First time on a red carpet.

Spent the weekend with Girl Ninja and my family at the Veronica Mars movie premier in Austin, Texas this weekend. It was a quick trip, 36 hours in total, and a ton of fun. Here’s a pic of Girl Ninja and I on the red carpet….

Three years ago I wrote a post titled “The easiest money I’ve ever made” in which I shared about my 15 minutes of fame. Okay, who am I kidding, it wasn’t 15 minutes, more like 1.5 seconds of fame.

Literally.

As you may already know, Girl Ninja and I used to live in San Diego, which just so happened to be the same city the TV show Veronica Mars filmed in. My mom, and sister, were die-hard fans of Veronica Mars and begged me to try to get on as a background extra. Thus immortalizing me forever when the show went to DVD.

So I applied to the background casting company and after a few months of silence, I got my first gig as a background extra (FBI agent) for the Veronica Mars season four pilot.

This was my chance at becoming famous.

I mean, check out my big break (I’m the dude that walks out of the elevator at 7:08, haha).

I nailed that elevator walk out didn’t I!? (I’ll be signing autographs later).

It was awesome. I made $1,200 for about 12 hours of work. Which was especially cool considering “work” meant walking across a set, pretending to look at paperwork, and listening to a fake lecture in an auditorium.

Another interesting thing happened that night, however. Kristen Bell and I became friends.

There is a ton of down time between each take, and since we had that scene above together, we were pretty much forced to talk to avoid that awkward elevator silence we all know so well. We ended up hanging out a few different times together in San Diego and L.A and, according to my photo archives, we apparently enjoyed taking really stupid pictures of ourselves.

Here we are between takes on filming day (this was the pic I texted to my mom when she didn’t believe that I had met KB)…

Here we are taking “shaky face” pictures (look at that extension on my lips!)…

And here she is throwing up the deuces behind a dude we found fast asleep inside of a Ross.

All of that happened seven years ago, when I still lived in San Diego. I hadn’t seen KB since.

She, of course, was at the premier of her movie on Saturday night and when we crossed paths she remembered who I was. She then punched me (I still don’t know why), met Girl Ninja, met our future son too (if you count rubbing Girl Ninja’s tummy as a meeting), and gave us some solid parenting advice. We snapped a quick pic and then she went on her merry little way getting bombarded by hundreds of fans.

The premier was a ton of fun and, although Girl Ninja and I are totally exhausted from the quick travel turn around, feel like there wasn’t a more fun way we could have spent the weekend. Especially considering Baby Ninja is making HIS PREMIERE mid June, which will obviously hinder our future travel flexibility.

If there is a financial lesson to be learned in all of this, it is two-fold.

1. Go be an extra on TV shows. Minimal work for potentially epic pay.

2. Let Kristen be an example, that even if you are an uber-famous celebrity/multi-millionaire, you can still appreciate a solid Ross Dress For Less shopping trip, but more importantly not let all your perceived importance go to your head.

If you watched Veronica Mars when it was on TV all I can say is go watch the movie, you wont be disappointed.