As the end of April neared, I had to cook two or three meals at a time to hit my birthday deadline, and therefore completely misrepresented the culinary standards my husband and children should expect from me. Don’t care for Thai? No problem, we also have Italian and French options on our menu this evening! I sent my children to school with warm lunches every day that spring like some kind of Martha Stewart protégé, and then disappointed them terribly when things eventually returned to normal PB&J fare. Thankfully, our friends were more than happy to come over to be our taste testers and help us chow down on the vast quantities of food coming out of my kitchen. Our landlord, who lived alone and was either 92 or 101, depending on which day you asked him, was the happy recipient of many of the meals I was working on, too.
The recipes were coming together, but I still really wanted to make a few videos to accompany them and wasn’t quite sure where to start. I didn’t own a good camera, I didn’t own a smartphone, and even if I had, I knew nothing about filming or editing. Philip made some phone calls, and through his brothers, I was introduced to a character named Brian Hardin.
Brian is a tall, laid-back hippie who cares about health and nutrition the way I care about donuts and butter. He’s creative and eccentric and funny. He always has a big smile on his face and regularly serves his guests sugar-free chia cake in an apartment covered with wall tapestries, mandalas, and peace signs. Brian also has a lot of experience filming and editing, and had already worked on a few documentaries and music videos when I met him. We hit it off immediately.
We mapped out six videos, which he charged me next to nothing for, because, as Brian said, “Philip’s brothers are like family to me, so you’re family now, too!” I maintain that he was also secretly excited to be force-fed bites of all the cheesy, gooey, chocolatey, bacon-filled recipes we’d be filming. Since we were ambitious, short on time, and completely nuts, we decided to shoot all six videos in one delicious, messy day.
I spent the next few weeks going to Brian’s apartment, often with Luka and Matea in tow. While he and I worked long days editing the hours of raw footage into short, frazzled-mom-friendly three-minute videos, the kids wreaked havoc on Brian’s ashramlike living space. Brian didn’t try to control the projects or direct too much. He saw that his job was to do what he could to bring out the best in me. He not only indulged my crazy, wacky sense of humor but encouraged it, and through his editing, he made me shine. Brian did this brilliant thing where he would tell me he’d cut but would actually keep rolling so he could capture me dancing to made-up songs and being my goofy self, and that often wound up being the best footage.
The very first video we filmed and edited opens with me standing in a friend’s kitchen—the richest friend I knew at the time with the most expensive-looking kitchen. The audience sees me in this gorgeous home, talking about my perfect life. Then, suddenly, an elegant woman walks in and reveals that I don’t actually live there, I’m just someone she hired to clean her house. From that, we cut to my real kitchen: small and old and messy. No granite countertops, no recessed lighting, just a wonky oven and a stained sink overflowing with dishes. And there I was, proudly showing off my very flawed but wonderful home. The entire point of that first video was to set the tone for my approach to cooking and to life: you don’t have to be perfect or rich or fancy to thrive. Even more than my grandmother’s three-cheese Croatian strudel, this message is what I most wanted to share with other parents.
Finally, on April 26, 2010, my thirty-first birthday, I launched my first blog, Sticky Cook. The name came from the idea that everything in my life was sticky. My finances were sticky, my divorce was sticky, my relationships with family and my ex were sticky, my children are sticky (because children, for some reason, even seconds after washing their hands, are always sticky), and my favorite foods are sticky, too. I also loved the idea of using a word that might have a negative connotation and turning it into a positive. My tagline read “Life is sticky . . . Dig in!” Instead of trying to make life seem flawless, I wanted people to embrace the mess and the chaos and still create something delicious from it.
As soon as Sticky Cook went live, I started receiving supportive phone calls and messages from friends. I was so proud to have seen this project through, and so grateful for Brian and Philip and Jo and everyone who’d come together to help me make this dream a reality by my birthday deadline. It felt so good to celebrate this milestone with friends who’d been cheering me on every step of the way. There were even a few people with no prior connection to me at all who came across my videos or recipes and shared them online. I was thrilled. When I blew out the candles on my cake that night, I wished that this new adventure would thrive. And I wished it out loud.
Just nine days after launching the site, I received an unexpected email from a complete stranger named Kim Schofield. Kim got straight to the point, telling me that she’d seen my videos and thought I should enter Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star because I belonged on TV. Not only did I not know Kim, Philip and I didn’t even own a working television, so we didn’t know about Oprah’s competition.
Even though Kim didn’t know anything about me beyond my few silly videos, she was quick to answer all of my questions and encouraged me as if she had known me for years. She wasn’t a producer or involved in the entertainment industry in any way. Kim was just a warm, middle-aged mom from Arizona who connected with my message so strongly that she felt compelled to write to me. Somehow, through the power of putting myself out there and the magic of the internet, I’d found an advocate. Or rather, she’d found me.
From Kim, I learned that Oprah was running the competition to promote the launch of her new network, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), and anyone could submit a video pitching their own TV show to her. Ten people would be chosen to be contestants on a reality show competition produced by Mark Burnett, an award-winning producer who had created shows like Survivor, Shark Tank, and The Apprentice. Each week, one entrant would be eliminated, and the final winner would actually get to make their own television show for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Entering required a three-minute audition video. By the time I learned about the competition, the deadline was only a few days away and more than ten thousand auditions had already been submitted.
“What do you think, Philip? Should I even bother?”
“Bother?!? Are you kidding? You’re perfect for this!”
We scheduled a time with Brian to cut together some of the footage we already had into an audition video. When I clicked the submit button, there was a small part of me that actually hoped that maybe, just maybe, a producer would notice me and at least call me in for a meeting. But that hope quickly faded. I spent the entire night watching audition videos on Oprah’s website. Some of them featured real news anchors or former child actors I immediately recognized, some were so moving that they made me cry, others looked like they had been put together by a professional television producer, and some even had special effects. My video seemed very amateurish by comparison. By the time submissions closed, more than fifteen thousand auditions had been entered.