With the biggest Canadian eating contest this weekend, I reposted the start of a blog entry that was originally on the Montreal Expos website in 2002. The blog entry describes a public access cable show on Ottawa cable that starred a woman named Celeste who would eat a large meal during the broadcast. The entry is in all probability a joke, but in the minor chance it was an actual program, I thought I would see if anyone had any additional information about it.

The start of the blog entry is after the jump

I have a friend named Celeste, who’s Asian, good-looking, and athletic in that rare combination of the three that could make her a lot of money if her moral standards were lower, but she’s a good, clean person. She has a metabolism like a blown 426 hemi, though, and watching her eat is a spectacle on par with ancient Roman bloodsport. Open hand over clenched fist, over and over, into the mouth, chew, chew, swallow. Anything you put in front of her. It’s unflinching and destructive and wondrous to watch in a compellingly repulsive way (or a repulsively compelling one, it doesn’t matter). It’s transfixing that she can eat so much, so quickly, so violently. It’s almost pornographic, really.

I bring it up because back in 1998 I had the brilliant idea to make it a show on Rogers 22, the community cable-access channel. We paid the money (less than you’d think), got the studio, and every Thursday night at 9:30 for about two years, she would just sit in a cheaply-lit TV studio and eat. She never said anything; I was the nameless guy who came on camera every five minutes wearing a www.exposbaseball.com t-shirt to put a new plate of food in front of her: nachos, jerk chicken, risotto, something like that. We had friends lining up to cook for us. It wasn’t exploitative; she got to eat to her heart’s content, I advertised ExposNET, and no one spoke for the whole half-hour (the titles were magic marker on bristol board). The show was hilariously bad, but before long it had developed a cult following a lot like Tom Green had for his Rogers show; smaller, obviously. There were a couple websites (all now defunct) on Geocities devoted to the show, listing all the food she ate, some recipes, messageboards on what would come next, secret messages hidden within the show, things like that. I didn’t expect such huge cult appeal, but the show became addictive for a number of people who liked watching attractive Asian girls, who liked watching food, who just wanted to see what she’d brutally consume next. Our most popular episode ever was the one where she ate most of a pot roast, silently and non-stop, for the entire show. No one knew anything about Celeste but her name, but no one visited ExposNET either. We became minor celebrities in Ottawa at the time (hard I know), but to look at her, you’d never know she was a typhoon for half an hour every Thursday night.

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