jerry springer

BM and I went to a taping of the Jerry Springer show yesterday night. It was not hard to get tickets. They are free and all you have to do is leave your phone number on the website, and a very excitable PA will give you a call the next day. We attempted to go to a taping a month ago, but were turned away because they overbook shows and seats are available first come first serve. But because we had attempted and failed to see a taping, we were given "VIP" tickets to the December 15 taping.

All VIP meant was that we got to bypass the ticket line outside and fast-track to the metal detector. I arrived at 6:30 pm and waited half an hour for BM to show up. I killed time by trying on the thumbcuffs (upon which "CHICAGO AL CAPONE 'There are no gangsters in this city'" is printed) in the NBC souvenir shop and cycling through all the quips programmed into the "The Office" talking pens. Outside the non-VIP audience hopefuls were queuing up. Average age looked to be 19 or 20; the minimum age is 18, and security checks IDs.

Even though Chicago hit a low of windchill -3 degrees yesterday, many of these kids were dressed for spring break. The PA who booked my ticket reminded me twice, once by phone and once by voicemail, to dress "super cute" for the show, since it was going to be a "special." The tickets also came with an instructional half-sheet on what "super cute" meant. I saved it and will recreate it in its entirety below:

* SUGGESTED ATTIRE *

MEN: Nice jeans, khakis, dockers or dress pants with a collared shirt (polo or button down) or sweaters only. 

WOMEN: Nice jeans, dress pants or skirts with a pretty shirt, blouse sweaters only.

Unfortunately we are unable to admit you if the following attire is worn:

Jerseys, t-shirts of any kind, oversized clothing, logos, decals, sweatpants, sweatshirts, sports attire or any other attire we feel is inappropriate for our studio audience. 

We could have been at an all-ages bridge and tunnel disco. The boys dressed like boys and the girls dressed like girls. There were overdressed boys in collared shirts and jeans; they grouped together and talked to each other and eyed the girls nervously because they were probably 5-10 years shy of maturing into full-on, loud-talking confident pricks. The girls' makeup erred on the side of pancake. Everybody had straightened hair with bangs that fell at an angle across the forehead. There was lots of cleavage, and lots of GLH.

BM and I opted to blend in rather than stand out as "super cute." I am a member of the California bar, after all. Best not to attract attention on the Jerry Springer show. I wore jeans and a discrete, neutral-toned sweater, and glasses, and would have worn a schnozz to hide behind if I had thought to bring one. BM wore a flesh-colored sweater (she worried that the camera would make her look naked) and jeans. I had to stuff my royal blue bathrobe with the N.D. Ill. District Court seal into my backpack and check the backpack. The other checked items in the security area were about fifteen cigarette boxes and a skateboard.

A PA led us to the VIP waiting room, where I ate a dinner of Maruchan instant noodles using three toothpicks and BM sipped a diet cherry Coke. Apparently the non-VIPs were corralled into a caged waiting area to "sober up" during the hourlong wait between the security check and the actual taping. BM and I killed this hour by discussing in detail our plans to write and sell a Thanksgiving-themed song to a Nashville star (see previous entry - I found the perfect theme!). We were handed release forms, which we read thoroughly before signing. There were some pretty funny clauses in that form, not just the usual submit to arbitration, release us and our assigns from all claims that you and your assigns may have, but also (1) indemnify us for any damage you cause, and (2) you can't be offended by our nudity, the nudity of our guests, or your own nudity. I'm paraphrasing the last...I can't remember the exact words...but it was along the lines of NBC getting the rights to use the studio audience's nudity?

I haven't watched the Jerry Springer show since 1994, so I really didn't know what to expect. The release forms were the first clue. The second clue came when a PA came in to announce that our slated show was not an ordinary taping but a "special," for Pay-Per-View, and there was going to be extra nudity, violence and vulgarity, and if we couldn't handle it we should leave then. A little later on I went to the bathroom and saw several women trotting around in their underwear. I am still not really sure what they were doing but I think they were extras.

Around 9pm, the PAs led the VIPs to the studio. Jerry Springer's decorative scheme is Night Court gothic, same as it was in 1994, with brick walls and fake industrial equipment churning in the background. Jerry Springer's name/logo was stamped in stencil font around the studio, and someone had superimposed "UNCENSORED" placards on top, for the special Pay-Per-View show. The studio was very aggressively air conditioned, as I learned from the twenty-eight nipples that erected onstage in the next two hours.

The aisle seat of the row in which we were seated was propped up funny, as were some other aisle seats around the room. We learned later that these seats were designated for the "plants" in the audience, actors and actresses hired to dress and act like audience members but who would spring into action when called upon. Our aisle seat remained empty until just before the taping started, when a woman wearing so much foundation that her face looked like the top layer of a tiramisu slipped into it. She wore a spaghetti-strap tank top that revealed the bright blue outline of a cherry blossom branch tattooed on her right shoulder. I never learned her name, but she kept leaning over to BM and whispering conspiratorially and cattily about the people on stage: (about an obviously fake set of tits) "Ew, her boobs are fucking disgusting. They're making me sick"; (about the personality attached to those tits) "I hate dipshits"; (about two ugly women pulling each others' hair) "The brunette is waaaay prettier, but they're both...ugh." She magnanimously praised the pole dancer - I'll get to that - as being "really good." She knew the pole dancer was good because she was herself a dancer, in Arkansas, and she knew how hard it could be. Later she mocked BM for not knowing who Steve Wilkos was: "Uh, hello? Steve Wilkos is Jerry Springer's former head bodyguard who got his own show on NBC??"

