Chapter One: Why I ran away to join a lemonade truck

Have you ever dreamed of turning your life upside down? Wondered what would happen if you were to quit your job, leave your apartment, pack a bag and walk away from organized society in order to find yourself? Is it possible to turn life’s routine on its head and if you did, what would happen?

When you disconnect from society, something inside you changes. Once you submerge yourself completely into nature’s simplicity and live in abandon of Monday through Friday’s–truly living your life and not just existing five days in the hopes of relishing two– you know you can never go back. I know this because I once did. I broke free and it changed me irrevocably.

I saw the premonition form a very young age. At age six I told my mom I didn’t want to grow up. I couldn’t understand what adults did for fun. As far as I could see all they did was talk on the phone, work, eat and sleep. They didn’t play or make believe or dress up in old dance recital clothes. I made my sister (who was three years older than I) promise that she would never stop playing with me. Poor Renee.

Even as I grew older into preteen years, my Peter Pan syndrome didn’t dissipate; rather my fear deepened with the revelation that life would never be easy. It was the time when everyone was asking what you want to be when you grow up. What are you going to study when you go to college and where are you going to go? I didn’t have an answer for any of it. All I knew was that by watching the lives of adults it only confirmed that I could never share their destiny. I could never live every day of my life doing the same old routine: talk on phone, work, eat and sleep. Oh, I forgot watch TV!

I had to have more. I had to matter. I had to make a difference. My worst nightmare was dying and being forgotten.

I knew I was either going to have an awesome life of great success and adventure or I feared becoming that disgruntled bum on the side of the street from Pretty Woman shouting at passer bys about broken dreams and the evils of society.

And just as I thought it would, my life didn’t work out to be all that easy. No matter how hard I tried I never found a direction like the rest of my peers and as a result my early adult life was riddled with fear and the endless search for a direction.

The first real fear settled in at the tail end of my junior year in college when I realized I didn’t have what it takes to work in the news business. It was too late to change my major completely; I was three years in to my broadcasting degree but I had to do something. I remembered my love for gazing at the morning sky, something I had inherited from my mom, and made a last-minute alteration. I added Geography as a second minor and signed up for Mississippi State’s meteorology correspondence program, which would earn me a new future as a broadcast meteorologist. Weather girl here I come.

That quick fix seemed to solve my dilemma. I graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communication with an emphasis in blah blah blah, a double minor in blah blah and every damn blah honor you could imagine. I got the job offer of every graduate’s dreams and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to work at a ‘top fifty’ station as a weekend News Producer and meteorologist in training.

Just three months into that brilliant dream I lost my job and lost my direction once again. That day is forever engrained in my mind.

It was Wednesday morning. I had just settled into my desk and turned my computer on when I got the call from Human Resources. My presence was requested in the upstairs conference room. I climbed the stairs with a smile thinking I was going to be discussing my raise. But the instant I sat down at that long rectangular table across from my News Director and looked into his wide eyes I knew I had been called there for a very different purpose.

“Shelly, there’s nothing good about what I am about to say.”

He said it in the most foreboding of ways but it didn’t stop the internal denial. He is not firing me. This isn’t happening--but then he continued.

He said something along the lines of, ‘we’ve decided to let you go’. My mind began to spin. In that instant I literally saw my life crumble out of the sky like a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces raining down before my eyes

“Why?”

It was a simple question but he couldn’t answer it.

The lack of closure haunted me for the next two years as I wandered across the state of Michigan working for Abercrombie & Fitch as a retail store manager. I was too scared to go back to the news industry and too miserable in knowing this was what my life had amounted to after all my hard work. Not only had I been trapped within the routine I feared as a child, I wasn’t even a legitimate adult. I was folding clothes for a living. I worked in a mall.

I knew I had reached my breaking point one December morning as I circled the parking lot of Troy, Michigan’s Somerset mall unable to find a parking spot amongst the naturally belligerent Christmas holiday shoppers. I quit a week later.

I got rid of everything I owned, packed two black trash bags full of clothes, parked my car at my stupid boyfriend’s parents’ house and climbed into a Chevy Avalanche. Alongside Mike, my stupid boyfriend, and Monty, my smart dog, we fled Michigan to head west toward Los Angeles with hopes of resurrecting our abandoned dreams.

