A 26-year-old graduate student with large glasses and closely cropped curly hair stands opposite a mannequin dressed in women's clothing on prime-time television.
Psychologist Debbie Magids gives Joshua Green GS '06 a task: greet this mannequin as if it were your grandmother. He leans in and awkwardly hugs the plastic woman.
Next assignment: greet the mannequin as if it were your girlfriend. Once again, the student awkwardly wraps his arms around the mannequin.
Magids raises her eyebrows.
Green is one of the 20 contestants on the fourth season of "Beauty and the Geek," a reality TV show produced by actor Ashton Kutcher that pairs "gorgeous but academically impaired women" and "brilliant but socially challenged men," according to the show's website.
The show, which had its season premiere on the CW network last week, aims to improve the intellect and social skills of its polar-opposite contestants. After 13 episodes, the last-standing beauty-and-geek couple will split a $250,000 grand prize.
Needless to say, Green received the lowest score on the mannequin challenge, the show's first test of social skills. The abysmal results confirmed what some viewers have already said — that Green is the biggest geek on the show.
Green's route to "Beauty and the Geek" began in the University chess club. "They had been advertising the auditions for the show on the chess club listserv," he said.
The former astrophysics graduate student said the idea of being on the show did not initially appeal to him when he heard about it last April. "I thought it would just be too weird," he said.
Green eventually auditioned for the show when its recruiters found him at the Debasement Bar in the graduate college.
Zach Berta '07, who was a teacher's assistant with Green for an astrophysics course, said he was not surprised that Green was cast.
"I always really liked him. I thought he was a really fun kid," Berta said. "He's wacky and probably a perfect fit for the show."
Green no longer attends the University because he failed his Phd general exams in May 2006, he said. He currently is looking for a job.
The local star expressed mixed feelings about his friends and family's encouragement to appear on the reality show.
"It's funny when everyone says you've got to go on this show because you have to have some good characteristics like intelligence, but you also have to have some bad characteristics like social awkwardness," he said.
But Green takes some measure of comfort from his belief that being a geek is about more than apparent awkwardness in social situations.
He said some hobbies, such as his chess playing, lead people to consider him a geek.
While Green's fondness for chess was mentioned on the show, it was the televised clips of him dancing that may have solidified his geek status.
"At some point in my spring semester, I was coming back from a meeting of the chess club, and I heard some music that I liked in the D-Bar," Green said. "It was music I could sing along to and I liked, and the people watching seemed to like it, and I thought 'this is fun.' "
The people watching Green on the dance floor at the D-Bar may have enjoyed him, but the beauties interacting with Joshua on the show weren't too enamored.
Shalandra, the beauty who would later end up Green's partner, described him as so geeky that "he's not even real."
The response from some "Beauty and the Geek" viewers has been similar. "I've been reading the message boards," Green said. "Some people think I'm adorable, but one person said 'Joshua is more of a dweeb.' "
But Green said he isn't worried about what viewers' responses.
"I don't care how I was portrayed because the people who know me will be able to put things in context and fill in the pieces," he said. "The people who don't know me will not put them in context, and I don't care what they think."
After watching the premiere, Green said he is enjoying the show and is satisfied with his "reasonable" but "not completely accurate" depiction.
Green said he couldn't reveal what will happen on future episodes, but he said that being on the show has changed his view on social interaction between groups of very different people and given him more social skills.
"It opened my eyes to the fact that people from different worlds can get along and have more in common than you'd expect," Green said.
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