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    This commercial for 1-800 CALL AT&T was called "Rad Mom". Anybody who has seen it knows why. It aired a lot on ESPN during the X-Games and then hit MTV for some time. It was part of an extreme sports campaign that also included commercials with Matt Hoffman on his BMX bike in space and a rollerblader that eats it from getting distracted by a hot chick. The auditions for these commercials were really strange. They had a half pipe and a bike jump set up on an empty lot in Hollywood. There were a bunch of skateboarders, in-liners, and BMX riders in line with all their gear. They were taking turns on the pipe and jump. The in-liners were demonstrating how well they could bite it. I just got my picture taken and talked all sorts of trash about how great I thought I was. I guess it worked.

    The shoot only took one day. It was in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave desert. They had a pay phone set up in the sage brush. I had two parts to my job. The first was to go up in freefall and bust out a bunch of moves. That was easy. Then I had to land next to the phone, pick it up, and pretend to call home. I thought this would be basic also. Yeah right. The problem was that there were some winds that day. Winds aren't normally anything to worry about because, under normal circumstances, you can pick your direction of landing (which should be facing into the wind). But the director wasn't going to let me get off that easy. He needed the phone positioned so that it could be shot with the sun behind the camera. Made perfect sense from a cinematography point of view. But this put my landing approach in the worst possible direction: downwind. Parachutes don't perform real well with a tailwind, especially when you need an accuracy landing like this one. I was in for some trouble and I knew it. But that never stopped me before.

    It took eight jumps to get an acceptable landing and phone grab. I say acceptable because it was far from perfect. The shot they actually used in the commercial came from the eighth jump, and it wasn't pretty. But the other seven landings were far worse. I always landed near the phone, but most of the time it was a crash landing where I would just about break my legs.  I almost took out the cameraman one time. The director was actually pretty happy with the shot he got because it looked dramatic. But it made me look like a fool. Oh well.

    Anyway, it was a pretty cool commercial with a funny twist at the end. I had a lot of people ask me if that was really my mom skateboarding. I am not sure if they were kidding or not. My mom is way cool, but definitely not that radical. That skateboarder is the best of the best: Tony Hawk.