Before all this happened, though, we had to wait a little longer. It took a little while for the kids to settle in their seats. The kids sitting to my right were not like the Spring Break Cancun-types in the rest of the audience. They were hipster punks wearing ill-fitting "super cute" clothes, and I was very grateful when the doublewide male punk switched seats with the slender girl punk with the faded pink fauxhawk; though she still smelled like a dumpster, she was only half the dumpster he was. While the audience filled in the rows, PAs taped canvas sheets to the stage and brought out squirt bottles filled with white liquid. A best-of reel played on flatscreens overhead. They included clips from such winning episodes like "I'm Pregnant By Your Man" and "I'm Pregnant By A Transsexual" and "I Have a Secret...I'm a Woman." The clips were just ten seconds of dialogue so that you got the drift, followed by thirty seconds of pummeling.

A guy in a headset led off the taping by giving us the ground rules. Applaud when I raise my hands, chant "Jer-RY! Jer-RY!" when I pump my fist, and never look into the camera. Make big faces, because your reaction might be used not only on this show but on others. (I kept a poker face and didn't applaud or cheer, hoping to minimize the chances that a camera would fix on me.) Cheer when girls get naked. Sorry if guys get naked. (At this, everyone in the audience went "EWWWW!!" lest the taint of homosexuality fall upon our heterosexual taints.) Now it's time to chant: "JER-RY! JER-RY!" We chanted.

Then Jerry Springer came out and gave us five minutes of the most uninspired stand-up I've ever seen. He wore a poorly fitting gray box-stripe suit and brown Merrell low hikers. He was making Osama bin Laden jokes, for god's sake! Apparently no one cares enough to write new material for him! It was a mixture of stupid adolescent jokes meant to elicit homophobic disgust, which the crowd indulged, and just corny shit: "I signed a new cable contract today!" [We applauded.] "Yeah, the guy's coming over to install it next Thursday." [Crickets.] "Aw man, how much did you pay for these tickets?" [Weak self-conscious laughter.] He paced the aisles, flirting with girls. "I'm ugly but I'm rich as shit!" he told one. The crowd roared.

The standup act ended and it was time for the taping to start. There was nothing by the way of introduction. We just chanted for a bit, Jerry Springer came out, and immediately started reading off the teleprompter. The theme of the show was "Naughty Secrets Revealed," he announced. But first: "A pole-dancing stripper!" And out came Carolyn, who shucked her clothes off (except for a red thong) and suspended herself horizontally on the pole by the crook of her elbow. I don't think I've ever seen real pole dancing in person! The bored boys of Sugarland don't count as pole dancers. Carolyn was pretty impressive, even swinging herself upside down at several points, like a pole vaulter. BM and I muttered to each other about her athleticism and talent, while the kids around us hooted at the sight of her bazooms.

Just as suddenly, the next guest appeared. She was a buxom blonde with knotty white dreadlocks, like the Matrix twins, who said, "Jerry, my naughty secret is that I want to be with a woman!" Jerry asked for a "volunteer" from the crowd. One of the plants ran up to the stage. Without any further ado, both women disrobed until one was buck naked (EVEN HER HOOHOO WAS TANNED) and the other was in her undies and began squirting each other with the white liquid from the squeeze bottles. The lights cut out and a black light was shone upon them. The liquid appeared fluorescent, and soon the women were both so covered in it that you could see every body part in stark, glowing relief against the black set. They began to "wrestle," which was half rolling around, half sucking each other's tits. "We'll be right back, folks!" Jerry Springer shouted, and the lights came back on. The women temporarily stopped writhing around, the PAs moved the canvas sheets to a corner of the stage, and there the women continued their writhing for the next two hours, even as other guests came on. Likewise, the stripper kept dancing up and down the pole, pausing during the "commercial breaks" to wipe it off with a shammy.

The commercial breaks were not commercials, of course. The taping would cut to a "break" and then more or less immediately resume. The next "guest" was a woman whose "naughty secret revealed" was that she was sleeping with a married man. As she told her story (very poorly, forgetting details, needing to be prompted by the Cindy McCain-looking PA off by the camera), the PA with the headset goaded the audience into a chant of "Take off your clothes!" The woman shrugged and giggled, said "Okay!" and took her clothes off. Then Jerry Springer said, "Would you all like me to bring out her man's wife?!" and the audience roared. An ectomorph emerged from stage right, shouted some epithets at the naked woman, and then launched into a "fight." I have to say the first fight was the most realistic-looking one of all of them, since the ecto led it off with a good headbutt that actually might have connected with a cheekbone or something. After that moment, though, it was all long hair lashing out across the stage. Strangely enough, after their first "fight," the ecto was also naked!

