I'd like to tell you about the most surreal day of my life! I spent it in 'The People's Court', and I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just start at the beginning.

A woman I work with... Helen... was dating a woman named Sue. One day, Sue got drunk and smashed up Helen's car pretty bad. She told me about it at the time, but I was vague on the exact details, as they were given to me in a series of pretty drunken messages on my answering machine. I could only determine that there had been some sort of argument, and Sue had taken Helen's car and smashed it into a tree, breaking the windshield, and causing a lot of other damage. At the termination of this six week love affair, Helen decided that she would take Sue to court to try and recover the repair costs. Well... I guess the scouts for 'People's Court' know a potential TV fiasco when they see one, because Helen received a phone call from one of the producers a few weeks ago, asking her if she'd like to take her case 'to the People's Court'! As soon as she told me about the call, I knew that was a bandwagon I was itchin' to jump on! Mayor Koch! A limo!! My face on TV!!! The People's fucking Court!!!! I guess Helen was a little nervous and felt like she needed moral support, because she said I could go. 'Oh, man...' I thought, 'this is going to be hysterical!' I had no idea how hysterical it would be.

The day came, and everyone who was going (myself and three other friends of Helen's, including one really young and cute straight girl, brought along to make the 'ex' jealous) met at Helen's house to wait for the limo that the television station was sending to pick us up and drive us from Atlantic City to New York. The limo was late, but worth waiting for... a huge, white stretch job stocked with chips and sodas which we pigged out on all the way up to NY. I guess they know better than to stock a bar... although I don't see how it could have turned out weirder even if the litigants *were* drunk! Predictably, we got stuck in traffic when we got to Manahattan. At one point, two teenage black girls came over to the limo and were trying to peer through the darkly tinted windows to see who was inside. I cracked the window about a half inch, and whispered to them, "Michael Jackson's in here!" which resulted in lots of screaming and jumping around and begging the driver to let them see the Prince of Pop. We were rolling around in the back of the limo cracking up, watching them through the one way glass... and the funny part of the day hadn't even begun yet.

The limo's late arrival and the subsequent traffic jam meant that we got to the studio only minutes before the show was ready to tape. When we got to 421 5th Ave., we got in the elevator, and upon arriving at the eighth floor, we were met immediately by Rachel, the producer. She was absolutley frantic because we were late and were scheduled to go on in ten minutes. She took us to this makeshift room (four walls thrown together in a giant empty studio) and asked us to sign our waivers. Next was the 'security check'... I guess someone offing their opponent in the 'courtroom' would be too grisly, even for People's Court. Some guy had one of those metal detector wands like they pass over you at the airport if the metal plate in your head beeps when you pass through the security check, and he started checking us all for weapons. Any normal person thinks of these things as just a formality and approaches it with a pretty healthy degree of disinterest, so I was pretty shocked when one of us 'beeped'! Did someone have an old war injury they hadn't told me about? I couldn't believe it! It turned out that Lori (cute, straight girl) is wildly attracted to hispanic gang members, and I guess she likes to play the part, because she had one of those butterfly knives on her! Under other circumstances, it might have caused some slight embarrassment, but it just added to the excitement of it all! They took it from her, and told her they'd return it to her after the show... maybe they thought she had a grudge against Mayor Koch or something.

Ok, so now it's 'show time', and this fat chick is giving us instructions on what to do. We walk up to the double doors (really fake shitty doors) that lead into the courtroom, and she says to us, "Who's going up front with Helen, and who's going to be in the audience?" We all want to grab our fifteen minutes of fame that Uncle Andy promised us, so we say, almost in unison, "I want to be up front with Helen!" Believe it or not, she says OK to all of us! Then she says, "After I count down from 5, push open the double doors and walk directly to the front of the courtroom. Helen, you stand in front of the podium, and the rest of you stand to her right." Now, maybe I'm naive or something, but I was always under the impression that the music and all that stuff was dubbed in after the show taped. Not on People's Court! I couldn't believe it! The woman counts... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1! We push open the doors and the People's Court Theme starts playing as we all walk to the front of the courtroom. We get to the front, and we're standing there a few seconds when we hear this guy's voice over the music, saying something like, "This is the case of the lesbian lovers...blah, blah, blah... bang! crash! boom! Helen is suing the defendant, Susan... blah blah blah." Lesbian lovers?!!? This was supposed to be about a car crash!! Susan must have spilled the beans, and the People's Court folks jumped right on it! As Howard Stern says, "What's the quickest way to improve your ratings? Lesbians, lesbians, lesbians!" Well, thats when we all started to laugh... all except Helen, of course. We were trying really hard not to, but it was uncontrollable... kind of like when you're a kid and you get a case of the giggles in church. Suddenly, People's Court had turned into an episode of Jerry Springer. Then, in comes the defendant, Susan. The voice says something like "She claims the plaintiff wanted to have sex with her and got violent when she said no, and she crashed her car when she was trying to leave." I have no idea what is going to show up when it airs on TV, but that's when I lost it completely! I started laughing so hard that I literally had tears pouring down my cheeks! Luckily, I was standing behind Billy (another friend of Helen's, who was also there for 'moral support'... yeah, right!), and I had my face jammed in his back, trying to hide from the camera because I was hysterical. They were 3 miniutes into the case before I could even compose myself! The ex-girlfriend looked like a trailer drunk. At one point in her testimony, she said to Koch, "She wanted to *do* it, but I had to go to work and I told her there wasn't time." So of course Koch says, "Do it? Is that a euphamism for sex? Did she want to have sex with you?" Duh! Very astute, Your Honor! The testimony was so juicy that smashing up the car was hardly mentioned at all, even though they eventually did get around to it and Helen was awarded 1400 bucks... but not till after Helen had denied ever having sex with Susan at all! The whole thing was totally lurid and ludicrous. Helen and Sue even got into a nasty verbal argumnent during the 'trial'. On the way out of the courtroom, the Doug Lewellyn looking guy (who had on tons of makeup) asked for comments from the plaintiff and the defendent like he always does. Helen's only comment was, "She's a liar!" I couldn't hear Susan's comment, but she said a whole lot. I'm looking forward to hearing *that* when the show airs!

Before we left to go back home, we had the limo driver wait while we got pizza, subs, burger king, wine and beer! A real white trash celebration! The ride home was much more fun then the ride up... for everyone except Helen. She was humiliated beyond belief. I'm afraid she won't even tell us when the show's going to air, so I'll start taping it every day until I catch it. This is one case I wouldn't want to miss, even if I hadn't been there!

©1998 Susan Haug



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