Gabi Andrews was getting ready for a Beyoncé concert near D.C. last year when she suddenly got a message from casting at MTV. Was she available for a FaceTime interview in ten minutes?

“My makeup isn’t done, my hair is wet,” she says. “I didn’t know at first what show I was [interviewing for]. I thought I was doing Real World actually. But within an hour, they said, ‘Hey we’re flying you out to L.A.'”

She flew to the West Coast shortly after, signed some paperwork, and was promptly whisked to Mykonos, Greece, where she began filming for Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. The reality show, which is now mid-season on MTV and is the fifth highest-rated new cable show among young adults, features a lipsticked, heavily-adorned Lohan playing the role of a high-powered CEO attempting to “build an empire” of swanky beach clubs catering to obscenely wealthy VIP guests. Andrews was brought along as part of a cadre of “ambassadors” from the U.S. with one main objective: Get the guests to spend more money. That involves, variously, taking shots with patrons at the bar, fetching bathing suits for VIPs suddenly in the mood for a swim, and hawking $1,500 cabanas to people wandering around the beach.

Most of the people cast for the show, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m., had some amount of hosting, nightclub, or service experience that ostensibly qualified them for their role, Andrews included. The first time she got into a nightclub in D.C., Andrews says she was 15 years old. The 23-year-old grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and says she used to go into the city with her friends to dance and party. Eventually, she started working on the city’s nightlife scene, first at Gazuza Lounge, a hookah lounge on Connecticut Avenue NW, then later at Dirty Martini, Cities, and Ozio.

“I’ve done everything, bottle service, hosting, promoting, though promoting was never really my thing … I feel like I have a lot of influence on the nightlife community in D.C., and I wanted to show people what I could do outside of D.C.,” Andrews says. She was still 22 when she got the call from casting, and she says she basically had to quit her job overnight and pause her life to go to Mykonos, where the first season was filmed last year. She was even in a new relationship at the time, and had to call her boyfriend and tell him she was leaving for two months. (“We are no longer in a relationship,” she says, laughing. “He was definitely not happy with it.”)

But her first days in Mykonos were perhaps not what she had expected (but definitely what the rest of us expect from a reality show like Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club). She talks about the first episode with a delightful directness that makes it clear why she was cast in the first place.

“So, of course, as anybody who watched the show is able to see, [on the first day] I was completely trashed in a pool in my bra and leggings,” she says. “So, Lindsay did not like me when she first met me.”

She’s referring to what was an obviously producer-orchestrated event, where much of the cast stripped down to their underwear, gargled alcohol and jumped into the pool before Lohan popped in for a surprise visit. Lohan is flabbergasted by her ambassadors’ behavior, and complains that no one has even thought to offer her a drink. A drunken Andrews pipes up that they can’t offer her a drink, because they’ve downed all the alcohol.

“That’s my alter-ego, her name is Priscilla,” Andrews says. “I can see why that rubbed her the wrong way.”

One of the dramas involving Andrews’ character in that first episode was the issue of her blue hair. One of the DJs at the beach club also has blue hair, an obviously unacceptable state of affairs. “I can’t have two people with blue hair, they’re not avatars,” says Lohan’s business partner Panos on the show. They force her to dye her hair pink. (For the record, Andrews thinks this was less about the blue-haired DJ, and more about Lohan wanting Gabi to prove she would do whatever she had to do to stay there).

The rest of the season (shocker) features lots more drama, including a physical altercation between Gabi and one of the other guests, which she calls the “hardest thing” to watch now. She’s back from Mykonos, splitting her time between D.C. and Florida where she’s finishing up her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry. But she says she’s glad to represent her hometown on the show.

“I am happy to rep D.C. and the DMV area,” Andrews says. “It made me who I am.”