“I told you not to read the comments”
by Donna Brown
The words of the sage Noel Gallagher tell us “I need to be myself / I can’t be no one else,” which is fine if you’re your usual goofball self with your def posse. However, as I found out all too vividly, appearing on national television in one’s natural state leaves one open to all sorts of conjecture about who you really are.
I somehow managed to sneak onto the Sony lot and win $45,600 on “Jeopardy!,” the most American of all institutions overseen by a Canadian. People who know me saw Regular Donna on TV: spacey, high-voiced, what a dude in London called a “cheeky face.” America saw tons of other stuff.
On the date my first episode aired, December 22, I was at my work desk, looking at pictures of William Holden between calls, as is my wont. Around 1130am PST, I remembered with a start that TODAY WAS THE DAY! I could finally speak openly about my journey to California: the relatively stress-free time spent bonding with my mom and my brother Eric, both game-show veterans, about the closeness of our little group of contestants, how we bonded during a day of paperwork, dry runs, buzzer talk, and Charles van Doren; how our shared experience made it almost bittersweet when we stood on our podiums in tiny trios to battle it out. It was all a blur, magically foggy like the smoggy skies of Los Angeles, a city whose appeal I finally understood. I naïvely took to Twitter to “join the conversation’, as they say.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS A TOTAL DISGRACE.
Hey, that rhymes!
Oh-ok, I see how it is.
At first I took it in stride. I even responded to a few of the harsher tweets. But as the day wore on, and the episode snaked out across America, the sheer volume of hot takes became wearying. I tried to concentrate on the positive tweets, and I tried to stop thinking about the morass. But I couldn’t help it!
Much like the vile racial slur that stained Countee Cullen’s visit to Baltimore in his poem “Incident,” “Who else wants to punch Donna in the face?” colored my engagement with social mediums. I was already the mistress of self-deprecating humor, but it’s much different when Marlon Rando on Twitter shows up to deprecate you.
The sun set; my friends and my brother Mike and my husband Josh gathered to support me both in the half-hour of my triumph ($45,600! Whaaat) and in the half-hour of my defeat ($2,000! Whaaat). Christmas, New Year’s Day, and my fifteen minutes came and went. My friends and brothers spread out en masse over the Internet to defend me from creeps. I realized that I had a support system deeper and wider than I’d ever thought. I teared up, but this time I cried Hallmark Channel tears of gratitude, love, and camaraderie. The hot takes grew lukewarm and faded away, becoming sub-David Foster Wallace footnotes to my Bildungsroman. I poked around on the computer, this time to shop for tchotchkes upon which I could spend my after-taxes lucre.
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