Who is Jenna Lewis, or What Rock Have I Been Living Under?
"It's hard to be who you think you are." - Jenna Lewis, September 3, 2000
So, the question is, who is Jenna Lewis?
Yes, yes, I know that today is New Hampshire's official Jenna Lewis Day, and yes, I'm on my way to the official Jenna Lewis Day Festival in Franklin, but the fact remains that I've never heard of her. Knowing that I'll be covering JennaFest 2000, I've done a little research.
"Oh... My... GOD!!!" a friend of mine typed on the Internet when I asked her if she knew who this woman is. (I can tell she's really excited about this because she's gone to the trouble of actually typing out the words instead of 'OMG'.) "You're really going to meet HER!!!? I'm her biggest fan!"
But who is she?
My friend wanted to know if I'd been living under a rock.
Close - Bellows Falls, Vermont. I'd been living without a television and had somehow managed to miss the whole "Survivor" phenomenon. Just catching up on that is a bizarre, surrealistic experience - which, oddly enough, is pretty good preparation for JennaFest.
In the course of preparing to cover Jenna Lewis Day in Franklin, the crack editorial staff at HippoPress.com had been informed that the Powers That Be of Franklin, New Hampshire were expecting a crowd. Not just any crowd mind you - a big, noisy, possibly dangerous crowd of "Survivor"-crazed Jenna fans, a huge, seething mass of humanity that would strain the resources of Franklin to the breaking point. Come at least an hour early, we were told, and expect to park a good distance out of town. If necessary, shuttles would be arranged to transport desperate fans from parking lots in neighboring towns. This would be a sort of Woodstock with rubber rats.
So, it is in this frame of mind - prepared for anything and apprehensive about the possibility of mob rule - that I make my way into Franklin on Sunday afternoon.
And back out again.
I am so intent on looking for the Seething Mass of Humanity (hereafter referred to as the SMH) that I somehow miss the town of Franklin and have to circle back around and look for it again. I do eventually find Franklin and am directed by a policeman on traffic duty to a half empty parking lot behind the park where the festivities are to be held.
No mobs yet. So far, so good.
I'm directed toward the park by Jeffrey Woodburn, a candidate for District 2's Executive Council, who has shown up today - campaign sign in hand - to take advantage of the SMH that he had hoped to canvas. So far, he has yet to actually see the SMH, but he's hopeful.
"I'm here to jump on the Jenna Bandwagon," he says with a smile. "I just wish I'd seen one of the TV episodes."
I share a small moment of bonding with candidate Woodburn, but the crackle of a P.A. system off in the distance signals the start of the official Jenna Day festivities and I don't want to miss any of them. I hurry around a corner and into the park itself and join the SMH that is gathered around a tiki-torch decorated stage to celebrate Jenna.
As SMHs go, this is not as seething as it could be - two or MAYBE three hundred people - but it is kind of cool. The whole town seems to have turned out to celebrate Jenna's victory. ("What exactly did she win?" I ask another reporter. He acknowledges, that she didn't actually WIN anything per se, but that she apparently won some sort of moral victory. That makes this turnout even cooler in a funny sort of way.)
Jenna Lewis herself sits at the center of the stage, surrounded by various dignitaries. I recognize Governor Jeanne Shaheen, but the others are strangers to me.
"Never mind," I tell myself. "Dignitaries are dignitaries - they must be important."
As with so many other judgments in my life, this one turns out to be only partially true; I'm sure that in some philosophical, metaphorical sense, the chairman of New Hampshire's Lilac Commission is very important indeed, but he and his counterparts from the Postal Service and the state Senate do not exactly bring the sense of celebrity that the assembled media seems to have been hoping for.
(And in this one respect, the Jenna Day festivities have lived up to their hype - there IS a strong media presence. I count the number of khaki-clad men and women carrying notebooks, add it to the number of TV cameras and photographers and factor it into my estimate of the total size of the SMH. This turns out to be a pretty impressive number - the press seems to make up anywhere from 10-15% of the total crowd.)
This is the first time I've seen Jenna and I'm surprised that she's actually pretty... er... well, pretty. (I later find out that this is one of the factors in her enormous popularity on the "Survivor" TV show.) She sits on the stage in a green tube-top, smiling patiently and trying very hard to be a good sport about all the complete and utter tripe that everyone is talking about her.
And it is tripe. The speeches, which start out at a fairly high level of hyperbole, quickly grow to a level of fawning obsequiousness. (Ha! How may times do you get to use THAT phrase in print?) Let's be honest. Jenna didn't drag a schoolbus full of drowning orphans from a watery grave or solve the state's educational funding crisis or bring peace to the Middle East. She wore a pink bikini on an island full of celebrity wanna-bes and ate rats until she was voted off. You wouldn't know that from listening to the speeches the SMD (Seething Mass of Dignitaries) make about her.
In fact, the person at Jenna Lewis Day who seems most aware of how silly the whole event is, is Jenna Lewis herself. She has the good grace to look more and more embarrassed as the speeches get more and more worshipful. She is a very good sport. She smiles gamely, even as the will to live is sucked right out of her body by the speeches. I start to like her.
Allow me to paraphrase the speeches:
Tony Giunta, Mayor of Franklin: "Isn't she great?"
SMH: "Yay!"
Tony Giunta, Mayor of Franklin: "And she's FROM here! Can you believe it?"
SMH: "Yay!"
Governor Jeanne Shaheen: "This is officially Jenna Lewis Day in the state of New Hampshire!"
SMH: Polite golfcourse applause
Governor Jeanne Shaheen: (Reading from official proclamation) "Whereas...
1) She was a well-known track star in High School AND
2) She got on TV AND
3) She lasted a while on TV AND
4) She ate a lot of rice AND
5) She made the TV show a GOOD TV show AND
6) She's done a lot of interviews (really, I'm not making this up) AND
7) She's a nice person
Therefore, this is officially Jenna Lewis Day."
(Keep in mind that this is a paraphrase - though a fairly accurate one.)
SMH: "Yay!"
Mayor Giunta again: "And she didn't take her clothes off!"
SMH: "Yay!"
Press Corp: Palpable sense of disappointment
Guy Giunta, Lilac Commissioner (and brother of the Mayor): "Blah, blah, blah..."
SMH: "Yay!"
Postal Official: "Blah, blah, blah..."
SMH: "Yay!"
It is at this point that my brain turns completely to tapioca and I stop listening to anything anyone on stage says and start to focus on Jenna's tube-top, hoping for a hint of cleavage. (I am sadly disappointed - sigh...)
The upshot of the rest of the afternoon is this - Jenna proves to be a really, really good sport. She gives a nice, self-effacing, funny speech of her own, then answers questions for members of the SMH, which break down to three types - "What was it like to eat bugs?", "Were the people on the island as big jerks as the seemed?" and (hinted at, but never actually stated) "Was there any sex?"
Jenna does a great job of answering each question seriously and with good humor for the next 48 or 72 hours, then signs photos for the SMH until her hand falls off of her arm and flops around in the grass.
So, the overview of the day?
Jenna is 1) really nice, 2) kinda hot, 3) a very, very good sport and 4) knows how to eat a rat. In terms of potential people that New Hampshire could pick to have an Official Day for, there are worse choices.
