10 Green Girls Are Off To Hollywood!

Actually, only seven… three of them already live in Los Angeles;  Vanessa Meier, Rachel Avalon and Jessica Williamson. Both Zion Francis and Juliana Tran are from Austin, TX. Ariel Clay is coming from San Francisco. Leilani Munter from Cornelius, NC. Rachael Joy from Mount Rainier, MD. Erika Schmid from Portland, OR and Karen Pannochia from Miami.

It wasn’t easy for Project Green Search to narrow it down from 130+ entries to just ten. The online voting was a bit of a confusing mess, because the design platform we chose to build the web site only offered that voting option as a preset. Many people ended up voting by mistake while they were simply trying to access a contestant page… there was no instruction manual or practice run, but it was the only option we had. WordPress or nothing. We were dead set on launching this competition, so we made it work. We will do better next year.

We  asked the judges not to look at the number of stars, the rating, only consider how many votes each entry received. All things considered, online vote popularity didn’t feature all that much into their decision. They looked closely at modeling potential, education, screen presence, media background and experience. It boiled down to running averages on each judge’s top ten submission in order of preference, inviting to the finals those who featured most frequently, the highest on each judge’s list.

We’re confident that the ten women picked to participate in the finals represent the best expression of majority verdict by the judges. It wasn’t easy. Competitions create more losers than winners, that’s what I want to address here. We don’t cast Project Green Search in the same light as your run of the mill cut throat reality TV show. PGS is much more of a collaboration, developing talent to bring attention to issues all dear to our heart. In a sense, the winner, should and will, represent all the other contestants, become a spokesperson for all the women who entered this contest, which isn’t a contest really, it’s more like a direct action!

Our Project Green Girl is not going to be someone who wins by exterminating the competition. She’s going to win because all other nine girls are going to consider her to be the best candidate for the job, become her support network. The judges are going to pick up on that. We’re creating a family here, a team, a green model army. We’ll leave the cat fights, petty jealousy and superior attitudes to the slew of mind numbing reality TV shows which are only interested in rehab, temper tantrums, and suicidal tendencies. It’s already evident from the communications we’ve had with each finalists, that they are easy going, smart, with a funny bone.

LED artist and engineer Robert Van Winkle Jr., with a lot of help from Jessica Feuer, designed our trophy… in the spirit of recycled muffler art. He lives and works in Poughkeepsie, NY. Robert handed it to me at the Green Market Exposition in Bridgeport, CT. I’ve been debating whether to bring it with me on JetBlue or ship it. It’s got a rechargeable lithium ion battery pack powering three green LEDs, made from reclaimed industrial wire, sure to set off every Homeland Security alarm. But don’t worry, we’ll find a way to get safe and sound to ECCO Ultra Lounge on November 6th.