Stars of the Silver Screen

4.2.2022

Remember the show Fear Factor? I do. And I was a pretty big fan of it, so when my dad took a handyman jack handle to the side of his head and needed surgery in LA, I visited. Somewhere between the hospital and the hotel, I saw a flyer for Fear Factor auditions. I went, and failed, and never got the chance to be on TV and have a pile of tarantulas crawl on my face. But then Regina got a call from a local video production company. They had seen her website for Crown H Cattle Company and, because it's awesome, liked the content and wanted to come over to film a commercial for a local hospital.

Of course, I mostly forgot about the hubbub until I came in from work last fall and found three guys with cameras hanging out in front of the house.  I changed into my cleanest dirty shirt, added a vest I got for ordering a lot of cattle dewormer, and started catching horses.  While Regina and Grady have, probably, the coolest horses, Dylan and I have the prettiest.  That led to a lot of filming Dylan and Dad synchronized horse mounting, Drill-Team style turns, and tandem giddy ups.  The four of us pushed our Beltie cattle into an alfalfa field and back out, and then did it again.  They'd often direct me to, "Look at Dylan like I'm proud of her."  I didn't know how to take that.  I've heard of actors often saying that they don't know what to do with their hands when they are acting.  I didn't have that problem because I was holding reins, I just didn't know what to do with my face.  Like I'm proud?  Do I cry?  Smile with teeth?  Stoic cowboy gaze?  I settled on tight-lipped grimace and thus made hours and hours of footage completely unusable.

I finally gave them some good footage when my horse decided, for no apparent reason, to buck.  I rode it out like I was Billy Etbauer at the NFR Finals.  "Did you get that?" I panted, once Kid stopped bucking.  "Nope, sorry," the camera guy said.

I'd forgotten about the commercial until five months later, at one of Dylan's basketball games, some friends told us they'd seen us on TV.  Shortly after, we started getting the phone calls.  "You're on TV!" friends would yell.  Actually, the conversations usually began with, "I saw your horse on TV!" or, "I didn't recognize you, but I recognized your horse!"  That's when you know you really live in the country, when people can pick out your horse from a 30 second commercial.  We only have internet TV, so we haven't really seen the ad except for on our phones.  We've never been surprised with our own faces on TV while we ate our dinner on the couch.  We could have been watching some schmuck get buried in pythons on Fear Factor and suddenly our ad would come on, my face in a weird proud smile, Dylan's horse stealing the show.