A couple of weeks after entering the competition, I was on my way to meet a friend for a late lunch in Pasadena when my phone rang with an unknown number. I let it go to voice mail, but then I worried that maybe the phone call was from someone at my kids’ school and that one of my children might have come down with Ebola or decided it was a really great idea to drink a bunch of hand sanitizer, so I pulled over on a side street to listen to the message.
“Hi. I’m a casting producer for Mark Burnett Productions. We love your video! Please call me back as soon as you can.”
This couldn’t be real. I called Philip and asked him to look up the guy’s name. “See if you can find anything on him. Does he really work for Mark Burnett? This is probably just a prank call from a friend who knows I sent in a video.” Philip quickly confirmed that the guy calling did in fact work for Mark Burnett. I texted my friend: Gonna be late. Then I took a deep breath and, with my hands and my voice shaking, called the guy back.
You know that feeling from before cell phones and caller ID when the landline would ring and your heart would stop for a small eternity because the person who answered might be that boy you really liked from school? (If you’re a parent reading this book, you’re probably old enough to know that feeling. Congratulations, our kids already think we’re dinosaurs.) Well, that’s what making this call felt like. The production company had probably made a mistake and called the wrong Kristina. This was going to be an awkward conversation.
But they hadn’t made a mistake. When the casting producer picked up, he said, “Oh my God, Kristina, I just watched your tape multiple times and we’re all cracking up in here. Your video is one of my favorites! I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’m gonna be shocked if you don’t make it to the next level.” I could barely think straight as he walked me through the paperwork I’d have to fill out to move forward in the competition. By the end of the call, I felt like the air around my entire body was buzzing. Did this just happen?
The next few months were even more surreal. I kept advancing further and further in the competition, until eventually I found myself in a hotel near LAX with the other top forty entrants, waiting to be interviewed by Mark Burnett himself. At first, I was a pile of nerves. But I’d done a lot of theater work back in grade school and college, and I found that if I pretended I was walking onto a stage every time I walked into a meeting room, things didn’t feel so scary. After all, I’d forgotten lines in plays before and improvised, and the shows had gone on without a hitch. If what had caught these producers’ attention was my video, where, thanks to Brian, I was shown being completely myself, then I just needed to continue being completely myself. Nothing more.
Somehow, it worked. Out of the remaining competitors, Oprah handpicked me, along with nine others, to compete on her reality show. I don’t remember my exact reaction when I received that phone call from the casting producer. All I can remember thinking was, OPRAH KNOWS WHO I AM. She would recognize my face in a lineup! If someone mentioned my name to her, she’d casually reply, “Oh, yeah. I know who that is.” The real competition was about to begin, but I already felt like I had won more than I ever expected to win in my life.
Just a few years earlier I’d been so broke I had to borrow money from a friend to buy myself a box of tampons. I had been sure I was going to be alone, poor, and miserable forever. There were people in my life who were close to me who believed I’d never amount to anything, and I believed it also. I was certain I was always going to be someone others looked down on, someone people pitied. Fighting my way through that dark place and meeting and marrying Philip already felt like I’d stumbled onto more than my fair share of good fortune. I had a wonderful husband. My kids were healthy. What more could I ask for?
When I entered that competition, I wasn’t looking to have a TV show, not really. What I wanted, what I needed more than anything, was for someone to look at this new little dream I had poured hours and sweat and tears into and tell me that it was worth dreaming out loud, that I did have something worthwhile to offer to the world. Now here I was in the top ten of Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star. I knew that I’d never win the contest and I didn’t need to. I was beyond grateful and thrilled to be validated by the most powerful person in television.
But my glamorous validation also came with complications. Participating in the reality show competition with the top ten meant that I was now living in a hotel in Los Angeles. Depending on how far along I made it on the show, I would be away from my family for one week to seven weeks. No visits. Only one fifteen-minute phone call home every Friday. I was a year into my marriage with Philip, and he was about to be a single dad to my two young kids, without any way to reach me directly. Initially, when I learned about this, I balked. No way was I going to leave my kids for that long. But Philip wouldn’t let me withdraw. “The kids and I will be great. I’ve got this. You’ve come so far, you have to keep going!” So I went.
I quit my waitressing job without being allowed to tell anyone the truth about why I was leaving. I had signed a $5 million nondisclosure agreement and no one was allowed to know I was one of the ten contestants—not my coworkers, not my friends, not my kids.
The morning before I left, I filmed a few video messages for Luka and Matea. I wanted Philip to show them a video of me talking to them every few days because I knew this would be a big transition for them. Thankfully, they were already well bonded to Philip and considered him a second dad.
As I was packing the final few things in my suitcase, Philip said to me, “You’re going to win this.”
If you want to know the type of guy my husband is, all you have to know is that in fifth grade he was running for student council and his best friend was running against him. Philip lost that election by one vote, his vote, which he cast for his best friend. Philip is the type of guy who will always set you up to win. He roots for people in his life so genuinely that you can’t help but start rooting for yourself.
I did end up spending the next seven weeks living in a hotel room. While that might seem like an orgasmic fantasy to most exhausted, overworked moms of young children, the hotel room got lonely quickly. I had no phone, no computer, no television. The production team even took the magazines and newspapers out of our rooms. The contestants weren’t allowed to talk to one another at all unless we were on camera, because the producers didn’t want to run the risk that their viewers might miss out on any good drama. We weren’t even allowed to ride in the same elevator together or eat meals without our “babysitters” (as I called them) watching our every move. I would have turned one of my pillows into a companion like Wilson the volleyball was for Tom Hanks in Cast Away if they’d just given me a Sharpie.
Though I missed Philip and the kids immensely, I loved getting a crash course in television production and hosting. I got to do segments with Dr. Phil, Gayle King, Vera Wang, Suze Orman, Arsenio Hall, and Curtis Stone, who taught me how to make a prosciutto-wrapped pork dish that I still whip up. But most important, I got to meet Oprah face-to-face. O-P-R-A-H. Oprah. Oprah? OPRAH FREAKIN’ WINFREY!