Cara Zavaleta Nude
MTV has been the launching pad for many a Hollywood career: Adam Sandler was a standup comic on the game show Remote Control, Jenny McCarthy slapped around male fans–and perfected her chops–on Singled Out, and Carson Daly, before landing his own late-night show, was Total Request Live’s main tween wrangler. There was a time when Miss November, Cara Zavaleta, wanted her MTV too. You may remember her as the wide-eyed, enthusiastic beauty from Road Rules: South Pacific and later The Gauntlet, on which Road Rules and Real World alums faced off and hooked up while pursuing a cash prize. Cara is now touring the country as part of the 10-month Reality Bar Crawl. “We’ve been hosting ass-shaking contests, guest bartending, signing autographs and hanging out with people,” Cara says during a pit stop at her Chicago apartment. “Bar owners want to hire us. I’m goofy, and I don’t take myself too seriously. I think people like that.” On The Gauntlet Cara helped her team to victory–but would she do it again? “I would feel more relaxed and have more fun with it knowing that I’d already won one and that it didn’t need to be another crazy competition,” she says. “I would probably never do Road Rules again. It was uncomfortable and an invasion of personal space. I told the producers I had claustrophobia, and they put us in this small RV. We were sardines in that thing. Every mission was scary.”
Photography by Arny Freytag