You think you'd heard it all about a "reality" TV show's doomed notion to fake up some drama by shipping part of an L.A. man's lifelong collection of 55,000 dresses to a Santa Rosa vintage clothing shop. Then a former Miss Petaluma speaks up.
Sandra Gordon Michaan — Miss Petaluma 1989-90 — could only gasp, laugh and shake her head as she read how the owner of Hot Couture in Railroad Square was nearly driven to the brink by her role in a retailing misadventure triggered by scriptwriters for A&E's ostensibly true-to-life "Shipping Wars."
Hot Couture owner Marta Koehne had prepared to be filmed as she received and sold 540 gently used, lovely old dresses. But the shipment didn't happen, so she drove to L.A. to pick up the dresses but discovered they were nowhere near as nice as she'd been led to believe. She left without even one dress, and then she hurriedly borrowed others from fellow Bay Area vintage-clothes dealers so she'd have something on the racks for all the people she'd told about the made-for-TV dress sale that had utterly unraveled.
Her saga has Ex-Miss Petaluma Michaan, a Casa Grande alum who's now 44, feeling like she dodged a bullet.
A&E had originally wanted her to star in the scripted episode on the shipping of some of the 55,000 dresses.
Michaan said she heard from "Shipping Wars" in October and she put in a lot of time preparing for a episode that was to cast her as a fashion diva who locks horns with the burly truck driver who delivers a selection of the L.A. man's long-accumulated dresses.
"I was very intrigued by the whole idea," admits Michaan, an actress and model who runs the Alameda Point Vintage Fashion Faire and co-produces the monthly Alameda Point Antiques Faire.
"They told me this is their highest rated reality show on A&E," she said. The premise of her going nose to nose with the driver who trucks the dresses to Alameda sounded sort of fun.
But Michaan said there came a series of scheduling conflicts and false starts, then the A&E people switched to wanting to do the filming at a vintage shop in her quaint hometown of Petaluma. And then, she stopped hearing from the "Shipping Wars" producer altogether.
The producer apparently had discovered Marta Koehne and her shop in Santa Rosa's picturesque Railroad Square. A plan was hatched to ship the dresses to Hot Couture last Thursday and film a concocted tiff between the driver and Koehne.
But that idea fell apart, causing Koehne to jump into her cargo van and drive to the L.A. dress warehouse in a semi-frantic attempt to salvage the evening-gown sale she'd told everyone about.
If A&E manages to produce an episode of "Shipping Wars" from all this, neither Koehne nor Michaan can imagine what the scripted story line will be.
But it seems to the former Miss Petaluma that if a camera crew simply had shot all the real-life drama that flowed as she and Koehne stepped into this mess, it would make for good TV.
SPEAKING OF SUCH, it's genuinely thrilling to local music lovers that Will Champlin, 30-year-old son of rocker Bill Champlin of "Sons of Champlin," is faring so well on NBC's "The Voice."
Will, who sings and plays keyboard, just made it as one of the televised competition's eight finalists for the top prize of a recording contract.
The Champlins are largely a Marin County musical phenomenon, but Bill, who played also with "Chicago," has deep connections north of the Marin-Sonoma line.
And the Green Music Center or Wells Fargo Center for the Arts would no doubt sell a lot of tickets to a performance by the son of the primary Sons of Champlin.
POWER TO THE VIKINGS: Friday would have been a dark and difficult day at Santa Rosa's Montgomery High, School, after the winds Thursday night knocked down nearby electrical lines.
But Principal Laurie Fong led a chorus of praise to PG&E for bringing in a "generator the size of a truck!"
(Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.)
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