Save a Failed Idol’s Life

I waited in the waiting room for about twenty more minutes. Then a man who looked like a floor director opened the door and came in.

“Let’s move to the set.”

“Come on, let’s go and get ready.”

My manager pushed me and Seong-won lightly on the back.

I took a short breath and headed to the studio.

“Move a little more to the side of the chair! Don’t block the screen!”

“Someone sit there and check how high it is!”

I saw various people preparing diligently in their own positions. Instead of feeling intimidated, I felt something else.

Even though I was pushed into this situation unexpectedly, I realized how precious this opportunity was.

Then I heard a buzz from the students who were sitting together in the distance, waiting for their turn.

“What? I thought Kang Yugeon was coming today?”

“Unnie, wasn’t Kang Yugeon the guest?”

“When is Kang Yugeon coming?”

They looked like they had just graduated from middle school yesterday. 

They asked the staff while looking at us.

“Yugeon couldn’t appear today due to a schedule problem, so another group from the same agency came instead.”

Then complaints erupted from everywhere.

“Aw, come on… I bragged to my friends that Kang Yugeon was coming.”

“I skipped my academy to see Yugeon oppa, but how can they change the guest all of a sudden?”

“I want to go home… I was so excited to go to the show where the Floss members were coming today.”

The students who had prepared various placards to show to Kang Yugeon showed their disappointment blatantly.

It’s not like we wanted to be Kang Yugeon’s substitutes.

Seong-won must have heard the students’ complaints, because he frowned. I secretly grabbed his sleeve and pulled it down.

“Cheer up. Do you want me to hit you?”

He glanced at me with a glare and turned his head away without answering. Fine, just keep your face away from them.

I asked the staff around me awkwardly.

“Did you recruit all those students as Kang Yugeon’s fans?”

The staff who came close to attach the microphone to me answered with an awkward expression.

“Not all of them. I think they selected the participants by lottery from the classes that applied for the appearance. The guest was announced after the audience list was confirmed, but Yugeon is so popular that…”

“So there were a lot of Yugeon’s fans among the ones who were chosen by lottery.”

“I guess so. Don’t worry too much. They’re not doing that out of malice.”

Whether they had malice or not. You’re not needed. Anyone who has to face that kind of gaze directly will inevitably suffer psychological damage.

This is work. I’m a pro, and a pro is someone who gets paid and does their assigned job faithfully. Even someone who had firmly pressed that into their mind would be shaken.

If they received such a gaze full of disappointment.

“Are you bothered?”

I covered the microphone with my hand and asked Seong-won.

“No? Why would I be?”

Seong-won acted as if nothing was wrong, but his breathing was slightly faster than usual.

I could tell the difference because we were so close. If he was far away, I might not have noticed.

“Just admit it if you’re bothered.”

I turned my gaze to the opposite side of where the students were sitting and asked. Seong-won snorted.

“What difference does it make if I admit it?”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Then why are you asking?”

“I can at least cheer you up.”

Seong-won looked down at me with a cold eye.

“Who?”

“Me.”

Seong-won turned his head away as if it wasn’t worth answering.

“There’s no one else we can rely on here but us two. Who else is there?”

Of course, I… Even if I was left alone with this guy, I couldn’t trust him completely. That was partly because of my personality that didn’t trust people easily.

I would rather have Kyunghwa than this guy. He was too immature to expect that level of responsibility from him. It was also because Seong-won whined too much. Just look at the music issue.

Whether I trusted Seong-won sincerely or not, now was the time to make him my ally.

Ograd would have given us dozens of lines, what’s one line?

“Since this is how it is, let’s do our best. You’re good when you do it. Let’s show them a good side and go back.”

I patted Seong-won’s shoulder. The staff who was checking the counter on the stage gestured to us.

“Guests, come over here and do a screen test!”

I answered without hesitation.

“Yes!”

Seong-won looked at me suspiciously for a while, then followed me with a small sigh.

**

Thirty minutes later, the real shooting began.

“Now, let’s start the challenge of Climax’s Ise & Seong-won!”

The time limit was one hour. We had to make twenty servings of samgyetang for the professional judges and the students who came as the audience.

‘This is going to be pretty tight.’

If it was just three or four servings, it would be fine. But this kind of mass cooking took a long time.

The production team seemed to worry about that too, because the script said to start with the time-consuming tasks of trimming and boiling the chicken.

The manual was detailed, but it wasn’t a friendly recipe for beginners. Didn’t a professional check it?

I didn’t think Kang Yugeon was good at cooking. If the cast wasn’t me, I could easily imagine what kind of disaster would have happened with this menu.

“You go over there and get some water in the pot, until it’s about six hops full. Then wash the green onions well and cut off the root part.”

I first poured the chicken legs that were piled up like a mountain on the counter.

Even though I had already memorized the recipe once, I didn’t know what to touch first when I stood in front of the counter. Seong-won nodded his head as he was flustered.

