One Year of Reality and How It Nearly Killed Me: My Life Behind the Scenes (15 page)

I’ve had many embarrassing moments. My most embarrassing was in sixth grade when I broke the string off my cello at a talent contest and decided to sing a solo with no preparation. It wasn’t until I had finished the first verse of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that I realized it was a bad idea.

Now, the second most embarrassing thing in my life was about to happen…

I met my new hairdresser, J.C., who was a friend of Kelly’s, and we had the usual beautician conversation about what I’d been doing (without giving away any details of where I had been), what I wanted to do with my hair, and any entertainment gossip we could come up with. When she started to wash my hair, my stomach was really bothering me. I kind of ignored it, figuring that I’d forget about it once I finished getting my hair done. As J.C. started putting color into my hair, a truck hit me. The room started to spin, not all the way around, but fast and short half spins, and I really needed to go to the bathroom. I hit the bathroom, and as soon as I came out, I told J.C. to get the color out of my hair because I needed to go to the hospital. Now, how I knew that is beyond me; it just came out of my mouth. “Do you want me to call 911?” asked J.C.

“No,” I said. “Call my friend, Rhonda.”

Now Rhonda is one of those friends that you want to have around on momentous occasions. Every woman thinks that they are Lucy and their best friend is Ethel. Well, that’s how I think of Rhonda. When my father died, she paid for my airline ticket home.
When she wanted to wish her friend a happy birthday, we stood alongside a hill adjacent to the freeway early one morning and she rolled out a huge, very long HAPPY BIRTHDAY! sign along the hill. Everyone driving on the Hollywood Freeway and around his apartment complex could see it. So it made sense that she was the one I chose to take me to the hospital. I had become the center of attention at a salon I had never been to before, among people I had never met until that day. I went into the back and rested while J.C. called Rhonda, who was in Hollywood. It took about a half hour, but she finally showed up, and I managed to pour myself into her car.

In typical Lucy/Ethel fashion, we drove around haphazardly, looking for an emergency room. Now there was an emergency room only nineteen blocks or so away, but we didn’t even consider it. We decided to go to the emergency room I had frequented in the past. It was twenty minutes away, but at least they might have a file on me already. So we went to the ER in Marina Del Rey. I was feeling really awful, something I had never experienced before. It was like having the flu and feeling pregnant all at once. My guts felt like they were in my lungs, and I was achy, dizzy, and incoherent.

We finally got to the emergency room and after waiting what seemed like hours, I finally went into
the admitting room to give them my info. Rhonda was with me. I told them that I must’ve gotten something from overseas, but couldn’t say where I’d been, as I had signed a confidentiality agreement. This wasn’t my brightest moment in the world. I should’ve just told them, but I was worried about that stupid agreement.

They took my temperature, and it was 103. I remember the admitting lady saying, “We need to get you a bed!” Well, we went back out into the waiting room, but there weren’t any couches there where I could rest. I tried to sit, but my head needed to be on the floor. Instead of lying down in the middle of the waiting room floor, I went out to Rhonda’s car and stretched myself across the seats. Since I’m longer than most cars, I left the driver door open and my legs dangled outside of the car.

I don’t know how long I was there, but I was told later it was about four hours. Rhonda apparently would come and check on me from time to time, and then go into the waiting room and tell anyone who’d listen that I had been to a foreign country and could be spreading something to everyone right now if they didn’t take me inside. Well, finally a couple of guys came to get me with a stretcher. My temperature was high, and something
was wrong with my blood (either too many or too few white cells, I can’t remember which). They put me on Cippro and gave me some other stuff too. Rhonda was there with me the whole time, and she called my mom. “Hello, Mrs. Wolff?” she said. “This is Rhonda, Deb’s friend. Everything’s okay, but…” and she proceeded to tell my mom everything that had happened. Rhonda also spoke to Philip, and I remember him saying not to worry about anything, that everything would be okay. I took that to mean that someone would take over for me until I got better. The doctor came in and told me that I had something about ten times worse than Montezuma’s Revenge, but that the antibiotics and lots of rest would probably cure it. I had gotten up a few times to go to the bathroom, but I finally became fully conscious at about midnight. The nurse asked me if I wanted to stay overnight, and I told her that I’d prefer to go home. Rhonda helped me get dressed. Oddly enough, one of my shoes was missing. They had put all of my clothes and one shoe underneath the gurney where I’d been laying all day. So we looked around the whole emergency room for the other shoe. Finally I gave up and went barefoot back to Rhonda’s car and home to my bed—a bed that I’d hardly slept in since moving to the apartment a couple of months ago.

