Unlike most of the Hollywood bashes I roll through, this little soiree at the ever-so-chic Sunset Strip restaurant Le Dome wasn’t exactly overflowing with “beautiful people.” In fact, most of them were decidedly…average. But then I knew that going in, considering the party was celebrating this television season’s edition of the geek-filled fantasy date-fest Average Joe: The Joes Strike Back.
In the absence of the usual gaggle of Parises, Lindsays, Nicoles and Simpson family babes, my eyes did manage to shoot through the exceedingly ordinary-looking throng (by Hollywood standards, anyway) and zero in on…hey, there’s that really nice guy Dennis–from the first Joe season, who looks like the lead inRevenge of the Nerds–with the comeliest cutie in the crowd, a radiant redhead with the girl-next-door grin.
As luck would have it, Las Vegas model Anna Chudoba just happened to be the object of all the Joes’ affection this season. She watched herself on one of the restaurant’s plasma screens, living a life of luxury aboard a yacht in Tahiti, tantalizing and tempting the Joes with her bikini-perfect bod.
I sidled up to Anna in a Joe-less area and chatted her up, wondering if she was at all concerned about the overwhelming amount of male attention she would receive on the show. “No! I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world,” Anna laughed. “What girl DOESN’T want 20 guys competing for her? But when you’re standing there, do you know how uncomfortable it is with all 20 guys are looking at you? And when we’d go out on the group dates, it’d be like ‘Anna! Anna! Anna!’ It was way too much. It was exhausting.”
She also admitted that she found it hard to adjust to the real world, where, despite her obvious physical charms, the guys didn’t always swoon around her. “It was really weird afterwards, because you’re opening up to so many people in such a short period of time. It’s very…not normal, you know?” She discovered she definitely wouldn’t cut it if the tables were turned and she was one of a pack of gals pursuing one man. “I’m not that type of woman. I don’t like to compete, I don’t like to be catty. And I do like to be the center of attention. I just didn’t know it would be this extreme.”
Anna admitted she learned a lot about herself during the filming of the show. “I learned not to judge. Some of these guys, when they came off the bus, I was like ‘Oh, they’re outta here!’ but then when I had my moment to talk to them, I was like “Oh my gosh! How did I even think that? They were the most unbelievable people, and touched me.’ And that’s when I got to see the inner person and see that they were that much more beautiful.”
She thinks her warm personality helped her give all the Joes a fair shot. “I don’t consider myself to be very shallow,” she explained. “Even when the hot guys came, I felt so bad I couldn’t even look at the hot guys, because I didn’t want my Joes to be thinking I was such a shallow individual. And I grew up being kind of geeky myself. I had boy-cut hair and glasses.”
Now, however, she was the Geek Guys’ Goddess, and I could suddenly feel myself falling under her spell, even though no cameras were rolling. “I do love being on TV. I won’t tell you that’s not fun,” she continued. “I enjoy all the memories that you make. I got to do such amazing things: go to Tahiti, live on a yacht, so that’s what I like. Everybody working around you was very weird, but I felt like such a princess. All these guys who were so sincere and so kind to me, I was so lucky. One day you can tell your kids, ‘Hey, look at Mommy.'”
Too sweet and adorable…Must tear myself away…or risk morphing into an Anna-smitten Average Joe myself.
Is There a Dr. 90210 In the House?
Whew! That was close. I needed to spend some quality time with an Above Average Joe, so I bellied up to the bar next to the impeccably bowtied Dr. Robert Rey, aka E!’s Dr. 90210, and his gorgeous wife Hayley. Having recently wrapped their latest season, they found they were actually kind of missing the camera crews that usually follow their every move. “It’s like the Stolkholm syndrome. You miss your captors,” grinned Dr. Rey. “One time we had the camera people babysit our kids, because it’s been two years now. We’ve become family, friends.”
I wondered if watching themselves on the show shed any light on facets of their personalities they may not have recognized before. “I thought I was a really patient and understanding wife, and when I see me yelling and complaining at him all the time, and I’m going ‘Oh my gosh, stop!” said Hayley, who thinks the show portrayed her fairly. “I’m yelling at myself on the screen, saying “Stop yelling at him all the time!’ I felt guilty. I apologized to him.’
