COUNTRY CONNECTION: Everybody Has a Second Job

By PAUL KENT
For the Stafford County Sun
Published: April 9, 2008

So I go home after another night in the studio, just a few hours removed from being interviewed by this very paper – thanks for dropping by, Uriah! - and I turn on my television, crack open a beer and set about cooking something edible without setting the smoke detector off. (Guess which one of these I failed at.) During commercials, and before I turned my apartment into a Hamburger Helper flavored Cheech & Chong movie, I saw the question that will forever haunt my mind.

Can a country music star make it as a stand-up comedian?

Shortly before waking up the neighbors with the smoke detectors, they were probably stirred with my thunderous cry of “Who gives a darn!?”

Country stars are gravitating to the reality TV fad like bugs to the zapper. Sara Evans danced with the stars, then exited in the midst of her divorce fiasco. Trace Adkins nearly ran the entire gauntlet as a celebrity Apprentice. Blake Shelton organized a choir and outlasted Michael Bolton’s — and really, that’s the important part. And now Clint Black, he of the aw-shucks smile and more hits than your sober teammate in a dart game, is trying his “secret talent” of comedy against other celebrities.

On the plus side, Black, like all those mentioned above, is competing for charity. Country music being big on giving back, I suppose it’s only natural that we find star after star on reality show after reality show. Still, the whole thing seems ridiculous on its face. In order to win Black’s charity of choice some money, one must vote for Black’s stand-up routine over, say, Danny Bonaduce on a unicycle. Is this what we’ve come to? In order to do good things, we have to vote for the silly-but-harmless over the stupid-but-harmless?

Raising money for charity on television is the new second job of the celebrity. Some folks wait tables on weekends; some folks go ballroom dancing for cystic fibrosis or what-have-you. The ends more than justify the means, but I truly wish that these folks would just send kids around with cardboard piggy banks in the promise of memorabilia. You know, the way things used to work.

That said, if I could convince my neighbors to donate a dollar to the Autism Society of America for every time I cooked dinner without loud bleeping noises, I’d probably enter a reality cooking competition. We’d raise 20 bucks if we were lucky, but it’s twenty more dollars than we started with, and hey — dinner!

Paul Kent hosts Thunder After Dark, 7 p.m. to midnight weekdays and the Saturday Night Special, Saturdays 7 p.m. to midnight on Thunder 104.5 Everything Country and More.

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