Commercial breaks during award shows are absolute anarchy. The second the cameras turn off for a commercial, about half of the room stands up and shuffles about, going to the bathroom, heading backstage for a snack, or ditching the show entirely because they’ve seen what they came for and they’re fucking sick of it. An army of seat-fillers—a bunch of hot young aspiring actors and actresses who want to be around famous people—come in and fill all of the empty seats so that when the cameras return, they return to a nice, big room, full of beautiful people who definitely didn’t just play the biggest, most celebrity-filled game of musical chairs. The last thirty seconds before they come back from commercial is like a scene from a war movie, with producers running up and down the aisles, screaming at everything with a face, shoving every warm body into any available seat, skipping over rolls and rolls of camera cord, and elbowing production interns in the head. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing one of them pull a gun and shoot an assistant in the neck. It’s an absolutely glorious mess, and twice as entertaining as the actual show.

About halfway through the evening, during one of the commercial breaks, just as the cameras shut off, a producer runs up to me, trailed by a cameraman. She leans in.

“You’re Matt Balthazar, right?” she shouts.

“Um. Matt Bellassai? Yeah, that’s me.”

She shouts again, “OK, good, we wanted to make sure you’re in your seat. Get ready.”

At this point, my heart is pounding, or at least beating as hard as it can beneath the layers of Spanx I’m wearing. I mean, she’s making sure I’m in the right seat, she’s saying “get ready,” that’s gotta be a good sign, right?

She goes back to the cameraman a few rows in front of us and points to me. The cameraman cranes his neck around the camera to get a look at me, he points at me to make sure he has the right fat, balding ginger, and the producer nods.

I’m freaking out. My stomach is churning. I’m sweating through my disgusting Men’s Wearhouse suit because their cheap fabrics aren’t breathable enough to handle my superhuman levels of body humidity.