Thursday, September 17, 2009

Guilty Pleasure ~ Silly Admission

Okay, already, I LOVE her! She never fails to make me laugh, feel happy, feel good about myself. She's a ad campaign's dream girl. And while I have no intention of buying what she's selling, it's a comfort to know that I am not alone.

"The Strange Allure of the Progressive Insurance Girl:
What makes normal people fall so hard for the cute and perky pitchwoman known as 'Flo'?"

Two hours of hair and makeup transform improv comic Stephanie Courtney into Flo, seller of insurance and stealer of hearts.

She's bubbly and beaming, high-volume, with a flip of dark hair and a face like a lollipop. She irks as she endears, bemuses as she bewitches. She's a bundle of energetic contradictions, bursting here, retracting there. Her expressions blink and change like a neon sign. Her eyes are popping globes. And she just sold you a bunch of car insurance.

First she caught our eye; now she's snatched our heart. Viewers are smitten. They're crushin'. They want to know: Who's that girl?

From a recent blog at HoustonPress.com, with the headline "The Cult of the Progressive Car Insurance Chick":

"Am I the only one completely and totally enamored of the woman in the television ads for Progressive car insurance? You know, the ones starring that babelicious brunette named Flo with her 'tricked-out name tag' and her '60s style eye makeup and her kissable red, red lips?"

No, sir, you are not.

"It's so weird," says Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo.

How much is Courtney like flamboyant Flo?

"It's me at my silliest," she says. "You start off with a script, but at the end they usually let me put a little zinger in there. We put a little mustard on it. That's when it gets fun.

"Flo could be one of my improv characters, always on and sort of cracked in a weird way."

And I end this post by suggesting that if Flo is weird, Flo is what the world really needs more of! Progressive Insurance? who knows?....but Flo, definitely!

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