So you think there’s a good person inside of you just dying to come out, but your ugly facade won’t let it? If you’re smart you might see a shrink about that. But thanks in part to shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan–the most evil TV show the scientists at Fox have ever concocted–you’re probably just as likely to call a plastic surgeon.
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Out of the 100 or so applicants who were called in for a meet-and-greet, the team picked two winners, DeAnna Lee and Josh Romph. “The team was most interested in finding one man and woman who really deserved the makeover,” publicist Alisa Bey e-mailed me, “someone who had done so much for others that they had forgotten to take care of themselves (like DeAnna) or someone (like Josh) who struggled since childhood with low self-esteem and overwhelming feelings of sadness/depression due to the way he looked.”
Lee, a 41-year-old African-American woman, described herself in a letter to the team as the mother of three sons, one of whom was recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She wrote that she was sexually abused as a child, experiences bouts of depression, had lost a child to SIDS, and had tried dieting to shed her extra 60 pounds with little success.
I couldn’t hide my disgust. “I guess if I were ugly,” I told Kulbieda, “I’d do anything to make it better. But seriously, why would you want to be a part of something like this?” She immediately put me in my place. “I don’t think these people are ugly,” she said. “They just want a change.” Then she told me she joined the team because Dr. Rodger Wade Pielet, one of the plastic surgeons, was a friend. “It was fun to bring them out of their shells,” she said, adding that she thinks it’s great “when someone’s willing to get creative with their dress–especially if they never had the means before.”
Romph, dressed in a striped shirt and trousers, was slimmer and his Ted Kaczynski beard was gone. Beaming, he thanked the team members personally and profusely. Several audience members clasped their hands to their hearts, their eyes welling up with tears. “Now let’s go have dessert!” said Romph.
After we picked up our VIP passes a security guard whisked us to our room: an expansive cream-painted plot with a couple plastic-covered banquet tables and overstuffed leather couches, illuminated by an overabundance of fluorescent light. No booze, no band.
