Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (23 page)

So I did not care to bounce the ball at Busch Stadium. I was given an extra final chance at glory, and I wanted a happy ending to my baseball career, tied in a neat Cardinal-red bow. And I wanted that bitch mother of my ex-friend to hear
all
about it!

As per usual, I completely overhyped the event and told everyone I knew. I secured a box at the game with room for thirty family members and friends who flew in just for the occasion, including my old friends Kari, Jeanne, Dave, and Amanda, Isaac Mizrahi (who was in town directing an opera and is a fanatical baseball fan), and, just to make the possibility of humiliation a smidge more emasculating, my Bravo boss, Lauren Zalaznick, a lover of both baseball
and
completely overhyped events.

The day of the game, my sister Em arranged for me to throw baseballs with a high school coach who would warm me up and critique my throw. Outside of a brief game of catch with Matthew Broderick that I shot for
Watch What Happens Live
(“Don’t throw from the mound,” Matthew sternly advised, between takes. “Oh, and you want the catcher to
catch
the ball.”) I hadn’t done much in the way of
rehearsing
training—but as is often the case, I was unrealistically optimistic. The coach told me that I looked okay, and he deemed me ready to throw—from in front of the mound, just like everybody said. I felt strong and coordinated (only later would I learn that he told Em I was so bad that he rolled the ball to me because he was worried I couldn’t catch it). When I got home, my dad asked me to show him my form. I indulged him so that his dream of coaching me doing baseball-related things could also come true.

“You look like you’re
pushing
the ball,” he warned. “You have to follow through.” I was sure he was right, but I had no idea how to make my arm not push, and now I was getting confused. My mom went to YouTube and pulled up George W. Bush throwing out a first pitch to show me how it was done. It was probably the only time anyone in my family used W as an example of doing something right. Ready or not, it was time to go.

At the ballpark, I was given a jersey that said “Cohen” on the back with the number 68, the year of my birth. You don’t see many Jewish baseball players, so on top of everything, I felt special to be representing. I left all my VIP spectators to watch me from the box as I headed to the field with my thirteen-year-old nephew Jeremy, my coworker, Bravo exec Dave Serwatka, my boss, Lauren, and her son Dale. And then a pregame event unfolded that changed my game plan.

There was a mass of Little Leaguers doing I Don’t Know What on the field, but it involved pint-sized hurlers throwing strikes from the TOP OF THE MOUND. These little pissant punks were showing me up before I even had the chance to humiliate myself! I looked at Lauren aghast. She’d taught me plenty about TV and I needed her help on the field. She tried to console me, though she agreed that my hands were tied and I simply could not pitch from the front of the mound without sacrificing my dignity.

My nephew was incredulous. “What is the big deal!?” he shouted. He didn’t get why I would care one way or another
where
I threw the ball from. (Easy for him, when he was the kid in the family who got all the hand-eye coordination.)

As I looked out at my family and forty thousand St. Louis Cardinals fans, Lauren explained to Jeremy, “Andy is having really bad flashbacks to being a gay kid in Little League who dropped balls and continually sucked.”

I actually
hadn’t
been thinking of that, but was sure to thank her for putting it top of mind, both for me and for my only nephew, just in case there was any danger of him ever looking up to me. We were interrupted by the Cardinals’ PR director, who informed me that in a short while I’d be introduced and throw my pitch, and then they’d bring out Bob Gibson to throw his.

Wait. “BOB GIBSON?!” I asked? “Bob Gibson is throwing a baseball?”

Bob Gibson is one of the great pitchers in all of baseball and a Cardinal legend, and he would be throwing
after
me. My heart sank.

Time was running short and the PR guy introduced me to then Cardinal right fielder Joe Mather, to whom I’d be throwing my pitch, and I quickly fell in love. He was tall like a building and under his Cardinals hat was a full head of gorgeous gingey hair (you know I love a ginge, right?). He had no idea who I was or what a Real Housewife was, nor did he care. Nor should he have. I was just grateful for the distraction.

“Go over to Fredbird,” the publicist instructed me, ripping me away from my future boyfriend-in-my-head. Ever resilient, I joked with Fredbird, the mascot for whom I was nicknamed, as the announcer introduced me. Then came the very best part of the night: running, in slow motion, to the mound, framed by the Gateway Arch, as the crowd cheered. I caught a glimpse of the Jumbotron; a shot of the back of my Cardinals jersey was on-screen and I looked legitimately like I belonged. Even though the name said “Cohen” and the guy inside it didn’t really have any idea how to do what he was about to try to do. It was my finest moment. Except that I still had to make that effing pitch.

Once I got to the top of that mound, I knew it was all downhill from there. I took one last look at my family a million miles away in the stands, and then just got it the hell over with. The throw was, um … well, it was
very
high and
very
outside. That is me being kind to myself. But Joe Mather took several steps—maybe a leap or two—and caught it! It was nowhere in the vicinity of the plate, but it did not bounce and it was caught, and suddenly that seemed to be all that mattered.

After the pitch, Joe Mather ran to the mound and we took a picture together. Then, as the two of us jogged in slow-mo away from each other, he toward the dugout and I toward—I don’t know where the hell I was going, but it wasn’t into the dugout—the six-foot-four Gingey baseball god called out, “Hey, Andy!”

I turned to him and we locked eyes. We were still running away from each other in slow-mo, but yeah, our eyes totally locked. “If you ever need a baseball player … call me!” he said. Then he was gone.

My heart fluttered. I DID need a baseball player! I needed him! But I never called him, because I am not a fool and I know he wasn’t saying what I was hearing. Clearly, he meant if I needed a baseball player for a TV show or something. He was pitching himself to
me
!
S
to the
woon
.

