That time I tried out for ‘America’s Next Top Model’

She was taken in by cultists. Hit on by a guy while wearing a Jabba The Hutt costume in Las Vegas. And here, in this excerpt from "A Field Guide To Awkward Silences," tried out for "America's Top Model.'' 

Growing up, you figure out pretty quickly which of your friends is the person who doesn’t mind looking like an idiot, and that was me, hands down. I was the one going over to strangers and asking if the mothership had landed. I was the one standing in an airport with a giant foam cow hat on my head, accordion open, ready to greet friends as they landed, and not even because I’d lost a bet.

What was a field in which a willingness to look foolish might come in handy? Of course! Reality television.

And there are always two ways of making it on the air: to be spectacular, and to be spectacularly bad. The second group was more fun to watch anyway. Why be Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood when you could be short, sweatshirted William Hung, wrangling his painfully earnest way through “She Bangs!” or Leonid the Magnificent, dropping his equipment as the big red X’s buzzed above him? Sure, on one path lay Kelly’s international fame, but on the other lay William’s Christmas album, Hung for the Holidays.

Now that was what I called a career trajectory.

And that was going to be my way in. I was going to seek failure out — on the national stage, with a glowing neon X attached. The plan was simple. I just had to become dramatically, unquestionably, horrifically bad at something. I had to get myself in front of the judges and flop like no one they’d seen before.

There was an art, as I quickly learned, to flopping. You can’t just be bad. Half the art is knowing how to go too far. You must keep a straight face. If you’re auditioning, you must sing badly, but feelingly. You must put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, read comedy as tragedy and tragedy as comedy. Overact, overgesture, pause for no reason midsentence and open and close your mouth like a bewildered carp. You must, in a word, turn in a whole performance.

“Any talents?” the student directors asked in college.

“I have heart!” I wrote. “And kidneys!”

Gradually, I broadened my scope. I auditioned for the Women in Science Players Ensemble. It was the first audition I’d seen listed that was on campus but involved no one I could conceivably ever have met. For my monologue, I recited Yoda’s death scene from Return of the Jedi in its entirety, doing all the voices.

“Lu-uke,” I croaked. “There is another s— ky— wa—kk-errr.”

When it was over, they looked at me.

“What possessed you to choose this as your monologue?”

“Star Wars is science,” I said.

It was a start. I was ready to move on to bigger pastures. That summer, I signed up to audition for America’s Next Top Model.

In order to appear on America’s Next Top Model, you have to fill out a 13-page form detailing such things as “Have you ever been so angry you threw something?” (“My back out, one time,” I ventured.) “What would bother you most about living in a house with nine to thirteen other people?” (“Not knowing more specifically the number of people in the house.”) “What in the past do you regret?” (“The Holocaust.”)

The audition itself was brief, but the afternoon entailed a lot of waiting around in heels. I stood there smiling amiably and murmuring that everyone “looked like a model,” which seemed safe. When you got in front of the judges you had to walk your model walk, which, since I was in heels, was difficult. In heels, I always look like something that is walking on land for the first time — less Ariel than some kind of recently evolved amphibian. I teetered boldly from one end of the designated walk space to the other, trying to be Fierce, like Tyra said.

I handed them my photos. They asked us to tell a video camera the craziest thing we’d ever done to win a contest. I told them about the time I had crashed a dog show and run the agility course myself. “It wasn’t really about winning the contest,” I admitted, “but it certainly seemed to unnerve the other dogs.”

They seemed pleased by the story, but months passed, and I heard only silence.

I was getting pretty good at this whole rejection thing.

At the America's Got Talent audition, I sang a few snippets of Usher. Old men plied their banjos, ineptly. A girl and her entire family waited in front of me, humming “Grenade” by Bruno Mars.

When I got into the audition room, I gave it my worst. I sang. I twitched. I shouted.

I didn’t stand a chance.

As I flailed and gyrated — I caught the woman judge looking at me. We made eye contact, and I could tell she knew.

So that was what actual rejection felt like. My worst wasn’t bad enough.

I’d been overlooking one thing, I realized. The best bad movies aren’t the ones that try to be bad. They’re the ones that try to be good. If I really wanted to fail spectacularly, I should have been trying to succeed. For the most spectacular rejections of all, you have to believe. You have to go out there and give the performance of your life.

Only then does the ax really fall.

Failing, it turns out, is easy. It will come and find you whether you seek it out or not, like women who want to talk to you on long airplane flights. We’re terrified of commitment the way our ancestors used to be terrified of mammoths. Without true commitment, you never get to know if you would have made it or not.

So why not take the leap? We’re all weird. We’re all awkward. We’re all bound to fail from time to time. It’s in our DNA as human beings …  along with a certain innate wariness of mammoths.

Adapted from A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri. Published by arrangement with New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Alexandra Petri.