Even though my sickness kept me from going in to the office, I started working again the next day. While lying on the floor of my bathroom (so that I could be close to the toilet), I was on the phone with travel agents and producers about potential travel plans for the contestants. Things were going rather smoothly at last—even for a first year show,
Amazing Race
had been a bit of a mess—but I still had to get to the end of the race, which would be in New York.

I had only been out of the hospital for three days when I got on a plane to New York. I cannot tell you how excruciating that flight was. Since I was nauseous, dizzy, and ill before takeoff, I couldn’t imagine what the flight itself would be like. And I absolutely hate going to the bathroom on a plane. So I did whatever I could to keep myself—and my bowels—together so that I wouldn’t get sick or need to use the restroom on the plane. Plus, I wasn’t eating anything because it would go right through me, and I wasn’t about to hang out in the airline bathroom for the entire flight.

A bit green, but grateful, I made it to my hotel room in New York. It was just like the beginning of the race. We had the New York staff prepping, I was on the phone trying to get travel info, staff
started arriving and getting ready for the end. We weren’t prepping for a wrap party, but the finale, the final run to the finish line for the contestants. It wasn’t exactly fun to have people come in and out of my room (since it was the production office), as I ran back and forth from the bathroom to the bedroom, but at least I could do most of my work from bed with the phone and the computer. Finally, after a day or so, I started feeling better and had something to eat. It was a momentous occasion, because when I had to go to the bathroom afterwards, it was actually a good experience. I literally pooped out my entire colon, or at least that was what it felt like. And to be even grosser, it was one long piece that came out that literally circled the bowl. I had never seen that in my life. To top it off, it happened twice. Once I eliminated everything, I started feeling a lot better and could participate in full form. It seemed that the big bad bug had left me.

I also got my out date.

My out date was simply the last day I would be working on the show, which was essentially two weeks after I returned from New York and wrapped up some of the loose ends as best I could. So now I knew when I would need another job. I kept this on
the back burner because I had more present problems to deal with.

One of my crews were stuck at immigration in Canada.

One of the race’s last stops before New York was Alaska. All the crews and contestants left had made it there, and then they would need to get on planes to New York. There were several different ways to get to New York from Alaska. One of them was Alaska to Canada to New York. It never occurred to me that we would have a problem if a crew came through Canada. The South African crew, which had followed a team of contestants, was stuck in Vancouver, and they weren’t being allowed back into the States. Canada was not on the lists of countries for the race, so I hadn’t applied for visas for everyone. I still kick myself for not having considered this turn of events, since I had tried to make sure we were covered for any “transition” countries. Canada had never entered my mind. Agh!

But that wasn’t even the problem.

I was fortunate to have worked with Canadian Immigration in the past on many other studio shows, so I’d gotten to know the immigration person
in Vancouver personally. I gave her a call to see what the scoop was, and what I could do. I tried to explain my situation, and even sent off a quick letter explaining that I had a crew that was transitioning to New York and I needed their equipment to be returned, if nothing else.

