So today I did something I never thought I'd do.

I attended a filming of Extreme Makeover - Home Edition. A family about 1/2 hour away from where my mother lives was chosen and the cast and several thousands of volunteers spent the past week completely transforming their home. The two-hour episode will air as the season opener late September.

We got there around just before noon and took a quick look around the house before finding a spot to camp out. I had a hunch that a lot of the filming would take place near the tents they'd set up, and thanks to my new-found Parisian metro maneuvering skills, we managed to get a good spot right up front. A short while later, Patricia Heaton (the mom on "Everybody loves Raymond") came out to talk to us. She was the celebrity guest for the episode and she interviewed a woman just in front of me who'd been saved from a burning apartment by the father of the family.So there is a good chance I will end up being in the background during that segment. Then there was a lot of waiting around. We were told the family would be arriving at 3pm. 3pm came and went and I got tired of standing around (and it wasn't really my thing), so I went back to the car to wait for my mother, who wanted to see the family arrive. She still hadn't come back by 4:30, so I made my way back over to the construction site. I saw a whole bunch of builders and volunteers milling around in the front of the house in their red and blue shirts, and decided to head over that way instead of going around back where all the spectators where supposed to be. My gumption paid off and I ended up being right in front of the limo and the famous bus during most of the taping:I was one of the only ones not wearing a blue or red t-shirt, and a few people looked at me strangely but no one said anything. Minnesota nice and all that jazz. It's so funny to see how France has changed me in that way - I'm much more daring now when it comes to lining up and sneaking into places I shouldn't be.
One of the things that surprised me most though was the number of takes they did - they did at least three for each scene you see. So that means three times of the limo driving up, three times of the family getting out of the car, three times of us all shouting "Move that bus" etc. Not to mention everything that went on during the week. Since I was surrounded by all the builders and contractors, I got a lot of info about what they'd seen and heard during the week.
As for Mr Ty Pennington himself, he was barely around. The only time I saw him was when he was taping his segments. Off-camera, he stayed to himself and didn't interact with the crowd or his fellow cast-members. Makes me wonder if his whole Mr. Nice Guy schtick is just a big act.Between the Patricia Heaton interview and the filming of the builders & the arrival of the family, I should make it on the show at least once or twice in the background. Not that that's really how I wanted to make my national TV debut - my mom called me up at 10:30 and said "Be ready in 15 minutes" so I basically just threw on some clothes and pulled my hair up into a ponytail.

All in all, it ended up being about 7 hours of waiting for less than a half-hour of filming. A bit too much for my taste and my knee is killing me from all that standing around, but my mother really wanted to go. And hey, it gave me something to blog about, right?