LAURA BUSH GOES THE REALITY SHOW ROUTE

First Lady Laura Bush apparantly got her wish granted. She will make an appearance on the feel-good ABC Television reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" this season.

The highly rated programme usually selects a hard pressed but deserving family each week, sends them on a seven day vacation, and while they are gone the design team, along with contractors and volunteer labourers work frantically to tear down their former home and build a new one in it's place.

In the episode on which Mrs. Bush will appear, the show will visit an underserved shelter near the heavily damaged coastal city of Biloxi, Mississippi, bringing along a convoy of trucks stocked with items from kitchen appliances to clothing to mattresses provided by the show's main sponsor, Sears.

The First Lady's exact role in the episode, which was filmed Tuesday at the Biloxi Community Center and reported by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, was to be shown with design team member Preston Sharp greeting victims, listening to their stories, and handing out items from large plastic bins. According to the AP story, Mrs. Bush sought to be on the program because she shares the "same principles" that the producers hold, her press secretary said.
Whatever the first lady's role, the idea is to convey that people — in this case, a major television network and the White House — care about the thousands of hurricane victims who remain homeless.

"This is why it is so great the first lady is coming along, just to talk and hear stories and share tears and give hugs and remind everyone we are there for a long time and we are going to keep coming back and nobody has forgotten about them, including their government," [Executive Producer Tom] Forman said. He said the episode will air in November.

The show has been likened to a modern-day "Queen for a Day." But it could be difficult to discern whose fortunes will be lifted higher — the displaced victims of two hurricanes or the White House, which was widely perceived as slow to understand their pain.

Many in the crowd were unaware that the filming of a popular national television show was involved, believing that Sears was simply offering a drawing for free appliances.