So Jerry Springer is entirely faked! The people on stage were clearly actors, or maybe just desperate people who need money, but whatever they were, they were coached. One set of women (the "You're Sleeping With My Army Fiance" one) stage-fought so badly that they looked like they were just leaning into each other, like saplings in a breeze. A boxing bell sound effect would sound when it was time for the fighting to begin - maybe they edit this out during production. PAs kept running around the stage slinging microphones on lanyards over the necks of the naked women, because there were no collars to clip the mikes to. The "security staff" stood at the side of the stage, allowed the play-fighting to go on until both women had each other's hair in harpy-grips, and then rushed to pry them apart. It was like WWF. BM looked over at me at some point and said, "I know this is fake, but there are still clumps of hair on the ground." We speculated that they were either weaves or that the PAs had thrown the hair down when we weren't looking.

This only took us to about twenty minutes. Then, for the next hour and forty minutes, the show alternated between two girls making out under a variety of pretenses ("I'm a college student, and I'm in love with my roommate," followed by disrobing and faking cunnilingus, then "My naughty secret is I want to be dominated by a dominatrix," followed by disrobing, the licking of boots, a ball gag, a leash), and staged fights about adultery. The Army sketch turned into a "You're Sleeping With My Army Fiance...But So Is An African-American Little Person!" and then the whole show turned into an opportunity for the audience to mock the disabled. You can probably predict the dialogue (Little person: "I can suck your man's dick standing up!" Audience: "OHHHHHHH!!!!"). The audience also shouted impromptu slurs, like "NASTY!" and "MIDGET!" and "WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR FACE!" and had to be shushed by PAs several times. Even though by the end of the show there were 28 tits on stage - I knew because a boy in the row behind me counted aloud and miscounted several times: "One, two, three, four, five, six...oh hmmm..one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...oh..."), I was ready to die of boredom by the end of the first half hour. There's only so much of tits and fake violence one can see before one longs to go home and finish up The Omnivore's Dilemma. I am, in fact, even bored of writing about it. Tits, tits, tits.

I understand why Jerry Springer does this. I saw his seventy year-old face lit up under those hot lights and I saw his disinterest in reading the teleprompter. I saw him half-heartedly delivering seven year-old standup jokes. There's practically no investment for him, only reward. He seemed like a smart, greedy sleazebag, which I guess is what he is. And once I learned that the fights and scenarios are all faked, it made watching the taping somewhat less appalling. It's just a spectacle, like WWF. The profit motive for Jerry Springer and the actors makes this whole thing understandable to me.

What was truly frightening was what was happening in the audience, not on the stage. At some point the line separating silliness and cruelty was crossed, and it seemed like people were taking the show seriously. Jerry Springer took "questions" from the audience at the end of the show. We were told at the start of the taping to think of witty, cutting one-liners about the show's guests, for which we would be rewarded with screen time on Pay-Per-View. Some girls just raised their hands to ask, "Can I have my Jerry beads now?" and flash their tits, at which a PA would throw some New Orleans-style beads. Many more audience members raised their hands to say aggressive, conservative, crass, and cruel shit. The Little Person clearly had some sort of neurological disorder that made the left half of her face droop, and she'd combed her bangs over this half of her face. "Hey Smeagol, did you ever get that ring?" one audience member shouted. ("I don't take questions from homos," the woman shouted back.) "Why don't you show us what's wrong with the left side of your ugly face, Leprechaun in the hood? What's behind your hair?" shouted another audience member. That line was clearly so offensive that even Jerry Springer cut it off, and the cameras moved to a different audience member. The woman to whom that comment was directed didn't even try to think of something to say back to him, and instead just glowered in her chair. Maybe it wasn't in the contract to be derided by three hundred rabid assholes.

I felt very uncomfortable and I wanted to leave. But even leaving didn't make me feel more comfortable, because BM and I had to mill among the throng as we waited for the single elevator to make roundtrips between the first and second floors of the NBC building, carrying the audience out twenty people at a time. I think when people are stirred into a hate-filled frenzy, even when they think they're just being silly or hyperbolic, they actually absorb those feelings and behave violently to the people around them. I don't think you can make people listen to hate speech for two hours and not expect consequences. There was pushing and shoving as we waited for the elevators, and some muttered insults. Maybe this is the closest I'll get to attending a Sarah Palin rally. When we were finally packed into the dimly-lit, freight-sized elevator, and the steel door slid shut, BM turned to me and said, "This is how people got gassed."

I suppose it was a good experience, in that all experiences you've survived are good, even if they are bad, undignified, putrescent, or dangerous. I don't think I would do it again and I wouldn't recommend that anyone else do it. I didn't get home until midnight. I drank chai and ate ginger snaps until I warmed up and calmed down. Then I took a very, very long, and very, very hot shower, and then I went to sleep.