We hear someone shout, “THIRTY SECONDS TO AIR,” and everybody starts moving in different directions. Producers are screaming into microphones, hustling people this way and that way, barking orders at everyone in sight. “TEN SECONDS,” someone else shouts, and the final chaotic dash for open seats commences. In the aisle where I’m sitting a woman in a dress appears holding a glistening award statue. None of the other nominees in my category are sitting nearby, which can only mean one thing. I prepare my least nervous smile. I get ready to act surprised, to wave to the camera in glee as I hoist my award—my award!—to the sky.

“FIVE. FOUR. THREE . . .”

And just as the cameras get ready to blaze back to life, just as the audience roars back to on-air applause, a seat-filler—some woman in tacky heels and a tight black dress—rushes in front of the camera to try jumping into a seat in the row directly in front of us. The producer’s veins bulge from her neck as she screams, “GET OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” But people are standing to make room for the woman in the black dress to sit. Everybody finally lowers to their seats, but by then, the cameraman is already moving forward, and in the confusion, he stops on the man sitting directly in front of me. And for a moment, time stops entirely.

I should point out, for the record, that the man sitting in front of me looks absolutely nothing like me. I could understand, even sympathize with the cameraman—the very same cameraman who had pointed directly at me seconds earlier—had the man in front of me been wearing glasses, or had a comb-over, or was wearing a similarly appalling Men’s Wearhouse suit hastily purchased the day before. But none of these things was true. The man in front of me had jet-black hair, a beard, and giant, gleaming teeth, and to top it all off, he was approximately thirty-five years older than me. And sure, maybe that cameraman suffers from one of those diseases where you can’t tell faces apart, or maybe he had recently sustained one of those debilitating injuries to the part of the brain that remembers things for longer than five seconds, but in either case, I might kindly suggest that he pursue a different line of work until he’s able to correctly distinguish an overweight bespectacled ginger from an old coot with fluorescent teeth. But now we’ll never know.

I look sidewise at Jeremy beside me and chuckle nervously. It’s the only thing I can do.

Meanwhile, the cameraman is screaming now. “You won!” he screams at the man in front of me. “Act excited!”