Miz Shoes Reviews: ANTM

I had a rough day yesterday, and was more than ready to settle in on the sofa with the glass of red wine, fuzzy slippers and fuzzy doggie. It’s TV night at the Casita des Zapatos, and time again for the bitches and the hos. Whee. Good times, peoples, good times. Except. Not. Because at the end of the show, my sweet, gently bewildered Jael was the first girl to head back to the states. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Open on the usual shit talking about who went home and how nobody’s going to miss them. Random leaping about concerning who’s left.

Doorbell rings and in walks…uh, that pointy-faced girl from Season Two? The one who got her own on-line talk show? April. The one that Nigel was so hot for. The one who didn’t win. She’s going to teach them how to interview and be interviewed. She has a grinning little midget friend with her to help her with the examples of talking too much and talking to little. He looks like Teller, only shorter and with a rubberier face. Woof.

Then the girls team up and practice. Jael and Dionne get nasty with each other, but Jael is, and it pains me to say this, terrible. No, really, I mean terrible in new and different ways, most of them involving bizarre facial contortions and wildly inappropriate body language.

Natasha isn’t too bad, Jaslene has really big teeth, Renee is such a hateful ass that I don’t care if she does well or not. Brittney reveals that she doesn’t know if she can do this sort of thing because she got run over by a car when she was 17, bounced her head off the curb, had 8 (or 18—accounts varied) staples in her head and absolutely no short term memory any more. I wonder if that’s why she couldn’t keep her weave pretty? She couldn’t remember how to handle it? Wash/comb…don’t wash/don’t comb…

And then, they learn that they are going to have to take their newly-honed skills out into the real world and interview people on the street. The streets of Sydney, Australia. And there is Tyra in a broke-ass kangaroo suit. I love Tyra, because she is fierce and fabulous enough to let herself be put in a ratty roo suit and hop up and down on my TV screen. The woman deserves some sort of Emmy for that. Natasha doesn’t understand for, like, a minute or two that they are going to Australia, and then she starts shrieking like a banshee. It’s pretty funny, in an ear-splitting, nails-on-a-blackboard sort of way.

We see them pack, we see the little animated plane with their faces in the windows, and then we see them disembark in Sydney. Jael is wearing a flowered mini-tank dress over jeans and a lime-fucking-green tu-tu. It’s reeeeealy mind blowing, and not in a good way. Who had brain damage, again?

They are met by an Aussie supermodel who treats them to a slang-filled welcome speech. As you would expect, there are crickets chirping everywhere. Especially around Jaslene, who has really, really big front teeth. I’ve seen beavers with smaller front teeth. The model gives the girls (and Jaslene)a guide book to Aussie slang, a microphone and a big send-off to discuss American fashion faux-pas with the guy on the street. They will score points for each usage of the slang.

Dionne rocks that, basically by using what I suspect is her own verbal tic, but which coincidentally is also in the phrase book…“That’s cool.” Repeated two or three times after every response. But she says “I want to AKS you a question” which had me sticking my fingers in my ears.

Jaslene is just pathetic, Brittney talks to an American and is told that in the interviewee’s opinion, the worst thing American girls do is to wear skimpy tank tops with their bra straps showing. OMG! I was there being interviewed and I didn’t even know it. Brit, of course, is wearing a skimpy tank top with her bra straps showing. I love this show.

Natasha, who already learned one new language and has the skills for it, totally nails the use of slang in her interviews. She’s cute, and perky and just adorable.

Jael is, uh, not.

Then it’s off to their new digs and on to the Cover Girl commercials, where they have to memorize their lines and deliver them in an Australian accent. This is one time when I almost wished for closed captioning.

They are all just dreadful. Renee is dressed in poufy sleeves and really ugly eye makeup and delivers like (she says) Steve Irwin. In judging, the panel agrees that she did sound like a man, and maybe that wasn’t the best choice of role model when you are selling lippy.

Dionne comes back with her Jamaican-not accent. Brit cries and blows her lines even with cue cards and wahwahwahs about getting run over and having no short term memory. We know, because you already told us that story, and we do remember it.

Jaslene can’t speak American English, and her attempts at an Australian accent are embarrassing and awful and grating and pitiful. On the up side? She nails her lines without cue cards.

Jael is totally done in by the need to be cute, sweet and perky. She proves to be utterly incapable of smiling on cue. In fact, she sort of reminds me of the scene in Addams Family Values where Cristina Ricci is at sleep away camp and is forced to smile, and all the other campers squish back and start to cry that she’s scaring them. Yeah. It was pretty much like that. She cries and climbs a tree to make herself feel better, but we all know that this is it for my favorite little anarchist.

Natasha does an Austrailo-Soviet accent, which is much more endearing than it sounds.

Judging! Jael is looking fabu in a dress and heels. We see the commercial and it opens and closes on Renee. She is getting the fucking redemption arc so large and blatantly that it looks like McDonald’s neon arches in Times Square. The judges comment on the fact that Jaslene has this history(?) of drag queens. What? First we heard that she was raised by drag queens, and now she has all this experience with drag queens. See? This is what I’m saying… Jaslene IS a fucking drag queen.

In a huge upset during panel, the Aussie model talks about how the girls got off the plane (we see the flashback to Jael and her lime green tutu) and of all of them Jael (says the model) was the one who came out with enthusiasm and joy and a passion for the job and and and. Well. She was out-voted. The looks that passed between Nigel and Twiggy and even Miss Jay? Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle, they could not have been happier to finally give Jael the old heave ho. But it was certain curtains for Jael when Tyra said that she didn’t look like a Cover Girl, she looked like an anarchist cruelly mimicing a Cover Girl.

Then the panel discussed Brit’s head injury and subsequent short-term memory loss. Right. Head injury. Sure it was. That’s not what they tell us in drug class. It’s something else that causes long term loss of short term memory. Well, I think that’s what I remember them saying.

The bottom two are Brit and Jael, and Brit gets to stay, along with this advice: Sack up ho, and figure out how to deal with your disability.

Personally, I thought Jaslene should have been standing there with Jael, and I would have preferred to see her skinny ass out on the tarmac, but so it goes.

The winner of the challenge, remember the challenge? was Natasha, who received as her prize a field reporter job on the Tyra Talk Show. No kidding. How cool is that?

Next week, I don’t know what to expect because I didn’t get any previews. All I know is that with my pet anarchist gone, who cares. I’m going to go climb a tree and pet the grass. Who will protect us from the evil ducks of the universe now?