Miz Shoes Reviews: Cycle 9 ANTM, Episode 6

We open on the mansion on the hill, where we meet Ebony, face deep in the refrigerator saying that her personality does not suck. Jenah of the blonde rat weave is standing next to her, all eye-rolling “what evs, babe” and remembering what a totally rude bitch Ebony was back on the Love Boat, before Tyra and the 2 Jays started plotting Miss Thing’s high-fashion ass-whooping.

We cut to Ambreal in the phone booth, talking to her pops, and asking him to pray for her as he gives her the advice to buckle down, work hard and quit looking for a good time all the time. What? How’s she talking to my father when he’s been dead for 3 years? But sweet little thing calls her pop Daddy, and that makes me love her a little more, despite that she’s a musical theater major, and all the MT majors I ever knew were completely insane and insufferable, and not necessarily in that order.

Binaca and Heather are out on the patio, and Heather is whining about having to work on full frontal face. Binaca is surprisingly supportive and only sabotages Heather with bad advice once or twice at the end of the conversation.

At that moment, or at least at the next edit, the doorbell rings and there stands Tyson Beckford, the hottest, most famous male model ever (or so says Tyra, later in the show). I will grant him hott. Very, very hott. And heavily tattooed, but who among us is not? Tyson is at the house to give the girls advice on how to use your beauty and fame to be a spokesperson for important stuff other than hair products and clothes. This is a concept for Chantallobotomy to wrap her itty-bitty mind around. Tyson’s arrival causes Ebony to go running up and down the stairs, squealing and squeaking. It’s actually sort of cute. Heather, with her usual sangfroid, just allows, and I quote “Eye candy. Yumm.”

The girls are told to go into the kitchen, pick some random thing, and sell it sexy. Chantallobotomy felates a lime popsicle. I’m stunned that she would go there. Just stunned. Who would think that a cheerleader would do such a thing? Binaca sells a watering can… it’s wet. It’s realllll wet. Ebony is too flustered standing next to Tyson to do anything more than go guhguhgugh about something or another. Heather rocks a wine glass, saying it’s fingerprint proof, and (as she kissses it provocatively) lipstick proof. For some reason, although we keep hearing about how Aspberger’s prevents eye contact or physical contact, Heather manages to twine herself all over Mr. Beckford, who is happy enough to stand there and take it. Not to be outdone, Ambreal has a mango, and she sells that juicy thang enough that Tyson takes a bite out of it. A big, juicy, perfectly round bite. And Ambreal goes squealing back to the couch, mango in hand, and you just know that she is going to save that fruit in formaldehyde until the day she dies. SQUEEEEEEE.

Tyra Mail tells the girls that they need to have a cause. They speculate blindly and lamely. The cause, they find out at the shoot, will be Mr. Beckford’s personal cause: the I am Africa campaign, and the non-profit Keep A Child Alive, which fights AIDS in Africa. Good one. I’m down with that. For all my jaded scorn over TyTy and her Cycle of Meaning, AIDS is an issue that will always have me digging in my pockets. The girls are broken into 3 teams, and given the executive summary of the organization, a handful of props and thirty minutes in which to develop a 30 second public service commercial. The teams are Ambreal, Heather and Jenah; Lisa, Chantallobotomy and Binaca; and Ebony, Salacious D and Sarah.

