Interning With the Stars

I will do nearly anything for charity, as long as I get something out of it and my own money isn’t involved. That’s why I was interested in Charitybuzz, which auctions off internships and gives the money to nonprofits. On June 11, someone paid $22,750 to work on Beyoncé’s wardrobe team backstage at her Los Angeles concert in July. If I could get someone to work for me for free and it also happened to save the environment or cure AIDS, that was fine with me.

I got Charitybuzz to offer bidders this opportunity: “Spend this Sunday working for Joel! He will buy you a midpriced lunch and eat it with you.” Like Beyoncé, I donated the money to Miss a Meal, which asks people to skip a meal and donate the money they’d have spent on food to soup kitchens. I chose it, as I assume Beyoncé did, because it’s one of the few charities that are also a diet.

At the end of the two-day auction, I had Tom Sawyered someone into paying $2,550 to work for me on a Sunday, which was $2,750 more than I expected. After a decade of publishers’, entrepreneurs’ and philanthropists’ creative but failed attempts to save journalism, I had done it. If every TIME writer simply gets a paying intern every day, the magazine could increase its profit by millions of dollars, thereby making our profit equal millions of dollars.

I was surprised to find out that the winner wasn’t a student but someone with $2,550. Weirder yet, it was Eric Poses, a friend of a high school friend. Eric, 39, has a board-game company that created the hit game Loaded Questions. A year ago, I pitched him a terrific board-game idea that he told me was not a terrific board-game idea. It turns out my idea was so bad that Eric is willing to pay $2,550 to talk about something besides my board-game idea.

Eric lives in Miami Beach, so he’d be doing the internship virtually. At 6 o’clock in Los Angeles on Sunday morning, while I was still sleeping, he got to work answering reader e-mail for me. (Apparently, I told German-born pop star Jann Klose that “it’s hard to disagree with the impact music and the arts have on today’s youth.”) After I’d had some yogurt, I called Eric to ask him what he wanted to order for his midpriced meal. He eagerly suggested we both miss a meal to get the full experience of the charity. This is the kind of thing that an intern should mention a few hours earlier, when the boss could have had some eggs or pancakes or at least oatmeal.

I unhappily agreed and then got Eric to do my work on this column about reverse-paid internships. He started by interviewing Beyoncé’s creative director of wardrobe, who was running her charity-intern experience. This person is Miss Tina and coincidentally is also Beyoncé’s mom. Miss Tina declined to answer Eric’s first three very funny and pretty inappropriate questions, which is when, in a panic, I realized that it’s very difficult to fire an intern who is paying $2,550 to work for you. Then, however, Eric earned his own $2,550, breaking two pieces of Beyoncé-related news: If Beyoncé had been a boy, Miss Tina would have named him Beyoncé, a twist on her maiden name, “because it could go either way.” And if she had been a boy, Beyoncé’s sister Solange, who was conceived in Egypt, would have been Nile. I have no doubt that TMZ would let Eric pay it $2,550 for this kind of work.

Next, I had Eric call the CEO of Charitybuzz, Coppy Holzman. He too was shocked when he found out that people would pay to do internships. A six-week internship split between Richard Branson and Russell Simmons went for $85,000. And like Eric, many of these interns are adults. All of this made sense to Eric, who likened his desire to work for me to “rock-‘n’-roll fantasy camp where you get to jam with rock stars.” Until then, I never appreciated how similar drumming alongside Jeff Beck and Brian Wilson is to interviewing Coppy Holzman.

For the rest of the day, I had Eric do important things, such as e-mailing my editor to tell her my column would be late (You actually thought I was going to read it on a Sunday?), e-mailing Time editor Richard Stengel to ask for a raise (No), returning my mom’s phone call (The charity work sounds wonderful; glad he’s showering; this is not the strangest call about my son I’ve received) and asking my wife to bring home espresso and French-press fresh-ground coffee (she got neither).

Somewhere, a person going through a tough time is getting a hot bowl of pasta while a friendly volunteer explains that the food is courtesy of a man who paid another man to let him work for him for a day while they both didn’t eat lunch and one of them talked to Beyoncé’s mom. What happened in my house, and 3,000 miles away in Eric’s house and wherever Beyoncé’s mom was, is the new-economy equivalent of raising a barn, only with celebrities and media and no barn whatsoever. It feels good to give.