10/10

Just a year ago yesterday, Jeanne and I landed at the Hollywood Burbank airport to embark upon our reality television competition journey on Crime Scene Kitchen. And as we all know, we bombed terrifically in the fourth round because we didn’t know how to make a croquembouche. (But over the course of the last year, I have learned to spell croquembouche without relying on Google. It’s a shame that Wordle doesn’t offer 12 letter word games because croquembouche would just be my start every single time out of principle.)

So when yesterday Jeanne asked me to come over and help her lay down her new living room rug, I thought the glamour of the previous year had definitely evaporated. And then I got her vacuum out of the hall closet and discovered the very same Kirby vacuum that she purchased when I was in the fourth grade, She swears this to be the greatest vacuum ever created, even though the headlight on the unit stopped working sometime in the late 1990s. Also, it weights at least 100 pounds and requires a 30 step bag replacement process. (Honestly, I’m astounded you can even find replacement bags for that thing in 2022.)

And this is precisely why our reality television experience didn’t catapult us to national fame. You just can’t be famous but also swear by a 1980s vacuum cleaner with a non-working headlight. It’s like oil and water. Unless you are granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. Then that might work.

There was a minute there - mainly in the midst of hanging out with Joel McHale and finding him just as funny and endearing as on television - where we thought perhaps the whole experience would change us and our lives so much that all the annoying things about entrepreneurship would just evaporate over our weeks in southern California. Could you imagine if our month long LA life somehow made the 90 hour work weeks during the holidays less needed - or needed but done by someone else? It sounded appealing at the time, but just seems ridiculous in retrospect.

On the three plane trips it took to arrive in Burbank, we discussed that whatever happened during filming (which, really, could have been anything…we had no idea what to expect), we would just be ourselves. It was important to us that we be the same on the show as we are every day in our stores. And short of vacuuming the set with a dinosaur of Kirby system, we really were. Which is precisely why we didn’t know what a croquembouche was or how to interact with each other in any other way than we have since 1975 (pre-vacuum, for those of you keeping track).

So one year out, I give a solid 10/10 for the experience. And 10/10 for nothing really changing when we got home, but for Jeanne developing legions of fans who swooned over her Jeanne-esque antics. And a solid win for being the one person in any room that knows what a 14-inch tower of homemade cream puffs held together with homemade caramel sauce looks like.