Blood Sport
The Stunt Master on "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer"

Cracker Jack
Gag Writer for "You Don't Know Jack"

"A friend of mine started a business where he provides escorts for award shows. He asked if I wanted to work the MTV Movie Awards and I said yes. I thought it would be an interesting experience. Most of the escorts are sons and daughters of people in the industry and they're young and can be kind of star-struck. In my regular job, as a writer for a performing arts magazine, I do a lot of celebrity interviews so it doesn't really phase me. The Pope could walk in and I'd...well, okay, I'd probably treat the Pope differently."

"We're the jack-of-all-trades for the celebrities. We meet them at their limousine, we take them where they need to go, and we hang around all day in case they need water or a certain kind of food. The big stars get an escort to themselves. The lesser stars share one escort."

"There is no pay, it's for the thrill of doing it and working side by side with a big star for the day."

"They want [the escorts] to stand out in our clothing. They hand out bright colored T-shirts to wear with our black pants so that a celebrity could look around and see a person in a turquoise shirt and know that was a person who could help them.

"We all get headphones to wear for the day which is cool -- ultra official. In addition to the headsets we have a walkie-talkie. The escorts get a specific channel and you can flip over and hear security or the directors of the show. If you flip back and forth all day you can pretty much hear everything that's going on and it's funny. At the music awards they kept calling, 'Where is the garbage? Has anyone seen the garbage? When is the garbage suppose to arrive?' Turns out 'Garbage' was the name of a band. When they have a particularly nasty star who's very demanding, they make up nasty nicknames so they can talk about them.

"About an hour and a half before the show, the limos start to arrive and you hear the chatter on the headset. The escort whose star is arriving runs down to meet the limo, then a few minutes later she comes back with the whole entourage. Since I had the biggest star of the evening, I knew he'd get there late.

"Not long before the show is about to start, I hear on the headset that my star is arriving. So I go out to the limo and it's him, his publicist, his wife and a bodyguard. I expected him to have a much larger entourage, but I had heard that he wasn't really into the whole star trip. He was very nice and I said, 'Hi, I'm going to escort you into the awards area. You have a choice, you can go through the front past all the fans or go around the back of the studio.' Some of the stars like to go past the fans because the press is there and they get their picture taken. This guy said 'No, take me around the back.' He didn't need the press."

"There is one thing that is annoying about this job: you have to listen to the fans. The stars have fans and the press yelling their names over and over again, and when you're an escort you have to listen to it all day. It gets on your nerves after awhile and it just makes you see what a celebrity oriented culture we are...There is a story of a famous dancer who gave her toe shoes to a fan and he ate them. Now, no one at the Movie Awards ate toe shoes but they could have. I've seen some pretty strange fan behavior. We saw people break the barricades, and run to their star. I don't know what they thought they were going to do when they got to them. Maul them? Tear their clothes off?"

When Award Shows Go Bad:

"So, I went to get the person who's in charge of the chairs. All of a sudden, I hear in the headset, 'Mary [not her real name], your star and his entire party are getting up and leaving, and the show is about to start. What's going on?' I turn and look and there they go slipping out the door as fast as they can without running. I go zipping after them to try to find out what's going on. The star is talking to his publicist with his hands gesturing and all. I say, 'Are you leaving because of the chair?' This was all minutes before the taping was to start and it was like the Keystone Cops. Finally, at the limo area, the star took both of my hands in his hands and said, 'You did a great job, thank you very much, it's nothing you did.' The limo pulls up and the star gets in and pulls his wife in. He left the publicist with me and the limo took off.

"The publicist explained, that when they went to do the interview backstage, one of the co-hosts -- a younger comic actress -- had started to talk to the star in a way that he wasn't accustomed. She was vamping him and saying, 'I could I have been cast in your movie.' He said, 'Maybe if I was making a remake of Godzilla.'

"She was asking him how many women he slept with. He thought the interview was going out live, so he felt he had to field the questions as best as he could. To the MTV crowd, [it] would have been funny but to someone of his status, it was over the top. He completed the interview, but the more he thought about it, the madder he got.

"So now I'm labeled as the person who lost her star. I've got tears in my eyes and the poor chairwoman was a mess. She thought it was her fault. He was the biggest star of the evening, he was a presenter and he was supposed to be in a sketch and he was a shoe-in for an award. So they had to work around him. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen, it even made it into the trade papers the next day."

"Since it was the MTV people producing it, we were worried about the rock groups pulling the star stuff, like the group that wants M&Ms but they have to have all the brown ones removed. Whitney Houston threw a fit because she had the wrong kind of fruit in her dressing room.

"I found out the stars are mostly very professional and down to earth. Garth Brooks is so laid back and mellow. If you treat them like a regular person, they treat you like a regular person. But if they want a special brand of water, like Aquafina instead of Perrier, you have to go get it for them. It's not even the star asking. Usually the stars will turn to the publicist or the bodyguard and say, 'Ask the escort to get on the phone and get me a pizza.' They don't usually address you directly."

Escort- "When I tell people I was a celebrity escort they go, 'Oooh, you have a checkered past.'"

Holding Pen - a.k.a The Green Room - a room where celebs wait and socialize before they are admitted to the event.

Air Kissing - When the stars go cheek to cheek and make a kissing noise with out actually making contact. A common greeting for Hollywood types.