Meeting Ray the Rant

When two producers from the cable television show Fandemonium emailed me, I had never heard of either of them let alone their new show. It seemed like good business sense for me to search the Internet and perform a background check. I researched the name of each producer but came up empty handed for Mr. Ray the Rant. How could Ray the Rant be producing a cable television show without something, anything being on the information super highway?

Nevertheless, via email both producers related that they had viewed footage of me in the 25/8 Philadelphia Eagles commercial then tracked me down through my casting agency. Now they were soliciting my interest in doing a bigger segment of my being a Philadelphia Eagles fan for their new television show Fandemonium, which salutes diehard fans of the bleed green team.

Feeling foolish that I did not know who Ray the Rant was, I responded in kind by emailing both producers back expressing my interest to christen their show. I wound up submitting video and other media for the TV show to cover me as a lifelong fan in a future episode.

Fast forward three weeks. While sitting at a Philadelphia Eagles pre-season game, the giant Fanavision screen played a promotional trailer for this same TV show, Fandemonium. To my complete surprise, the trailer showed an animated scruffy ruffian who introduced himself as Ray the Rant. In humorous fashion, I learned that my email communication had not been with a living person but with an oddball cartoon character. Still viewing one dimensional Ray the Rant on the stadium’s big screen, I heard him exclaim, “Joe from Jersey we got your tape!”

The irony rings my ears and stings my eyes. It was bad enough that I had been regularly talking with a cartoon character through email. Now our relationship had accelerated to the point that he could be talking about me to 60,000 other people. The situation was getting out of hand. Over the next couple of days, I dealt with only the counterpart producer to sign releases to appear on upcoming episodes of this same TV show. I refused to copy Ray the Rant on any further email distribution to avoid becoming a laughing stock within the Philadelphia Eagles organization. Believing I had sent Ray the Rant back to the drawing board, I received another personal email from him. This time his bristled scruffy animated cartoon face was an unmistakable mugshot inside a thumbnail icon. His likeness accompanied a Facebook invitation for me to become his friend.

Social networking is a pervasive labyrinth so who I am to understand the matrix? Ray the Rant remains the only non-living friend I have befriended on Facebook.