This couldn’t have sucked anymore. I was with my friend, Amy, at the Lower Dining Hall at BC when my cell phone rang with a caller ID area code of 818. She was with me when I received the call that I made semi-finalist as well. The man on the phone was being super nice and asking me all these small talk questions like how my day was. I looked at Amy and knew that I had made it simply because it would be really dick of this guy to be all sweet then tell me to get lost. However, I wasn’t completely right. I had not made it…yet.

He asked me if I were around a computer. When I said I could be in five minutes, he asked me to call him back when I was. Amy and I ran like the wind into Vanderslice. I punched in the code for Peterik’s room, took a sharp turn into his bedroom where his computer is. Peterik was sitting in his common room, and was obviously curious as to why two Bostonians broke into his place and didn’t say hi.

I called the man back and he told me to go to mtv.com. “This is where you’re going to kill me,” he said. There in front of me were five faces, my face being one them. He explained to me the whole voting-process deal, then told me to click on my video. There in front of me was my broken digital face belting out some Christina Aguilera. I was mortified because I didn’t show that audition tape to ANYONE except my friend Mike because I was embarrassed about it, and now it was on the internet. At this point, I’m screaming at the guy on the phone. “WHY THIS CLIP??? WHY DIDN”T YOU HAVE ME TALKING, SAYING SOMETHING INTELLEGENT!!!!!???” I realized then and there that I had become the “aspiring musician” character, and I hated it. I appeared to be yet another person trying to use the Real World to get a singing career. Not. So lame.

Well, I was pissed at this point when I realized that all the other finalists had the simple phone call to get into finals where I had a week to prostitute myself for votes with the unnerving possibility of not winning at all anyway. If I DID make it, all the other finalists would know who I am and have made prejudgments of me already while I wouldn’t know a soul there. The Bostonians were put to work. They each mass emailed everyone they knew in life to vote for me and encouraged each person to mass email as well. I’d be getting reports from them, “Lori, I have a high school in Michigan that has all voted for you,” so on and so forth. My boyfriend’s roommate, Nick, put my picture and a message on a main BC website with a link to mtv.com. Soon, my teachers were asking me if that was me on the web.

I didn’t enjoy the attention, which is odd considering how much I love attention. This was a bit too much though. I had to finish all my finals early in case I did win so that I could go to Palm Springs. Luckily, all my finals were take-homes that semester.
Matt was a big help for me that week. He doesn’t watch MTV, and doesn’t care much for pop culture as a whole. He was obviously proud of me and knew it was a good opportunity, but he also know that it was just another piece of life, not my ENTIRE life, so he stayed level-headed. It was nice because when I was with him, we didn’t have to talk about it, and that was a relief. We didn’t want to talk about it because getting on the show meant leaving each other, and things were going pretty well with us at that time.

So anyway, I started going crazy…I had discovered the message boards. Evil, evil things those boards are. Here I am, for the first time confronted by the masses to be criticized and I haven’t even made the show yet. I checked it obsessively. It destroyed me inside. People were tearing me apart, and I couldn’t handle not being able to defend myself to each and every person. Matt saw me freaking out. “You HAVE to stop checking them. Who cares what these kids think of you? Hon, you’re obsessed and it’s not healthy.” I resented him briefly claiming that he just didn’t understand, but he was right to a degree. MTV removed the message boards when they saw how cruel people were being.

Finally, the day had arrived. I was promised a call by noon, but it had not come yet. Matt and I were walking from lower to upper campus, and we cut through the library because it was so cold. “Let’s just check the site real quick,” I said as we came upon some computers. “It’s not up yet. The man said he’d call first,” he responded. “Let’s just check anyway.” I went to the site, scrolled down, and saw my face blown up on the top of the page. The picture was bordered with the words, “And the winner is…LORI.” I screamed right there in the whispering library, and jumped up and down while Matt hugged me.

After that, I don’t remember exactly. I still didn’t like to talk about it. I’m the same way now. I guess I called everyone, I don’t know. I think I just started busting my ass to finish my finals right away. My roommates found out through the computer. I was slipping in the door quietly after studying and writing most of the day, but an enormous party was going on right in my living room. The place was packed with people, my roommates were all standing on chairs. They looked over, saw me, and started screaming their congratulations. They forced me up onto a chair, had the whole party applaud me, then made me to a shot. I was going to do work that night, but I decided fuck it. I dropped my bags and coat and went drinking with my roommates the whole night. I had an amazing time. Came home, stumbled into Walsh, crawled into Matt’s bed and slept well.