You know those crazy nights where suddenly your friend Bethwhoknowseveryone calls, and the next thing you know you find yourself in a trendy Meatpacking District hotel room, drinking wine with eight women and Robin Givens, and trying not to look at the cameras?

You never feel quite so much like a
Cabbage Patch Kid as when you’re standing next to a size 0 celebrity
with cheekbones that could slice beef.

And the producers ply you with warm wine and brie and instruct the eight of you to dish about motherhood, and actually, you get to really like all the other women there with you as if this weren’t totally staged and bizarre? And then two days later you find yourself heading into the Montel show studios for a live taping to see just what scary things the producers did with your video?

Well, it’s no Tyra Banks Show

And then you’re in the green room (which is not green) eating some bad turkey sandwiches and run into mom entrepreneur Nina Restieri of MomAgenda who you’ve always really dug and is coincidentally on the show? And then you’re headed towards the audience when suddenly a producer snatches you away from your friends, crams a microphone pack down the back of your leggings and and tells you Montel might throw you a question and you freak that maybe this is all a set up and they’re going to hit you with a paternity test or something?

And then you sit back down to watch the taping in the front row center (with almost no makeup on because you weren’t expecting this), and then the very edited video of you and your new friends comes on and your one line is about Elmo Sex, in which you plop the kids down in front of Elmo, race into the bedroom for 15 minutes, then get the 2 minute warning when the theme music comes on?

No Elmo, it’s we who love YOU.

Nina missed her 15 minutes of trashy TV fame –
but gets 15 minutes of trashy blog fame instead

And then Montel actually does throw you a question and you sound like a total idiot because you’re caught off guard and aren’t about to divulge your family issues on a talk show anyway? And then the rest of the show downward spirals into boring stories featuring women willing to cry on stage because it’s more interesting to keep the trainwreck moms on and cut out the inspiring success stories of Nina and Elena?

And then you’re totally exhausted from smiling for three hours straight and go home and fall asleep during the first commercial break of Lost?

Yeah, it’s weird when that happens.

You know you’ve made it when…

(You can catch my disastrous TV appearance mid-March or so if you don’t have anything better to do like maybe wash your hair or sort pennies.)

—-

Other cool people doing way cooler things, a.k.a. linkie love:

-Bobbie Sue who writes Blooming Yaya needs help with research about parentbloggers of preschool aged kids – help her out and take her survey?
-Blog buddy Devra is the featured expert on PBS Parents this month
–Tony had the line of the night at NYC blogger drinks this week with “Scrappy Doo was the Yoko Ono of Saturday Morning cartoons.”
–The Graco Blog gave my Sanctimommy post a nice nod (along with some other good ones) in their monthly fave blog post thingie. Supposedly it comes with a little prize and I’m hoping that it’s a free infant car seat and a time machine so I can go back and use it.
–Vanessa Van Petten has a interesting blog about parenting advice from the teen POV (even though she’s now herself an old and decrepit 22) and is doing a little best mom blog contest and resource guide: You can even enter your own.

*Last and totally not least: Guy Kawasaki who is like the king of all things online (and was super nice when I met him for about 3 seconds at BlogHer) has come out with a very clean and fabulous mom blog aggregator at Alltop. It even lists the last five posts from each blogger so it’s easy to just click around and find fun things to read. Looooove that there is a famous techy sort who actually sees the value in what we do. Bookmarking, stat.