In an insane twist, Bob Gibson pitched from the front of the mound and his ball definitely bounced. No matter that the man was in his seventies with a bum shoulder. I pitched better than he did. It’s as simple as that, and no one can take it away from me.

When I got to my friends and family, Isaac Mizrahi proclaimed it the “gayest pitch in the history of baseball.” I turned to my mom and dreamily told her about Joe Mather’s good-bye “offer.”

“Oh, that is RIDICULOUS!” she howled. “That guy is STRAIGHT! GET OVER HIM!”

And of the pitch? What did my mother think of The Pitch? “Well … at least you didn’t hit the DIRT.” And there you go: I had succeeded simply by not failing spectacularly. I’m sure there’s a deep metaphor somewhere in there for anyone who ever has to pitch anything. Maybe it’s this: There are no perfect pitches, just try not to hit the dirt.

BRAVO

You’ve probably seen me with a sheaf of blue index cards in my hands, which my guests on
Watch What Happens Live
or
Housewives
reunions clearly regard as some sort of dangerous weapon. These are viewer questions, and they rightly induce fear. The questions can be rude, invasive, and divisive. (And I mean that as a compliment.) They are what make our discussions interesting. Oh, and I enjoy the freedom that in most cases Andy C. is not asking if anybody was or was not in fact a prostitution whore; Brenda B. from Skokie is. Since turnabout is fair play, I have put some of the questions most frequently asked of
me
since I’ve been on Bravo on some blue cards and handed them over to my editor, and she has chosen a batch for me to answer here.

Q:
How did you end up on the air? Did you just green-light your own show?

A:
I hear this question a lot, often put exactly like that. Usually, I just say
:
If I could just green-light my own show, don’t you think I would be hosting
Andy Chats with Susan Lucci While a Parade of Shirtless Gingers Slowly Walks By
?

Short answer:
No, I didn’t green-light my own show. A chain of coincidental-but-totally-connected events at Bravo have led me to where I’ve always wanted to be since using that hairbrush as a mic in the backseat of my uncle’s car.

Long Answer:
It all began when I started sending detailed and gossipy e-mails to Lauren Zalaznick about behind-the-scenes shenanigans on
Battle of the Network Reality Stars
, the first show I concocted as head of current programming at Bravo in 2004.
Rumor has it that Trishelle from
The Real World
hooked up last night
, I’d write.
Richard Hatch has ideas for how the format of this show could be better—he’s oddly competing while suggesting twists to the challenges.
Lauren told me I should be blogging for the Bravo website.

For me, my blog became the silver lining of the bomb-shaped cloud that was
Battle of the Network Reality Stars
(more on that later). I envisioned it as a dialogue with Bravo viewers about everything from interviews with the
Project Runway
judges about why they’d eliminated Santino the night before, to, eventually—after readers got to know me a bit—what
I
had done the night before. In the early days, when I was still learning, sometimes I’d lose touch with my journalistic roots and I would be a little too creative in my reporting online. When Heidi Klum made a controversial remark on
Runway
about a design making a model look “plus-size,” I hastily blogged that no, no, no, Heidi didn’t mean it. Except the problem was, I didn’t know what Heidi meant, and moreover, she did not appreciate me speaking for her. I also blogged about rumors that two designers were hooking up. This, I was later told, did not go over so well with the live-in lover one of the designers had back home. “You caused a lot of trouble,” Santino told me. I felt pretty awful.

(Of course my mother was constantly up my ass about the blog. “No one liked Wednesday’s blog. You got ONE comment! People don’t like when you write about things they don’t care about. You write about Oprah too much. Are you AWARE of that? Are you MONITORING the comments?” No, I wasn’t monitoring the comments. Clearly, my mother had it covered.)

Being a blogging network exec somehow made me “credible” enough to get invitations to be a pop-culture-commenting windbag on various CNN shows,
Weekend Today
, and once even
The View
. This wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined getting on TV all those years earlier, but I relished the opportunity. My best buddy, Bruce Bozzi, is a restaurant guru—he helps run the Palm Restaurant empire, which his grandfather founded—and he became my de facto media coach, watching every single appearance I made with a critical eye.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he’d say. “That was good. But you sat with your legs wide open. You need to cross the legs!” That was a big one, but it was nothing compared to what I did with my head. “Again with the
head-cock
! You did that whole section about the Academy Awards with your head tipped like your brains were about to run out! But the outfit was great.” Of course he would think that: Bruce always told me what to wear when I went on TV.

During Season 2 of
Top Chef
, Lauren decided to create a live webshow to “air” on
BravoTV.com
after each episode, with me as moderator. She viewed it as an extension of my blog, and I viewed it as a fun lark and an opportunity to learn something about hosting. Every Wednesday night, I would schlep to CNBC headquarters in beautiful Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to interview the chef who had just been eliminated at Judges’ Table, along with one of the judges who had just done the eliminating plus a famous chef or a
Top Chef
Season 1 alum. The show was named after our Bravo tagline:
Watch What Happens Live.
We didn’t have much of a set, studio, staff, or audience, and I loved every low-rent second of it.

The year 2007 was a big one for Bravo. Everything just jelled. With
Project Runway
and
Top Chef
, we had two new hits, and suddenly we weren’t just the
Queer Eye
network anymore. Kathy Griffin won an Emmy,
Work Out
had an intense second season
,
and
Sheer Genius
and
Flipping Out
premiered. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about our shows. Many people like to leave their work at the office, but I like to drag my work around with me everywhere, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. When the season of
Top Chef
ended, I continued schlepping out to Englewood Cliffs to do
Watch What Happens Live
on the Web as an aftershow to
Top Design.