Hey Paula: Episode 3

July 09, 2007

One Sunday morning in the late 80s, I was having Sunday brunch with my then-roommates Scott and Alan and our friend Judy at the always reliable Art’s Deli in Studio City. About halfway through our meal, Paula Abdul came in with a friend and sat just a few booths away from us. Paula was hot hot hot at the time and as a cruise ship dancer on holiday, I was in in into her. ‘So what do we do?’ We asked ourselves. ‘Do we engage her? We know one of her dancers, Denise, so maybe that’s our in.’

Reaching out to a celebrity in public -- even one you may have met before or interviewed -- is always a dicey proposition. It can go great and leave you feeling high all day, or it can go disastrously and leave you feeling bad all week. A few years back, I saw Melissa Etheridge and her family at the Good Neighbor diner in Studio City. I had recently interviewed her for The Advocate and been to her home, so I thought a, ‘Hi. How ya doin?’ would be in order. She wasn’t mean or anything, but she was short and didn’t remember me at all. I felt like dick all week long. The moral of the story is: leave ‘em alone. The older I get, the more I think the emotional risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to chatting up a star in public.

But we were younger back in the Art’s Deli days. My friend Alan had our server send her a Mimosa, “compliments of Denise’s friends at the booth by the window.” I remember feeling extremely embarrassed about this, but Paula gave us a gracious wave and a smile and that was the end of it. Not a huge pay off, or a huge disaster. We broke even.

I’m opening this blog with a pleasant Paula memory because Episode 3 of “Hey Paula” is really rough going. It opens with a ‘Paula in Crisis’ meeting between Paula and her team, where they try to come up with a plan for managing the bad press that came out of those delirious American Idol satellite interviews from Episode 2. This scene, complete with Paula’s plea of, “I’m being treated like a dog shit. That’s what I live with every single day,” is so hard to watch that I try to focus on superficial things, like the fact that I really like the style of Paula’s house. It may be my favorite famous-person-reality-show house out there.

There’s also some guitar strumming going on the soundtrack, which seems like the composer is trying in vain to supply some emotion—pathos, perhaps—that is totally missing from the scene as is. What we’re witnessing is too dark and complicated to be lightened up with a few strums and a nice major chord progression… but it was a nice try.

“It’s not okay,” Paula blubbers at one point. “Someone needs to help me.” Have you noticed that Paula says, “It’s not okay,” whenever a situation doesn’t meet with her satisfaction? Maybe that could have been the name of the show: Paula Abdul: Not Okay.

Paula’s certainly not okay in this opening war room strategy session. She’s in tears and completely traumatized, understandably so. But she’s also quick to jump down poor Jeff the publicist’s throat when he says, “Okay,” in the wrong context. I can imagine being in that room and having something I wanted to contribute, but being afraid to say it for fear that that Paula wouldn’t take it well, and jump down my throat. Non-famous people often look at the antics of famous people and wonder how the friends could look on and do nothing, like, “Why didn’t someone tell Britney to wear underwear and not shave her head?” “Why didn’t someone tell Paris not to get in the car?”

The next time I hear someone question the fortitude of the star-adjacent, I will show them this scene. I totally get now why someone would just shut down and keep their mouth shut.

Paula got a lot of bad press after the satellite tour, so it’s understandable that she’s upset, but she doesn’t seem to want to take any responsibility for her part in the debacle. It’s not like we as TV viewers got together and thought it would be funny to make up a story about how Paula seemed wasted on TV. We thought that because Paula seemed wasted on TV. Paula wants us not to believe our eyes.

“What Paula needs to do is get out there an honor her commitments,” Jeff the publicist tells the camera. It’s the first line of the show where I think, ‘Right on!’ Then Jeff has a tough love moment with Paula. “You have to do everything that you’re scheduled to do.” Right on, again.

Paula agrees even though the two big items on her agenda are incredibly demanding both physically and emotionally. She has to go to a gifting suite and get a bunch of free stuff given to her. I’m drained just thinking about that. And then she has to go to Las Vegas to get a Woman of the Year award. That’s some rough shit. In fact, I’m glad I’m a man so I’ll never have to go through that.

Of course, the events themselves aren’t what Paula’s nervous about—it’s the press that’s going to be covering them. Paula doesn’t want to be asked about her erratic TV appearances but you can’t just grab the swag bags and the award and run. You have to make nice and Paula’s not ready to make nice.

The swag suite comes first. In writing about “Hey Paula”, I struggle weekly with how forthcoming I can be in my assessments. Sometimes I feel like I’m being too hard on Paula, but I feel like the gloves can come off with the gifting suite scene.