Look at this. Beginners forget what to do when they are overwhelmed by the huge amount of ingredients.

“Got it.”

Speed was life in group meals. 

There was no time to waste even a second. 

I cut the meat so that it would cook quickly inside and put the pot that Seong-won had filled with water on the high heat.

Samgyetang was best eaten with sticky rice porridge. 

I racked my brain to somehow reproduce the sticky rice porridge.

The chicken in my hand was a product that was specially boned and delivered only with leg meat. 

Thanks to that, the size was large and the meat was much more plentiful than ordinary chicken legs.

‘If the meat is this thick… maybe I can slit it open and stuff it?’

I quickly sliced the thigh part of the chicken leg and tried to fill the inside.

It was impossible to put in the medicinal herbs, but there was enough space for a tablespoon of soaked rice.

‘This is it.’

I wrapped the slit with thread to prevent it from opening and showed one to Seong-won.

“I’ll make the slits, so you fill them with a tablespoon of rice each. When you’re done, wrap the thread around twice and tie it.”

Seong-won nodded. Instead of answering, I secretly stepped on his foot and winked with my mouth.

“Say something, don’t be silent.”

When we were on the radio, Sunwoo or Yejun talked so much that Seong-won could get away with being quiet. But now it was just the two of us.

What do you want me to do? He looked at me with a look that said that, but I just casually talked to Seong-won.

“Did you ever have samgyetang for school lunch when you were in school?”

He kept nodding and doing what I told him to do, but he finally opened his mouth.

“Maybe once in middle school…”

“Doesn’t it usually come out every year on the first day of summer?”

“I think I couldn’t go to school on those days.”

Just then, the assistant directors prompted the audience to react. I responded with a thick skin to the sighs of pity that burst out.

“It’s okay, you must have eaten enough anyway. Look at your height, you must have snatched other people’s food and grown that much.”

The assistant director induced laughter again with my natural response.

Seong-won was not the type to talk much unless he was picking a fight.

Most of the audience members were angry that Kang Yugeon didn’t show up, and we couldn’t go home in an awkward atmosphere after just doing our job.

“Do you guys like roasted chicken?”

I asked as I spread the boiled chicken legs on the iron plate.

The kids who liked to participate answered.

“We love it!”

“We can’t eat it because we don’t have it!”

‘Thank you, you guys are the hope and the future of this generation of high school students.’

I sincerely thanked the fact that there were students who answered and smiled.

“Please look forward to it, it’s going to be really delicious.”

The staff induced cheers again at the right timing. 

Thanks to that, we were able to pull off a friendly atmosphere until the end.

I immediately applied the secret sauce based on salt, pepper, and other seasonings to the cooked chicken skin and put it in the oven. Meanwhile, Seong-won diligently divided the boiling broth into twenty bowls.

“Now we have ten minutes left!”

The male host who was the MC came close to the counter and fidgeted.

“Wow, what’s this? It’s supposed to be samgyetang, but why did the chicken legs go into the oven? Seong-won, can you explain?”

Seong-won’s eyes wavered for a moment. He had been following what I told him to do all along, so he had no idea how to explain.

“Ah, you can’t ask such a difficult question to the assistant.”

I threw a teasing joke and the kids burst into laughter without being prompted.

I don’t know what they laugh at and what they don’t. I couldn’t figure out the standards of these kids these days.

“Ah, Seong-won is the assistant, and the main chef today is Ise?”

“That’s right. I think our assistant did his best with his face, don’t you think?”

Thinking that I had to say something, I laughed and squeezed Seong-won’s cheeks with both hands as if they were ingredients. Seong-won twitched his eyebrows.

‘Hey, smile.’

As soon as I stepped on his foot, Seong-won barely pulled up the corners of his mouth and smiled. 

I patted his head as if he did well and checked the chicken through the window.

The sauce-coated skin was perfectly browned.

“Get the chopped green onions ready.”

Seong-won quickly brought the container with the green onions from the end of the counter.

As I put one chicken leg in each bowl, the delicious smell filled the studio.

All the audience members who came today didn’t know what kind of group Climax was, but they would remember that the food was delicious.

“Now, let’s start the judging time! First, let’s hear from Chef Nahyehee, who has been waiting with a very excited look!”

The middle-aged woman with a gentle expression raised her hand and responded to the cheers. She was someone I knew well from working together several times.

She was the first Korean to become the head chef of a famous overseas hotel after graduating from a prestigious European culinary school.

Unlike me, who had risen from the bottom of the Korean market, she was a person who had followed the overseas elite course.

‘She doesn’t like being called chef or teacher, it’s too stiff. Just call her sister.’

I remembered being surprised by her friendly and hearty image when I had a chance to meet her off the record.

‘Well, now she’s just a difficult teacher I’m meeting for the first time.’

“Then, let’s hear from Chef Nahyehee!”

I waited for Nahyehee’s evaluation with a confident expression.

There was no way I would get a bad review for my cooking. 

I felt a strong confidence.