popular thinking

TRYING OUT FOR BEAUTY AND THE GEEK: Sometimes, you stumble upon a TV show and can picture yourself on it.
Such was the case earlier this year, watching WB's Beauty and the Geek, which paired bimbos with brainiacs, all in the name of fun, big cash prizes and "Ashton Kutcher's ultimate social experiment.''
Not all of the geeks looked particularly geeky. And that led me to think that with my Ivy League pedigree, lack of inhibition and peculiar habit of saying and doing things that make others cringe, that I might stand a chance.
Ha!
If you didn't already know it, here is a spoiler alert: Reality TV is not real. There is a reason "reality'' TV requires quotation marks.
Everything about your life gets amplified, modified and packaged to make it prime time-ready.
Beauties need to be bodacious. Geeks need to be full-on Revenge of the Nerds, couldn't-tell-you-what-a-girl's-lips-feel-like-if-their-lives-depended-upon-it geeks.
At the open casting call Thursday night at The Rack, WB casting agents had the nerve to first question if I were too old (nope, I fit the profile, but thanks for that ego deflation) and then if I were truly a geek (should I thank them for that?).
The dictionary gives these definitions: "1) An odd or ridiculous person. 2) A carnival performer whose show consists of bizzare acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.''
The first definition fits; the second fits Ozzy Osbourne. Ozzy as geek? Who knew?
Clearly, though, WB was on the hunt for more Richard Rubins. Rubin, the 21-year-old Brandeis University graduate from New Jersey, acted outlandishly for the cameras this spring and had an online bio listing his main trait as "has never kissed a girl.''
The WB rewarded him by bringing him and one of the beauties along to televise this casting process.
Outside The Rack, Rubin interrogated would-be geeks before turning his attention to the beauties - upon meeting a girl named Tiffany, he said, "I'd like to have breakfast at Tiffany's, and lunch and dinner,'' flailing his arms.
Will, a grad student in nuclear physics, sported a blue T-shirt with "DORK'' in big letters, underlined by a dorky joke about the "complex conjugate forms'' of the word.
A young Asian kid named Tony saw my bow tie and raised me a briefcase, glasses, soft voice and shy, friendly spirit.
They got much of the camera's attention Thursday night.
Another guy tried to geek it up by bringing his Dungeons & Dragons dice and paperwork. One guy looked way to old to be there, but he was less than 5 feet tall and the WB wanted to keep him around.
But not many more than a dozen beauties and geeks showed up, prompting the WB to put its own production assistants in line with the auditioners to "make it look bigger.''
Alas, methinks I fell into that strange netherworld, in which I was too geeky to get the girls, but not geeky enough to get paired up with the girls on network TV. Or, to paraphrase Britney Spears, I'm not a geek, not yet a stud.
What kind of fresh hell is this?
Maybe that's my TV show.

RELATED: Beauty and the Geek (official site)