“I find that I am too psychotically intense about medicine,” admitted the good doctor. “One time, on one of the episodes recently–and I am very, very ashamed of this–we find out that Haley’s lumps was benign. I go from being very sad that she has these lumps to totally switching my emotions. I go ‘Okay, time for me to go back to the surgical suite.’ It was almost like medicine first, then my family. But I’m a husband, then a father and a doctor third.”
While Hayley admits to religiously reading every weekly celebrity magazine in the bathtub, she does admit that sometimes the reality writers get the wrong idea about her husband. “Some people write that he’s not a good father. That really bothers me, because that’s not true. He’s the best father I’ve ever seen, and I think people draw from the show that because he works so hard, he’s a workaholic. It’s totally false. He’s faithful, he’s so nice to us, he’s obviously a good provider, and he loves his kids to death. I’m like ‘Oh, if they only knew what a wonderful father he is.'”
“They said our show is a great hit, it’s a lot of fun, it’s very sexy, but Dr. Rey gets a B- for fatherhood,” agreed Robert. “And I just said “Oh, man, that hurts. That hurts.’ I finally realize that when you criticize celebrities, it hurts. They actually read it and it hurts them. I thought they just kind of brushed it off. But it hurts them.”
On the flip side, there are some perks to being a TV personality that make up for the criticisms, Robert revealed. “I’m at the Rite-Aid and I’m looking for some film. Plastic surgeons are always dealing with film. And somebody taps me on the shoulder, and I did not know who. I’m thinking maybe I’m going to say hi to somebody who likes the show, and I’m getting ready to give my usual little speech, and she says ‘Listen, I’m a great fan of your show.’ I look up and it’s Diana Ross! And I go ‘Wait a second! I’m a fan of YOU! What do you mean you’re a fan of me?’ When I was little boy in Brazil, I used to watch her on TV, and now she’s a fan of my show!”
And I thought he was going to tell me it was Michael Jackson. Then again, it might have been…
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Skin Deep
Wow, the Reys were definitely deeper than your usual reality show stars. I needed a change of pace, so at the risk of the obvious jokes, I positioned myself between Lauren and Erika, two of the babes from Ashton Kutcher‘s reality hit Beauty and the Geek.
The girls were there to show their love for Average Joe, which initially inspired their series. “Ashton was a huge fan of Average Joe,” explained Lauren, “and that’s why he decided to do his own take and came up with Beauty and the Geek.” I asked the girls what they had learned from the show, which they grandly termed a “social experiment”–not bad for a couple of blonde babes the show called “academically challenged.”
Replied Lauren: “I wouldn’t say that I was a shallow person before, but it definitely opened my eyes up to think a lot more about what’s on the inside instead of the outside. A guy that has good looks only uses his good looks, and he’s very cocky and inconsiderate, and living in a house for that long with those guys, you learn about what’s inside and how much they care about you and how much it’s about YOU instead of them.”
“Exactly,” agreed Erika. “It’s like when you date a guy who’s very good-looking and they’re very into themselves, and they go to bed at night saying ‘I love me.’ These guys, they just loved us. They thought we were the best thing since sliced bread. These guys would check US out, appreciate US.”
I think I got that straight: the Geeks were far better than the usual hunks the Beauties date because they were so much more willing to lavish attention on the girls, right? Yeah, nothing shallow about that, I guess.
As for next season, “It would be really cool if they switched it around,” suggested Erika. “If they had geeky girls and cool guys.”
“I’d play a geek if I could be on that episode,” Lauren chimed in.
“Lauren, you are SO not geeky!” exclaimed Erika.
I wondered: What’s the geekiest thing the girls do?. “Go to coffee shops?” Lauren offered tentatively.
“That is NOT geeky!” countered Erika. “I was in the National Honor Society and on the dean’s list in college. That’s kinda geeky.”
“I’m trying to think!” exclaimed Lauren.
“She’s a slob,” offered Erika helpfully. “A total slob.”
“But geeks aren’t slobs. They’re usually neat freaks,” pouted Lauren. “I don’t know. I’m just definitely myself, from here on out. I don’t care what people think about me. Call me a geek, call me not a geek, I don’t care.”
And my friends, the sight of these two mega-babes arguing over who was the bigger geek was exactly the reality check I’d been waiting for.