Paula, you cannot expect to breeze through a gifting suite, haggle over a dress that you’ve been told is on hold—“There’s no hold on it because there’s no tag on it”—walk out with bagfuls of free stuff for you and your posse, bum a few bucks off your friend Daniel to pay the valet because you never carry money, and ask us to feel sorry for you. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

This swag suite scene is telling to me because I don’t think there’s any way a reasonable person could watch this and think more of Paula afterwards. Yet they kept it in anyway. Is that all the footage they had? Or is the other stuff worse? I guess I’ll have to wait for the commentary track on the DVD.

“Everyone’s taking pictures and she’s having a great time,” Jeff the publicist says at the gifting suite. He’s clearly relieved, but I can remember my mom saying the same thing about me when I went to a birthday party that I didn’t want to go to…when I was 6.

Before we head off to Vegas for the big award ceremony, I want to compliment Paula on the sit-down interview segments that are interspersed throughout the episodes. She comes off better here than anywhere else in the show. She was having a good day, and the cameras were there to catch it, although I do have one small quibble. When recapping the Woman of the Year ceremony, Paula says, “I can’t enjoy it because I’m right in the middle of a big old crap sandwich.” I feel like this line was fed to her. I just don’t think Paula would use the expression “crap sandwich.” It’s too self-effacing. Besides, she’s a lady.

Then it’s off to Vegas. Before going to the awards ceremony, Paula gets on the phone with some journalist and rips him or her a new asshole for what he or she wants to print or has already printed, I’m not sure which. I was a bit confused by the scene but I do know one thing; I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that call.

Paula’s doing everything she can to avoid the press at the ceremony—staying in the make-up chair forever, spraying perfume on innocent hotel guests. When she finally does make it to the press line and gets a question about her recent travails, she turns it into a chance to complain about having to sit next to Simon Cowell on American Idol and put up with his shenanigans.

The ironic thing is that Simon Cowell and his shenanigans are the best things Paula’s got going now. ‘Simon’s a pain in my ass’ is her go-to riff in any interaction with the press and she uses it again and again and again. It’s like a life ring that she holds onto for dear life. She should send Simon a muffin basket or something…daily. He’s given her a story to tell that America seems interested in and it doesn’t involve her own craziness.

When asked about her recent controversy, Paula says she doesn’t pay it much attention because, “I’m too busy working. I’m too busy creating. I’m too busy multitasking.” What I want to know is, and I mean this sincerely: what is she creating? Where does she get her creative fulfillment these days, because we don’t really see it on Hey Paula. She worked on the Bratz costumes and her jewelry line, which is creative I suppose, but is she recording at all or choreographing anymore? I love watching artists do their thing, so I would love to see more of Paula’s creative life.

After being carried up some stairs by Jeff the Publicist, Paula receives her Woman of the Year Award. I’m truly impressed that her Idol cohorts-- Simon, Ryan, and Randy-- have all show up to present it to her. I wonder if they were slated to do that all along, or if it’s something Team Idol made happen to help keep a lid on all of Paula’s bad press. Either way, it said a lot that they all hopped a plane to be there. “There are few people who have achieved what you have over the years,” Simon says to her. “You supply the heart to our show, Paula.”

Both of these things are true and because they’re coming from the bullshit-averse Simon, we, the audience, are able to take them in and appreciate them. Robert Goulet and Mary Wilson also appreciate them, although it’s unclear whether they attended the ceremony to support Paula, or if they just happened to be playing slots nearby and were willing to appear on camera.

“Tonight was amazing,” Paula says afterwards. “I’m exhausted and bouncing off the walls.” There’s a shock. If Hey Paula viewers drank a shot after every time she said she was exhausted, they’d be as drunk as Paula appeared to be but wasn’t on all those morning shows.

Episode 3 wraps up with a little slapstick when Kiley the stylist tries to pull of out Paula’s driveway in Paula’s massive SUV. Paula’s heading off to a Tonight Show appearance but she may not actually make it because Kiley can’t seem to back the car out. Oh no.

I have a theory about this scene. I think Kiley did the bad driving shtick on purpose. I think she knew the episode was going to need some comic relief and she had just watched Clueless the night before. So now she’s going to pull a ‘Cher on the Freeway’ stunt in the hopes that viewers will forget all the unseemly stuff that came before. It didn’t work, but it was worth a try.

Paula wraps up the episode feeling proud that she got thought it all. “I deserve some stiff martinis,” she says. “Just kidding.” I think who ever fed her the crap sandwich line earlier came up with this one as well but they were tired…so it’s not as clever as ‘crap sandwich’ but, just like Kiley’s bad driving, it was worth a try.