Mike’s dream was to be a film director. My dream was to just get back to creativity and Monty’s dream was to hump a new leg. Whether it was television or film I was sure I could find my answer in the entertainment industry. I didn’t think it would be all that hard. I had the education and a producer’s credit on my resume, and Mike had a producer’s assistant gig lined up in Sherman Oaks.

It makes me laugh now to look back at our naivety.
It was February of 2006. The same year torrential rains caused homes to slide down from the Hollywood Hills and threatened to shut down red carpet events. Those kinds of rains in southern California were not normal and led the major population to believe the world was coming to an end.

It was also enough rain to dampen the spirits of two Michiganders expecting sunny LA skies not soggy socks. It down poured the day I dropped Mike off for his first day of work. By the time I got back to our shared guest room in a friend’s home it was time to go sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic again and meet Mike for lunch. At least I fed Monty. I think.

“The job’s bullshit,” Mike said.

The horrific words exited his mouth before he had even shut the car door on the watery onslaught.

“What?”

“The job’s bullshit. I’m not going back.”

Traffic in LA doesn’t have patience for a serious conversation to take place while idling on the side of Ventura Boulevard. My mind was at a standstill but the ambush of honking forced my foot to step on the pedal regardless. My foot took us to Panda Express where we walked the buffet style line to select plates of lamp-warmed orange chicken, fried rice and egg rolls to take to a table crammed in the corner. Not the ideal place for life-changing events to occur but I couldn’t stop it from happening.

Stupid Mike was adamant about not returning to the job he claimed to be ‘bullshit’. I distinctly remember staring into my plastic cup of tap water feeling as if the noisy world of Los Angeles was closing in on me. I didn’t know what to do or where to go next.

More floundering would follow. Desperate times meant living off of fifteen dollars a week to buy forty-five packs of ramen noodles. Sometimes sixty packs depending on which store.

Days of three-hour commutes riding three different combinations of Los Angeles’s Metro to journey from the valley to a Beverly Hills internship where I rolled phone calls and read bad movie scripts until four in the afternoon followed by a bus over the hill back into the valley for a night shift at Superior Nissan where I stood out front greeting car shoppers before the vulture-like salesmen swooped in and scared them away. Whew!

I persevered through several months of grueling eighteen-hour days and realized Monty hadn’t been walked or fed since Michigan. I left one morning and realized stupid Mike was still in the same clothes and playing the same video game as the month before. Of course he never left the bed.

Resentment set in. I was suffocating. I was lying awake at night in a single twin bed with my body pressed up against a man I was growing to loathe. His skin drenched in sweat day in and day out from the stifling heat that crept through the tiny windows no larger than a shoebox. Gross.

Just as I thought all hope was lost to ever gain paying work in Hollywood I finally got my big break in reality TV. The call came one unlikely morning from a friend of a friend asking if I was still looking for a production assistant job. The girl on the phone referred me to two jobs and I got both. Are you kidding me?

The first being a six-week project working on ‘Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts’, a talk show style project for Regena Thomashaur, a self-proclaimed sex guru. And the other job being a production assistant position on a home makeover show with the TV Guide Channel called ‘Ready Set Change’. I went guru first with Mama Gena but it was brief and strange. But the work was exactly what I needed to get my feet wet in the ways of the industry.

‘Ready Set Change’ was more lasting and the crew became family. I finally broke up with stupid Mike, stayed in a friend’s sunroom in Redondo Beach for a few months and met a friend by the name of Jen. She introduced me to the possibility of life beyond saving money for rent. We rode motocross in the dunes and went snowboarding in the mountains. I ditched the beach and moved to the valley to share a bed with Jen and her roommate, Rob, in their two-bedroom Studio City apartment. For the first time in my adult life I didn’t feel the pull to reinvent myself. The eternal search for a direction in life seemed to have found an end.

But then, in true form to the ways of my turbulent life, the happy times came crashing down with one swift blow from TV Guide Channel’s new CEO’s decision to can the show that had become my cushion. No mercy was shown as they pulled the plug, ripped the unstylish rug out from underneath us and broke up our happy family.

