Reality TV hits the Peninsula Reality TV hits the Peninsula (January 23, 2004)

Florida teen is filmed at MV martial arts studio

By Julie O'Shea

San Diego has "The Real World." The Pearl Islands have "Survivor: All Stars." And now the Peninsula is the site of one episode of "Switched," a relatively new reality TV show from ABC Family, which takes teens from different parts of the U.S. and allows them to essentially "try on" each other's lives for a few days.

In the latest installment of the show, filmed over four days last week, 16-year-old Adam Mack from Naples, Fla. flew across the country to trade places with Courtney Cox, a brown belt tae kwon do student at West Coast Martial Arts in Mountain View and a junior water polo player at Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

At the same time, Cox, also 16, jetted out to the Florida shoreline to jump hurdles on Mack's track and field team and give an oral presentation in his German class. (Cox doesn't speak a lick of German, but apparently managed to get through a short speech on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with some prodding.)

"That was pretty crazy," Cox said of the language lesson she ended up scoring an "A+" on. Nevertheless, the four days she spent in Naples, where Cox said she was treated like a small-town celebrity, "was really fun."

Mack enthusiastically agreed, saying that he fell in love with the Golden State and decided that he'd like to come back for college. He called his time in the pool with 15 members of the Gunn girls' water polo team "pretty close to heaven" and explained how he accidentally gave Cox's stepfather a bloody nose during his first-ever tae kwon do class last Saturday afternoon.

"Switched," which premiered in May 2003 and runs weekdays at 5 p.m. on Channel 52, has become a hit with high school students and particularly among teenage girls, said Ernesto Carreon, a publicist at ABC Family. Carreon said the Cox-Mack switch will air in six to eight weeks.

Cox said she became fascinated with the show over the summer, where one half-hour episode featured a teen from Los Altos.

Two weeks after she mailed network producers her application package in November, Cox said, she got a call telling her the show was interested. A month and a half later, she was on a plane headed to the southeast tip of the country where film crews would follow her around for four days.

"The first time, it was really weird," Cox said Monday, but after a while, "it's not like acting anymore."

Mack, on the other hand, is a sports newscaster at his high school and said he immediately felt right at home in front of the cameras.

"I didn't act, and I wasn't shy. I was just Adam Mack," the teen said in a phone interview from his Florida home Tuesday.

Mack said he definitely wasn't shy about taking on Cox's activities from band practice, where he says a classmate taught him to play the trombone in about five minutes, to an advanced martial arts class where he learned sparring in one afternoon.

At the other end of the nation where the mercury was hitting 80 degrees, Cox played touch football and went parasailing over the weekend with a couple of Florida boys. She, too, said she can't wait to go back for a visit.

Both said if they could, they'd do it all over again in an instant.

"I loved it -- West Coast people are really laid back," Mack said. "I'm kind of bummed that it is all over."

E-mail Julie O'Shea at joshea@mv-voice.com

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