The Dirt Field

I came home one night last week to find The Landlord and Matty in the kitchen in various stages of preparing dinner. After my standard warm welcome (“Where the hell have YOU been?”), The Landlord informed me that there would be a crew at our house that Tuesday night to film a television show. Apparently one of The Landlord’s friends is an associate producer for a new show on Court TV, and when a house was needed to film a party scene, this friend immediately thought of us.

It was exciting news, but I pointed out that we might want to consider doing some cleaning before the crew arrived the next day. My actual wording may have been a bit less delicate (“They’re coming here? But this place is a dump!”), because The Landlord instantly became defensive. He looked around the kitchen, objected to my assessment, and then explained that the house was supposed to look normal and lived in. I’m not sure that “lived in” includes having a gun cleaning kit, a power sander, empty cartons and boxes of food, discarded newspapers, a thirty pound bag of dog food, a paper shredder, and part of a rifle in the kitchen, but okay. I’m flexible.

The Landlord then went on to explain that the show they would be taping was called Suburban Secrets, and it was a part of a series of shows about true crime in the suburbs. Our particular episode would be about a man that poisoned his wife’s drink with antifreeze at a party in 1997, and our role would be to supply the setting for the party and some of the guests.

Tuesday night rolled around and the film crew showed up at around seven o’clock. As they were setting up, I went upstairs to put a blazer over my grubby tee shirt so that I’d look more presentable on television. When I came back downstairs, I received the thumbs-up from the producer on my look, to which The Landlord added, “Yeah, it’s very ninety-seven.” It was also what I’d worn to work that day. I responded by asking The Landlord what he planned to do about the fact that the camera adds ten pounds, to which he sadly replied, “Why are you SO MEAN?”

The filming itself went pretty smoothly. We sat around the coffeetable in the living room chugging down alcohol (a radical departure from the usual), while The Landlord got to have his fifteen minutes of fame playing the psychotic killer (another radical departure from the usual). I was the wife’s friend, a role in which I excelled as my only responsibility was to sip a drink and pretend to engage in girl-talk. And that was it. I don’t know when this episode will air, but I’ll be sure to call everyone I know when I find out to tell them to tune in and watch me getting liquored up on television. Because that’s how I want to go down in history.