Behind The "Reality" - page 7 - Setting Up The "Controversy" Setting Up The "Controversy" Was it the stress of the first eliminations that lead you to call the prayer meeting that became part of the "controversy" on the fourth episode?       Yeah, the fact that we were feeling it at the same time...and we had strep at the same time. So we had people sick, people depressed, people just in a bit of shock over the reality of the situation that we were in. That's when Jenny and I decided we would have a little prayer gathering the next morning, bring everybody back together and hopefully get everybody feeling better about the situation we chose to be in. We were going to be there for some time and we needed to find a way to deal with it together. We needed to help each other through that and be kind and understanding and patient with each other. Describe what happened at the prayer meeting.       That was on a Thursday morning. We asked the camera crew "Could we just have five minutes?" because they came back in that morning to start filming our little weekly clips. They waited while we did prayers and Jenny read out of her Bible. Everybody felt all pepped up again after that. It was good. What was the deal with the other cast meeting, the one that was shown during your clip and Erica Jo's?       That was the day before. As I mentioned, every Wednesday and Thursday were filming days for those clips, so we'd already started to shoot our weekly clips the day before the prayer meeting. But that Wednesday, they had decided to do something different for whatever reason - although I probably know the reason now.       Usually we'd all do individual things. But that Wednesday, they decided that we all had the same call time and would get into the common room and just hang out. We'd just do hours and hours of candid shooting. We'd have breakfast and chat, and we were doing a live show that Thursday night so we'd organize who's singing what and what order we were going to go in. It was just all conversational stuff, just normal stuff that people talk about over breakfast.       Probably three hours into the shooting, one of the show's producers decided to inject himself into the conversation. He said, "How do you younger girls feel about the older ones having more experience? Do you think they deserve to win this show more than you guys because they've been working at it a lot longer?" It immediately went from us all getting along and doing fine to Erica blowing some steam over it.       She got very defensive about it...and in her defense I think it was a valid response. It was a very unfair and provocative question to throw at anybody, especially in that environment. We were all on the same level. We'd all worked hard to be on the TV show, and we all had mutual respect for each other. She reacted and got very upset about it.       The rest of us were discussing the different thing we'd done to lead us to that point, and some had done more than others but that was irrelevant. The fact was that we were all on an equal playing ground on that day on that show.       Then in a matter of five or seven minutes, that was that. We gave each other hugs and tried to get back to where we were before that producer injected that stupid comment. Next Page: A Turning Point    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Back To Top