Well, I’ve found out who cares about ‘The Bachelorette’ filming in Bluffton

This “Week of ‘The Bachelorette’ ” might just turn me into one of those people who feel the need to write “Who cares?” on everything “Bachelorette”-related on our Facebook pages.

Those people baffle me, by the way. Why take the time to write anything about something you don’t care about? Why not bank all that time you devote to typing all those “Who cares?” and use it to practice smiling or saying “Hello. How are you?” out loud to an actual person?

And what says that YOU, a singular human in an infinite universe, are required to care about everything that’s out there anyway? Other people care about this. Other people think it’s cool. “Who cares?” Good lord, millions! Literally millions care about #BachelorNation.

Millions minus one, that is. I truly don’t care.

Except when I do, which is confusing.

Because it’s here! It’s filming in Bluffton and on Hilton Head Island. And everywhere I go, people are talking about it.

I love excitement and shared experiences and gossip.

Especially that last thing.

I love hearing that three people got so sloppy drunk Tuesday night that they were arrested at the filming in Old Town Bluffton (let that sink in: Three people can now say they were ARRESTED at a filming of “The Bachelorette” — assuming they want to say anything about this at all, of course, because I imagine it ranks up there with “I was conceived at a taping of ‘Mister Rogers’ ” or “I’m the one whose beige body was blurred out on the news last night.”).

I also love hearing that at least one woman threw up in the holding area near the stage while waiting for the filming to start and that this was the final straw for someone else so that person just LEFT. (I love it not for the humiliation and subsequent unsanitary conditions for the rest of the crowd but because final straw stories are my very favorite kind of story.)

Oh, and this is good, I love hearing that the fans who went to the spelling bee Wednesday sat very quietly and politely and clapped when appropriate.

Sorry. I know that was boring. But people should be rewarded when they don’t get sick off the drink or handcuffed because the excitement of being near Chris Harrison made them lose sight of base line behavior.

I didn’t go to the filming Wednesday because I was still so exhausted from and, frankly, traumatized by Tuesday night’s filming.

Exhausted because I’ve never seen an episode of “The Bachelorette” so I didn’t have that much-needed fan-motivation to keep me tolerant of the dirty, filthy, clock-related lies the producers kept telling us.

Every time they said some cheery version of “We’re almost ready!” I wanted to yell “WE’VE SEEN THE SHOW ‘UNREAL’ SO WE KNOW YOU’RE NOT. YOU’RE NOT READY AT ALL.”

And traumatized because by the time Russell Dickerson started playing — more than an hour after he was supposed to have started, which means it was 11-something, which means this is the absolute rudest thing I’ve ever seen Bluffton do to its Old Town residents (even though this whole thing has been pretty cool so far) — the spirit of Everyone Who Has Been Annoyed By Anything Ever suddenly occupied my soul.

A line and a half into Dickerson’s Garth Brooks cover and I was done.

It wasn’t the mosquitoes that did it, the ones that finally stopped biting everyone at 10:20 p.m. because, as the person next to me noted, “They even got bored of this.”

It wasn’t the creepy feature-less mannequin that did it, the one in a neighboring store window that kept startling me because I thought it was a real-life woman who had erased her own face so she wouldn’t have to witness a crowd of adults practicing their excitement at seeing two strangers enter a fake concert.

It wasn’t even Garth Dickerson himself who did it to me.

No. I left because this is how naive I am — or how much more considerate I am than whoever said yes to a 10:15 p.m. call-time in the first place knowing that things like this never start on time. I seriously did not think this guy was actually going to sing at a concert-level volume.

I’ve been an extra in two movies. I’ve danced like an idiot to music that wasn’t playing. I’ve awkwardly pantomimed an entire conversation with someone, who likewise had been minding her own business in a CVS parking lot when a frantic producer convinced them both that pretending to be Italians in a nightclub would be the next thing on the to-do list despite my clear case of freckle face. I have silently humiliated myself in the name of Hollywood magic.

So I thought Garth Dickerson was going to do the same, to fake-play, and they’d just fill in his hit song later in post-production.

Which is why I had no choice but to leave when my inside voice started screaming “What about the sleeping children, you decision-making maniacs?!?”

But don’t get excited. This is not a final straw story. There is no final straw story for me here, unfortunately.

I left in a disgusted huff, BUT THEN I CAME BACK.

Who cares about “The Bachelorette?” Certainly not the me who left.

But that other me did.

On our way out of town, my co-worker Mandy Matney and I decided to drive past a gorgeous house in Old Town that we had been lurking around earlier that night (THE house a few blocks from the concert where the Bachelorette was to have her fake date with fake whoever).

And as we slowly rolled past it, we saw them.

Rachel and fake whoever.

They were being filmed and looking cozy among the draped tree lights, the chandeliers, the beautiful wall of trees and the Spanish moss with Garth Dickerson’s music playing in the near distance.

This was “The Bachelorette’s” secret fairy-tale moment.

I could choose to see it as the moment before fake whoever fake surprises the bachelorette with a musician she’ll have to Google when she gets her phone back from producers in a few months and hundreds of sleepy and sauced not-so-fake strangers who are locked, loaded and ready to part the crowd to the couple’s dance-platform just as they had practiced throughout this night of lies.

BUT IT WAS SO ROMANTIC.

And no one was stopping us from gawking at it.

So we drove past it again. Phone up this time.

Then we drove past it again again. Phone up. Mandy in the backseat because she pressed the wrong button before.

We were Thelma and Louise if Thelma and Louise were two women who just wanted to go to bed because they had to get up early for work the next morning and Louise was so tired she forgot how to take video.

Why was no one stopping us?

Rachel saw us. Rachel didn’t like it.

But no one else cared.

And I guess that’s why we went back to the concert.

Because who cares?

This story was originally published March 30, 2017 at 4:57 PM with the headline "Well, I’ve found out who cares about ‘The Bachelorette’ filming in Bluffton."