In one word, therealityshowwasgreat. You don’t often get the opportunity to live in New York for free, but when you do, you make sure to enjoy the hell out of it. To begin at the beginning — we hit the ground running. From the first day the Reality Show cast was engaged in ice-breaking, soul-exposing introductions. These introductions shifted into regular warm-ups, so that on the daily, every member of the cast participated in terribly personal trust-building, ego-stripping exercises. Like staring into each others eyes while gurgling like a baby ostrich. The ultimate goal: to bring us as a cast to an empathetic understanding of one another — the perfect recipe for a heartwrenching show. And it worked. Friends became family. Enemies became tolerable. Reality Show phenom Lillian Korinek once remarked to me in a confidential exchange, “I’ll be honest with you, I hated the sight of you before the show, and I don’t know what it is, but now I really don’t mind when you’re nearby as long as you don’t talk much.”As well as learning to play nice together, we learned to live together. The Reality Show cast lived in NYU Palladium dorms, where we were spread out across four suites on the same floor. Each suite contained two double rooms, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a gas stove. In an unresolved dispute, 李姗 (Cheryl Li) used the stoves as her instrument of revenge, leaving a slow gas leak on in the suite I shared with Ricardo Chacon Rodriguez, Quinn McHale, and 王思浩 (Howard Wang). Fortunately, we all woke up in the morning — and with a good head buzz to boot. Upon confrontation, 李姗 walked away mumbling, “Come on, it was a joke.”Lethal jokes aside, we lived comfortably positioned between a Trader Joe’s grocery and a Trader Joe’s wine shop. With everything we needed just right out the door, it was easy for many of us to roost inside, away from the sun and inconveniences of walking. In our free time outside of rehearsals, cast members could be found spread out between suites, in living rooms and kitchens, talking and eating and writing new material for the show.New material was demanded by our directors almost every day of rehearsals. So midnights and early mornings were spent in huddles, frantically writing the next song about safe sex, the next skit about anxiety. Our directors were insane, intensely creative, and hardworking. Preston, our director, also directed the Reality Shows for NYU’s other two campuses, working a total of nine hours a day on top of extra time outside for planning. Nate, our musical director, is one of the most musically intuitive, talented people any of us had met. From scratch, Nate would take shaky skeletons of songs written and breathe substance into them. In conversation once he humbly remarked, “I could write this whole show for you in a night, but that’s not the point, this is your show.”And it was our show. And now, NYU Shanghai, it is your show, if you’ll have us. The New York experience was amazing, and could generate pages of books of half-witty things to remark on. But you'd need a professional writer for that. This article was written by Oscar Fossum. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Oscar Fossum