MTV SIGNS OFF

A remembrance of my stint as a prime-time VJ

I recently read that MTV International is closing most of its music channels and the one remaining one will switch to reality TV only. I texted my friend and fellow former MTV alum, Tabitha Soren, “We’ve gone the way of the buggywhip.” But I had fun recklessly driving the carriage back in my salad days.

I wanted my MTV.

There’s an old story that a mighty king gathered together the wisest men in the world and asked them to come up with a statement that would always be true. The greybeards put their heads together and came up with the sentence “This too shall pass.”

George Harrison’s first record after the breakup of the Beatles was a triple album called “All Things Must Pass.” The Beatles didn’t last forever and neither, despite his best efforts, did George’s solo debut.

My journey to temporary fame in a now-moribund medium began in my mid-twenties, when I was a recreational therapist at a nursing home. My job was to perk up the old folks: organize art classes, call bingo games, and host the Frank Sinatra Appreciation Club. I loved my job, and the confidence I felt from being a successful recreational therapist gave me the bravery to take the leap and send in an unsolicited audition tape to MTV.

My Uncle Jimmy was an orchestra conductor in Las Vegas. He told me the Jimmy Duffy Orchestra was the greatest party band in the world, and I’m sure he wouldn’t lie to me. Uncle Jimmy once said, “You know, kid, I didn’t get into this show business racket for fame or fortune. And so far, it’s worked out.” I figured I could do at least as well as Uncle Jimmy, so I made a cheeseball videotape of me goofing around and sent it to MTV.

To everyone’s surprise, including mine, I landed a coveted job as an MTV VJ. It was the dawn of the grunge era, and the viewers of the channel were mainly zit-spangled teenage boys rebelling in flannel and musty thrift-shop sweaters. My esteemed colleagues were just out of college; I was a grown woman who’d had a successful career as a healthcare professional. And now I’d gone from documenting protocols for the care of the elderly to dressing in miniskirts and conducting interviews backstage at U2 concerts. I loved it, but I think one of the reasons I did so well was that I didn’t have cable, so videos were new to me even though they’d been around for ten years.

From left: Everlast, Kennedy, Guy Oseary, yours truly

It turned out that working with Alzheimer’s patients in the nursing home was great preparation for MTV. I learned to command the eyeballs of people with a two-second attention span, and my elocution had to be crystal clear so the message got across. I used to have a bad nervous stammer, but I overcame that in the nursing home—I had to be completely uninhibited because I had to get a reaction from the residents. And, of course, I learned to work in a business full of excrement.

I’d open up every show with a cheeky remark, like “MTV—we play the classics because you fear the unfamiliar.” I got in a lot of trouble for saying things like, “Every once in a while a singer comes along with an amazing voice, whose talent has been poured into making an incredible song, and the video which captures that performance approaches the level of art. But until that happens, here’s Mariah Carey.” I was earning money undiluted by labor.

I look back on my time at MTV fondly. I’m still friends with all of the people I used to work with. But as Seneca observes, “everything that comes to us from chance is unstable, and the higher it rises, the more liable it is to fall.” Or, as the poet Ludwig Jacobowski said about the days of our youth, “Don’t cry because it’s over! Smile because they have been!”