Bushwick’s House of Yes bartender Sarah Pribis was flown out to Los Angeles last week after an infomercial she starred in caught the attention of The Ellen Degeneres Show. Degeneres and co-host Kristen Bell shared an infomercial for My Shiney Hiney on Ellen’s September 20 episode and after a friend alerted Pribis to the segment, she responded on Facebook with a quip: “Definitely not the way that I was planning to get famous or make my first appearance on the Ellen show, but you gotta take what you can get!”
An assistant producer from the Ellen show called Pribis on September 21 while she was at her other bartending job in the city and, after a bunch of questions, finally asked: “Could you hypothetically be free tomorrow morning to be flown to LA?”
Pribis appeared on the September 23 episode of Ellen, who then dubbed her Miss Shiney Hiney; while she was on air, she was asked to help host the following week’s Cat Week: “We filmed Monday’s [cat week] clip immediately following the interview, and I literally returned to NYC the next day and went straight from the airport to work at House of Yes,” tells Pribis to Bushwick Daily.
As stated in its infomercial, My Shiney Hiney is a “specialty cleansing brush with an ergonomically designed handle to easily access that difficult to reach spot” referring to you know what.
Pribis was the “before and after” subject of the infomercial, but admitted on Ellen about responding to the acting job that “the ad itself said it was casting for Shinney Hinney, it was spelled incorrectly…and it was a cleaning product.” She had no idea what the cleaning product was used for.
Produced by a husband and wife duo from New Jersey, the My Shiney Hiney commercial was posted on YouTube on December 22, 2015. To date, the weird infomercial has garnered a whopping 219,757 views, possibly in part because of the attention from Ellen.
Will My Shiney Hiney skyrocketing Pribis’ career? She tells Bushwick Daily that since the infomercial, “I’ve had several people offer to help me use the momentum from this opportunity to move my career forward without asking for anything in return.”
A violinist and singer in her younger days, Pribis found acting through her love of music. “I actually was cast in the Broadway production of Les Miserables when I was a junior in high school, and had to travel to NYC from Philadelphia every weekend for rehearsals,” says Pribis.
After studying method acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute and on-camera performance at Stonestreet Studios via NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pribis turned her attention from the stage to the screen.
Pribis has inadvertently brought to light all of the ridiculous roles actors take for work, “which is why I’m happy that Ellen brought awareness to this infomercial,” she says.
This isn’t the first unusual acting job that Pribis has done. She tells Bushwick Daily about a particularly bizarre commercial she once auditioned for for a condom brand commercial: “I had to pretend that I was in the locker room showers shampooing myself, etc, when a rooster startles me by entering, and I respond with subtle shock and then flirty behavior, like picking up the (completely invisible imagined) cock and kissing him.”
Though Pribis didn’t have an opportunity to speak off camera with Degeneres, she says that “I’d love to meet her in the future, and I’m hopeful that our time together on camera was the first of more to come!”
Featured photo courtesy of Sarah Pribis