Miz Shoes Reviews: Cycle 9 ANTM, Episode 1

That noise that sounds like the whispering wind? That’s me, sighing in contentment that all is right with the world. The Number 1 Surrogate Daughter came by last night with a pizza (banana peppers and spinach—new to me, but totally d’lish) and I poured the ‘tinis and we sat on the couch to ridicule the clueless. Girl bonding at its best. The RLA didn’t even last until the first commercial break.

For Cycle 9 (like, menstrual cycle, do you suppose? It is a little forced and artificial to call a season a cycle, but it is the house of women… and Jaslene...at least last year. This year we don’t seem to have a tranny in the house. But, never fear, we do have the requisite tragedies and horrible back stories. Nobody survived a plane crash from the diminishing heat of their mother’s dead body (my god, those were good times) but we DO have the daughter of a crack ho, the girl with Asperger’s (again, I have to hand it to Tyra, girlfriend has her finger on the pulse of trend: Autism is HOTT!), the Yalie, the dim blonde who was “born to win this thing”, the stripper (finally one made it into the house, but she don’t take her clothes off, she dances in a bikini, y’all… and she’s the designated weeper this season. She started crying after the third name out of thirteen was announced. Lisa. Lisa the Weeper), the “aesthetician” (read: bikini waxer, and she gave Tyra a faux waxing while we all watched. The look of abject horror on Miss Jay’s face was tooo much… and someone got called MRS. Jay last night which made me think that maybe The Little Orange Man got married), and a girl by the name of (and I am not kidding, although it fits perfectly into a long-running joke) Saleisha, or as I will be referring to her from here on out: Miss Salacious D. She currently has magenta bangs and a $25 dollar weave, but that will be going away very soon, or so Tyra and the Jays assure us.

The personalities started to come out as the 30? 32? 33? semi-finalists got put on a Caribbean cruise to somewhere or other. We see them in the dining hall, picking on each other’s food choices. We see The Girl With the Fauxhawk get up in The Bitch’s grill when The Bitch asks something like, which of you all have eating disorders. Bwhahahahahah. That’s a trick question, of course, because the answer is, if we all eat and purge like this then it’s normal, right? (oh, by the way, one of my Cafe Press shirts bears the immortal question from last year’s sent-home-too-soon girl Kathleen: “I know, right?”)

The Plus-Size Girl is shocked! Shocked!! to see how much skinnier the skinny girls are. But she’s rocking that full-figured size 6, so fuck ‘em. In fact, The Plus-Sized Girl is the subject of much discussion between Tyra and the Jays. Is she really a plus size girl? She’s on the small side of plus. Maybe, just maybe, they allow, she is merely The Real-Size Girl. Whoo-hoo for her, whoo-hoo for Sara.

The girls have to do an impromptu cat walk wearing life preservers and it is as ugly as it sounds. Miss Jay ridicules them and the tears start to flow. We see the duck walk, the pigeon toes, the knock knees, the stoop shoulders, and my personal favorite, the girl who walks like she’s smuggling the family jewels out of Westbumfukstan in her cootch.

We see the girls in their one-on-threes with Tyra and the Jays. There is weeping, there is a gift, there is the faux waxing (really. I may have to rinse my eyes with acid if I think of it too much). There is one girl who comes out stomping like the legendary Camille of season 2? I am Camille and this is my signature horse stomp… One of the girls allows as how she looks like one Adrianne Lima (pronouncing it LYE-ma and prompting catcalls from Tyra). Another has a walk evocative of Naomi (or so says Tyra, proving once more that she is so over that girl, and can too say her name without shattering). And yet another walks on her hands.

We see all the tragic back stories and the ones too tragic for the house are the girl with the fauxhawk who was sexually abused by her foster families and/or raped, the girl who was born with a hemmoraged right eye, but won’t let that stop her, and the bartender from Bahhstin who is even more unintelligible than Noxema or Jaslene. And that, my friends, is saying a good deal. The boat is rocking, and dinner comes a’knocking for one or another of the girls. This means that one or two try to look concerned and a couple others say yahoo, better chances for me.

There is a photo shoot on a beach, where they do varying levels of not-too-bad, with the occasional day-um, she looks good thrown in to confuse us. Jaslene appears here to tell the wannabees how fabulous it is to have won, and prove that speaking like you have a mouth full of gummy bears does not prevent you from winning a contract to be a

spokesperson. She still looks like a tranny, but she seems to have gotten more work than any of the other winners, so what do I know.

The Jays and Tyra look at film and decide who stays and who goes. The best is when they discuss the designated House Bitch (Ebony, the crack-ho’s daughter). The girls have all ratted her out by now, and the thought of beating her into humility causes Tyra and the Jays to cackle like the three witches in

Macbeth. All of us in television land are cackling too, because we know how much fun it will be to watch. Ebony has been gloating over her fabulous $500 weave (and it is pretty fly, I have to admit. How much do you want to bet that she’s the one with the shaved head or Dianna Ross afro make-over?

And then it’s the end, all too soon. Next week there will be DRAMA! FIGHTING! A new, faboo house decorated with lots of pictures of Tyra.

I know, right?