But then I was told I had been saved. They had a staff PA position waiting for me in the Specials department under the command of one of my closest ex-Ready Set Changers, Rick Saloomey. Not to be confused with the similarly pronounced meat, salami.

By most people’s standards I should have been happy. I had a staff position with benefits, which is unheard of in the world of reality TV. I had a friend for a boss, I had a boyfriend, I had happy hours with friends and I went snowboarding on the weekends. But something inside of me was dying. My spirit was drowning. I had been shoved in front of a TV set in a room without windows, fondly known as the ‘panic room’, to log interviews of sappy old soap opera stars with pulled skin and over-ripe lips.

The light in my eyes had dulled and my smile was fading more and more with every day. I came home nightly with barely enough energy to heat a noodle bowl in the microwave before crawling into bed to fall asleep to the drone of I Love Lucy sitcoms. My life had become a masquerade disguised with drunken nights at Cabo Cantina happy hours, but no amount of tequila could hide the reality that I was depressed.

I didn’t like what I was doing and I didn’t want a future in the business I had discovered to be so self-consuming. I didn’t like LA. I came here out of necessity but it hadn’t taken long for the illusion to dissolve and the need to flee to surface once again. I needed a new direction.
I began searching Craigslist for news jobs. And then I found Josh Lange and Just Squeezed Juice.

Travel, work and play with Just Squeezed Juice. 1 position left–female.

I clicked on the job posting more out of curiosity than the thought that I would actually become the next female to travel, work and play with a pair of vagabond juicers. What the hell are juicers anyhow? Right? But after reading further into the job description, which entailed joining a pair of action sports enthusiasts filming their cross-country travels with the possibility of becoming a character of a reality television show on the Travel Channel, I couldn’t help myself but apply. I figured why not? What are the odds I will even get a reply?
Josh responded the following day.

Thanks for your interest with Just Squeezed. You sound like a cool girl and look like a fit for our position. (really?) We love that your into action sports and have good skills to promote and sell our juice.

Is there anything that is holding you back right now from joining us on our adventure? (ummm) Are you able to pack up and hit the road for the next 3-4 months? (maybe) We will be heading for our first show in Atlanta, GA around the 20th of May. (so soon?) I will attach our tentative schedule for you to check out.

Are you OK with not getting paid? You can make good tips though. (hmmmm) Your expenses will be paid. (go on)

We travel in a full size Ford F350 Diesel 4 door truck and pull a 30 ft trailer. It’s comfortable but you must be the kind of girl who is flexible. In other words it will be tough being a girly girl on this trip. (I’m no girly girl) We live in the trailer together, everyone has there own bed, there is a kitchen, bathroom with shower, air conditioning etc. But it's no hotel room, are you good with that situation? (perhaps)

Why should I pick you? (cause I’m the shit, yo!) Convince me you are the person we are looking for. (I will, bitches) It is important for us to find the right person for this opportunity, someone who fits into our lifestyle and shares our passions. (you want passion? I’ve got passion! I’m Shelly, damn it!)

I answered Josh’s questionnaire on Wednesday. He wrote back on Thursday asking that we talk further. I called Josh Friday evening after work as I waited on an oil change for my Volkswagen Beetle. I always recommend making life changing phone calls while waiting on a lube job.

I knew there was nothing ‘right’ about what Josh had to offer me. He made it quite clear I wouldn’t be getting paid and there was no guarantee their documenting endeavors would pay off either, but from the instant I dialed that 505 number and we began talking, I knew I couldn’t say no. Everything he said, everything he believed in aligned so perfectly with how I envisioned life should be and so desperately needed my life to become.

He told me he had spoken with several amazing candidates but something about me seemed to be ‘right’.

“I’d like you to join us. I’m offering you the position if you want it. But I will need you to meet us in Albuquerque next weekend so we can leave for Atlanta by Monday.”

I knew I could’ve been making the biggest mistake of my life but in that moment I decided to quit my job with less than a week’s notice, pack my car with all the sporting equipment I owned and drive to New Mexico to meet up with two total strangers who juiced.