But Canada was ultimately not the problem, it was the U.S. Another group of filmmakers had gone through the border a month before and done something incredibly illegal, though no one could tell me what it was, and the U.S. border patrol was leery of foreigners with American equipment returning to the country regardless of whether or not they had visas. Though the Canadian immigration officer I knew was receptive, the U.S. customs people literally refused to take my calls. I tried calling all sorts of customs phone numbers that I had accrued over the years to see if there were any strings I could pull. There weren’t. They only thing the crew could do now was get on a plane and go back to Africa with the equipment.

Losing the crew was not so bad in terms of the contestants. The crews couldn’t film them on the plane, so they’d just be sitting there. So there would be no loss of footage. But it was still a loss. The South African crew was one of our best, and I knew Bert
liked them and that he hated to lose any crews. Plus, they had our gear, and we would have to have it shipped back from Africa. And I would have to let the producers know that we’d lost the crew so that they could compensate for that loss. So I gave one of the producers, who I called “friendly fire,” the information about the crew and started researching how the contestants would be returning to New York.

The night before the contestants were going to arrive in New York, I was told that the crews were going to rehearse the end of the show so that they’d have the best camera positions when the contestants came off the train and raced to the finish line. And they were going to do this right before the contestants arrived. So I got information from the airline the night before and passed it along. Early that morning, when the crews were already on their way to rehearse, I received firmer information on which flight the contestants were arriving on and double-checked the times. According to the airline, everything was on time.

But that wasn’t true.

As the crews were setting up to rehearse the ending, the contestants had already landed and were on their way... The crews had to literally dive out of sight
so that the contestants wouldn’t see them and figure out they were in the right place and doing the right thing. No time for rehearsal, plenty of time for panicking. It was a race to the end, not only for the contestants, but for the crew.

The race was finally over.

I stayed in New York for a couple of more days to organize flights for the crews and contestants and settle up any final cash reimbursements that I needed to hand out. While I didn’t relax and take time out to “smell the roses,” I felt good because I could finally wind down after being amped up for a month. I couldn’t wait to get home, finish this job, and move on to whatever was next.

Which didn’t take long.

I returned to the production office with the rest of the staff forty pounds lighter and very happy to be back. I had time to actually send out a couple of resumes, and within a week of returning, I had an interview and a job. Not only was it a new job, but it came with better pay, a better title, and more responsibility. But there was a catch. The new job wanted me to start two days prior to my out date. I told Terry about my new job and asked if I could leave a couple
of days early. He gave me permission, but I also told him that I would continue to wrap things like credit card bills and the reconciling of travel costs on my off time (read: nights and weekends). Great, no problem.

But there would be trouble, and I sort of knew it.

When we were working on
Wild Things
, anyone who finished their job and went on to another one was persona non grata to Bert. Even though their job had ended, if he wanted them back and they weren’t available, he would hold it against them. This was something I had never experienced before. Since production is freelance, you try and get your people whenever you start up a new project, but if someone’s already working, you just move on down the list. But Bert held grudges; it was as if he expected his staff to sit around and not work until he called them. It was a weird jealousy thing. When his first production manager quit
Wild Things
, he enforced her contract and made her finish the season regardless of the fact that he didn’t like her or want to deal with her. Leaving was never amicable. But my departure seemed to be going off without a hitch. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.

At least not until after I left.

My last day was a Tuesday, and I was cleaning out my desk and organizing papers and folders on my computer, when Bert came into my office. Philip was not in at the time, so it was just the two of us. I was a little scared to talk to him, not having spoken to him since I yelled at him over the phone, so I wasn’t sure what was going down. But he was in good spirits, and the conversation was wonderful. We talked about how challenging the show was, how happy we were to have made it through the first season, and how the next season would be even better. He was very upbeat. I thanked him for the opportunity, and said that he could call me again when he knew the next start date, and that I was looking forward to a few days off. He thanked me and left. To me, it sounded like a nice “farewell and see you later” conversation, and I appreciated his kind words. I didn’t know he wasn’t aware I was leaving, let alone going on to another show.