Land of the Real People

As he dances, ShoTyme ditches his jacket and pulls his vest over his head. He even loses an earring. When the tunes finally stop, ShoTyme has danced out of half his clothing.

The kids yelp that they want him to teach them some moves, so he runs a 30-minute clinic. He shows them how to move each joint in their arms — hand, elbow, shoulder, elbow, hand — to create a “rocking wave.” He calls out beats — five, six, seven, and eight — to teach them a box step.

Most important, he dishes a street-appropriate pep talk that’s short but effective. After all, this is his ’hood. He still lives just a few blocks away with his mom.

“Who here has big dreams?” he asks the crowd. Most kids around the room carefully raise their hands.

“That’s where it starts: big dreams! When I was young, I wanted to be James Brown! Am I James Brown? No, I’m ShoTyme! Did you enjoy seeing what I do?”

The kids howl in appreciation.

“Good. One day I want to see what you all do.”

Then, after his mom takes his gold tie and hands him a bottle of water, ShoTyme leaves the building.

VixenArialBolds red-hot personality make-over! And her scary brush with death!
On a recent Sunday night, Frankie Abernathy hops onstage at the Trouser Mouse, a smoke-filled bar in a Blue Springs shopping center. It's karaoke night, and lonely-looking cowboys have been crooning beer-drinking anthems and love songs for hours.

She grabs a microphone with one hand, faces a monitor and takes a swig from a bottle of Miller Lite. She looks mod, tricked out in a polka-dot dress and fishnets. A ring pierces her lip, and her polished fingernails are licked with tiny painted flames.

She revels in the fact that most people here don't know her as the Frankie. Most everywhere else, she is recognized as the one-woman blooper reel from Real World: San Diego.

The Blue Springs resident's on-air experience was the kind of coming-of-age train wreck that reality TV producers dream of. Her first night in the Real World house, she got drunk and puked. She smoked, even though she has the lung disease cystic fibrosis. Roommates caught her with a kitchen knife in the bathroom and learned that she habitually cut herself. She broke down because of a phobia of large boats.

When she got a visit from her hometown boyfriend, tattoo artist Dave Duly, the two looked head-over-heels for each other. But Duly would later watch, along with the rest of the country, his girlfriend make a drunken pass at a roommate. Twice.

Abernathy bailed out of the Real World before taping finished. When she did, viewers and her former housemates wondered: Would her relationship with Duly survive that full-scale meltdown?

After Abernathy left the show, she moved in with Duly for a few months. The couple bickered, once so loudly that they were confronted by cops in a parking lot. Then, at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards in Miami, Abernathy was arrested on charges of assaulting an officer who was trying to boot her from a party that she had crashed. Prosecutors reduced the charge to misdemeanor assault, she says. Her record is now clean.

Watching herself on television, the 23-year-old saw a caricature. But she also saw an opportunity to reflect on the person behind the "Drunk Frankie" character.

"If we were all followed around with cameras all the time, we'd learn a lot about ourselves," she says. "When you see everything you hate about yourself magnified by five, you think you should change that behavior."

Abernathy was unsettled by being well-known for accomplishing nothing. "It's a really weird thing to have fame and have never done anything to deserve it," she says.

She quit smoking and decided to stop drinking as much. She flirted with DJing for KRBZ 96.5 (the Buzz) and modeled for an independent label in California. Eventually, though, she decided to cash in her 15 minutes and find work that didn't trade on her pop-culture status.

She and Duly hooked up with the Art Intensity Network, a tattoo media company that creates DVD magazines of pricking conventions. She worked as a broadcaster for expos in New Orleans; Detroit; and Cocoa Beach, Florida. Duly inked at most of them.

Then Abernathy's life got complicated again. In December, a flare-up of her cystic fibrosis put her in the hospital, where she stayed for three months. Sickness had reduced to cameos her part-time sales work at places such as Guitar Center in Blue Springs. After she was released from the hospital, she moved back home and applied for long-term disability.