Back 2006 I went to a local Chicago kiss convention with family.....my 11 year old won the Guitar Hero contest there.....and a guy was taping people in a side room looking for Family Jewels story ideas. He calls us in to tape and finds out I used to be in bands late 80's and now my 11 year old was learning from me. 2 Weeks later we get a call from producers to fly us out in Jan.'07 to Miami (??) to tape an episode, all expenses paid + $300 for me and my son. At airport we found others doing similar.....they gave us little info...we thought Miami was weird, not L.A. Each of us was to be givin a "story" related to Simmons family....ours was Rock Star dad teaching son( like Gene to Nick), others were an artist (like Nick), a singer(like Sophie), and other stuff like jewelry and fashion,etc. They put us up in decent hotel on the ocean, on Friday, bought us dinner in South Beach, still no info though. Next morning picked up and brought to studio. We were first( nervous as hell), would the Simmons' be there?? Just 30 minutes prior to shooting, we were all let down.....it would be a mock up of us "faking " talking to them, then edited to look like a conversation. We would each get 1-2 minutes of screen time in show. We were put in our (fake studio)kitchen while lighting,mics were setup......director told us where to look as we were supposed to be chatting with Gene(NOT!!) After more than an hour of shooting our 1 minute scene over and over we were done. We retired to the holding area where we spent the day watching others shoot and we all swapped stories. Highlight was someone knew Bruce Kulick, called him up, and we all speakerphone chatted him for at least 30 minutes, super nice guy!!!! Well, air date came and went.....was a rerun??? Finally after weeks we were told our episode with 2 others were dropped because the network was purchased and those 3 episodes weren't included. We were heartbroken......we were on front page of local newspaper even. Oh well.....still a cool experience.

Nothing wrong with a freebie!

That's pretty cool, but sucky it didn't air.

Also sucky you pretend to talk to Gene while in Miami. Then he pretends to talk to you in LA! You could just have done it with him, would have been quicker.

My friend's ex-girlfriend was on the show. She was at Universal City Walk and she got to ask a question.