb.

All of us were behaving selfishly because those were the reasons we came on this trip. I thought that if our show got picked up I could be the next Tucker Max. Our playboy bunny probably thinks this could provide solid exposure for her modeling career. The virgin and the Jew write…a screenplay from notable reality TV stars would have an easier time selling than 2 nobodies. Our brunette is trying to further her music career and for the two guys running GlowFest this is a back door to get more publicity for the concerts themselves.

After leaving a crack house of an after party at 5am on Saturday night we all realized that we were just shooting a glorified Jersey Shore. In the Real World or any spin-off of the like, the cast is usually given some punky insignificant job. Sell t-shirts on the boardwalk, do marketing for SXSW. We were actually throwing a concert, with thousands of dollars on the line. It’s not a joke anymore, it’s not just a platform to get fucked up and talk shit about each other. Maybe that’s the drama that sparks good reality ratings, but it should be us vs. the world, not vs. each other. 

Day of show arrives and we make our way to the venue for the first time. Our responsibilities were overwhelming. All of the prep work that we should have been doing the first two days, we spent fucking around and this really put us behind the 8 ball. Around noon we found out we had to get our artist a new hotel room, because apparently the presidential suite at the downtown Loewes Hotel smelled like urine. Aside from that, the artist’s tour manager made it known that he was very unhappy about the production value of the show and the ticket sales. It’s funny how much you cross your fingers and hope when you are putting on a concert. The artist can pretty much walk at any time and still collect his paycheck. So you have to believe me that when I tell you that when the third opening act was coming to a close, we had no idea if the headliner would come on at all.

He went on stage…for 19 minutes. “Please stop throwing glow sticks at my fucking face.” Those were his last words before he stormed off stage, like the Swedish pussy that he is. With 1200 e’d out DU students I thought a riot would surely follow. Instead, the opening act, a fresh mash-up DJ named Kap Slap, went on for another 2 hours and burned the house down.

At some point, I went down to Ingrosso’s green room and stole his untouched alcohol and started raging backstage. I realized that everything was fucked. GlowFest would never touch Swedish House ever again, the show was probably $25,000 in the red, but when I looked out into the crowd I realized everyone was having a good time. And sure concert promoters are in the business of making money, but there was nothing that we could really do. It was a strange type of acceptance. I’m sure before this is all said and done there will be nasty lawsuits and I may even get served to appear. But at that specific moment I didn’t care, and I still don’t.

After the show one of the cameramen totaled our rental car…no insurance. That will be a bitch, but there was no way you were going to bring anyone down. We did it, and maybe we failed but it’s over. I was a part of something that most people will talk about their whole lives and never try…and it’s on film. My image, if this show ever sees the light of day, ruined. Half the shots of me include me chugging some sort of alcohol or making politically incorrect statements.

Looking back on it, it was the best time I’ve ever had. Sure we were doing everything on a bare bones budget, and when you are tightly packed with a group of people like that you feel like you are going to rip someone’s throat out. But I also felt like a fucking star. Cutting lines everywhere, people asking what movie we were shooting, my ego swelled to an unhealthy high.

Now that it’s a few days later, I miss the crew, I miss the people. I miss Denver. Now I’m back to my boring life, doing boring things and I already miss the spotlight, even if this was just an amateur school project. But if it does come to fruition, that one network exec thinks that this eccentric group of gen Y’ers might just be ridiculous enough for America to root for, I promise I’ll drop everything and be right back on tour. Because let’s be honest, I’m much better at acting like a moron than doing anything that actually contributes to society.