Of course, when you walk into any theater in Los Angeles, especially when you haven’t gotten used to this kind of thing, you sort of lose your breath. It’s almost impossible to tell who’s famous and who’s just a really ridiculously good-looking person, but I didn’t have much time to process everything around me because the show was starting and an army of producers in headsets were barking at everybody to find their seats, sit down, and shut up.

I sat in awe as the show progressed, and one celebrity after another came onstage. We were only a few rows from the front, and could see where each person was sitting, who they were talking to, how nervous they looked before they went onstage (the gratifying thing about Hollywood: nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, except maybe Oprah, and everybody is nervous as hell). Meanwhile, every three minutes, my parents would text me from their viewing party at home to tell me that they caught a glimpse of my face as the camera panned over the crowd.

Beforehand, the producers told us that my category wouldn’t be announced onstage. Here’s a not-so-secret secret about award shows: nobody gives a fuck about the awards. Everybody is here for the glamour and the cameras and the spectacle. The People’s Choice Awards give out something like sixty awards every year, and only about fifteen of them are handed out onstage to people like Ellen and Selena Gomez who are actually famous and not just on the Internet. But the producers did tell us that they would hand out the award in the audience just when they came back from a commercial break, and they would give us a heads-up when that was about to happen. Otherwise, all we had to do was sit and chill.