You may or may not know that in addition to career highlights including being interviewed by Khloe Kardashian on the TODAY show and appearing in a bathtub in a little trailer I made for one of my favorite books and having my TED talk hit more than four million views, I also spent a few years as an FM morning show DJ. People actually paid me to do this, too, despite having zero broadcasting experience and even less in the way of skills.
The KTYD Early Show hosted on-air games like “the Spanish word of the day” (where we made gringos like me try to roll their Rs HAHAHAHA) and “Dumber than Jenna” (a little bit my co-host came up with after I drove away from a gas station with the pump nozzle still wedged into my tank after which I panicked and kept going, but that’s a post for another day), and had our cartoon faces plastered all over the backs of our local buses*.
Anyway, I had to be at this job at the unholy hour of 4:30AM, so my co-workers were lucky when I brushed my teeth and changed out of my PJs. But oftentimes, as celebrities of the extremely local variety, we were asked to host live and televised events for which we were expected to put on actual clothing.
One of those events was the popular and prestigious Fiesta Parade in Santa Barbara. For non-Santa Barbarians**, Fiesta is a five-day excuse to get stupid-drunk and eat nothing but tacos celebration of our beautiful city’s rich history. The year was 2002 and this was the very festive dress I wore to host the parade, in the one-hundred-and six-degree televised heat.
It’s hard to tell but it’s got tiny little beads sewn on it here and there in what appears to be a completely random and nonsensical pattern. Some of them have fallen off or disintegrated, of course, since this dress is older than both of my children, one of whom is heading to high school in the fall. It’s really not my fault that time is going so fast, or that my husband built me a closet so massive that I honestly would never have to throw anything away again ever except I have to because it’s all driving me crazy.
Goodbye, fiesta dress! Viva la empty hanger!
XO
Jenna
*You guys, the plural of bus is buses. Not busses. I only know this because spellcheck keeps underlining busses so I looked it up and I’ll be damned if it isn’t wrong, even though it looks perfectly fine to me. Who knew?
**We’re not really called Santa Barbarians, I don’t think. But I can certainly think of a few folks the name fits…
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