Friday night: Marriott hotel, Troy, Michigan

Before I tell you what Kelly, LouLou, Anna, and I have been doing all day, I wanted to take a moment to say an enormous thank you to Andrew Balingit,. He accepted the position of P.A. (production assistant) for the day for the CBS camera crew that was on campus Tuesday, to film the big announcement that Kelly Sherman, LouLou Quintela, and Anna Pogosova had been chosen as one of five finalists in the Chevy Super Bowl College Ad Challenge.

That's right, Super Bowl. National advertising contest. One of five finalist teams chosen from over 1,000 entries. ARE YOU LISTENING, EDITORS OF THE SPARTAN DAILY?

(Andrew, why haven't you blogged about this yet? I'm sure it was a very interesting experience.)

Now, let me tell you about today. My day began at 4:00 — yes, I mean San Jose time. My alarm wasn't set to go off until 4:30, but since I was awake anyway, and since the cab was coming to pick us up at 5:30, I decided to stay up and attend to last minute details.

Anna and LouLou were able to arrange their own transport to the airport, but neither Kelly nor I have a car, and since we both live downtown, we decided to share a cab. Kelly stopped by my office yesterday and asked if I would please call him in the morning to make sure he was up.

I called him at 5:00. There was no answer.

I called him every five minutes until 5:25, then I went downstairs and called the cab driver. She was outside Kelly's frat house, and reported there was no Kelly in sight. I suggested she come fetch me, which she did, then we headed back to the frat house. By this time it was 5:45.

The cab driver honked her horn, and I stood outside and screamed at the top of my lungs, in the general direction of the windows, "KELLY SHERMAN, WAKE UP!" I kicked and banged the front door.

We kept this up for 20 minutes, and there was not a stirring from within the house. I kept screaming my way around the building, until I discovered an open door around back. Then I went inside and started screaming and banging on doors.

I'm sure I was quite annoying to the boys who live there, and, if they're reading, I'm sorry, but I don't give a rat's ass who I annoyed at that point — it was my responsibility to get Kelly to the airport. Despite the inexplicable editorial stance of our school newspaper, I realized that getting that young man onto that plane — or not — was the difference between national fame for SJSU, and national embarassment.

I got him on the plane.

That was 15 hours ago. He's now asleep in his room, as are LouLou and Anna. They have a big day ahead of them, and we have to meet in the lobby at 7:30 to be driven to GM's advertising agency's offices.

We're being driven in GM vehicles, of course.

We were met at the airport by a much larger camera crew from CBS, who filmed us arriving, then gathering our luggage, then mic'ed us and filmed us again. Then filmed us exiting the airport, talking in the car on the way to the hotel, entering the hotel, entering our rooms, and heading downstairs to dinner.

The trip from the airport to the hotel, normally a 20 minute journey, took two hours. We crawled most of the way, because there had been an accident. So there wasn't time for us to change. We ate dinner in the fancy steak house in the Marriott in Troy, Michigan, in our SJSU sweatshirts.

And we were damned proud to be doing so.