Binaca’s team goes first, and Lisa and Chantallobotomy do OK with their “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” ad, but Binaca totally blows her lines. Heather’s group does a thing with signs that reminds me of “Don’t Look Back” and we know how I love all things Bob, so I’m prejudiced toward their ad. I am also a little bit charmed at how they have no idea about sound on a set, and their cardboard signs go banging and clanging as they are dropped. The last team is Ebony’s and they are all the face of AIDS is women, and it’s all about girl power. The woman from Keep A Child Alive is the judge, and she tells them that the first team (hello, BINACA?) got the name of the charity wrong. (Buzzer noise). The second team was a little stiff (well, it did include Jenah and Heather, duh) and the last team incorrectly identified the services offered by the charity. The winner, then is Heather’s team. GO TEAM HEATHER! Prizes? Yes, two team members will get gift baskets from Carol’s Daughter and the third, whose name will be chosen at random from a little basket, will get to shoot an ad for Carol’s Daughter, art directed by Miss Mary J. Blige! More squealing. More good news for Heather, because hers is the randomly chosen name. She heads off to her shoot (and unlike when Lisa the Lap Dancer won a photo shoot, the other girls are all happy for Heather) and meets her photographer, Matthew Ralston, who has a shot of Johnny Depp on his website that just made me swoon a little. Mary J. Blige decides that Miss Heather is a leetle bit white for a cosmetic company that specializes in persons of ethnicity, so Heather gets a spray tan. Heehee. And she looks good a little beige. Ralston gives her some major one-on-one coaching and she impresses him greatly. She also learns how to pose face forward. Neenerneener, you Heather haters.

Back at the Casa de Bitches and Hos, the girls are making chicken fingers and microwave pizza and having a party in the closet. Yeah. Too easy. Make your own closet jokes, people. Ebony says she’s over this whole thing and wants to go home. The very concept make Chantallobotomy’s head explode. Since it’s empty, there is no mess to clean up. She says something, and I realize that she has a speech impediment. Or she’s talking with her mouth full. In any event, whatever she has to say is instantly forgettable. Binaca is practicing not having dead eyes. She’s doing the “squint with your eyes wide open” trick that Tyra was telling her about at panel last week. Frankly, I think this is a joke, like when Susan Sarandon tells Tim Robbins to breathe through his eyelids in “Bull Durham”, but Binaca is working it out in front of a mirror, so she believes.

Heather arrives home and a camera cut shows us that it’s almost one in the morning. She is glowing and happy. Binaca gives it her best shot, but all she can muster in the way of hateful is to ask if Heather got to practice face forward, and Heather beams, Oh Yes! Matthew was soooooo helpful with that. And Mary J. Blige was soooooooooo cool with me being a total fan freak. And we see Heather giving MJB a big ole hug, and MJB barely tolerating it. Asberger’s helps sometimes, I’m thinking. Binaca then confessionalizes that Heather is her biggest competition, and she just doesn’t get it, why it all comes so easy to Heather. I think the answer, and I could be going out on a limb here, is Karma, bitch.

Commercials, where Jaslene gives make up advice to the make over winners. I wonder if any of them could understand a word she said? No, I didn’t think so.

The theme for the final photo shoot of the week is Recycling, and each girl gets to be a recyclable object. (Oh, come ON. It’s like the closet jokes. Sometimes, it is just too easy.) The photographer is Frederic Reshew, and the girls are made up as: Heather/Aluminum; Chantallobotomy/Shredded paper; Sarah/Garbage Bags (and she does a great, backward flop into the piles of trash); Salacious D/Auto Parts (and manages to knock over the set); Ebony/Bubble Wrap (and she is soooo over it, and the Little Orange Man says she looks trampy); Jenah/Cardboard (and the LOM talks about how Jenah takes direction and then looks for more); Binaca is Grease and you know? sometimes it’s like shooting fish in a barrel…But the LOM says she’s obviously been practicing that smile with your eyes thing that Tyra loves; Lisa/Plastic Bottles and Ambreal/Newspapers. The Little Orange Man says she is going backwards. She looks inexperienced, she’s forgotten how to model, she is boring and uninspired. Not to put too fine a point on it, he grabs Ambreal as she walks off set and draws her a picture of herself, spiraling down, down, down.

Commercials. Ambreal tells the camera that if she can just stay in the house, she could win the competition. Big IF. Ebony allows as how she is praying with all her heart that she gets sent home, that Tyra won’t call her name. She is tired of the criticism and being beaten down. In the judging room, Miss Jay’s Afro is starting to take up two seats at the table, Twiggy is looking a little road worn, Tyson Beckford is the guest judge and Nigel is wearing one of Miss Jay’s old, shorter Afro wigs. There is a huge sigh of relief from everyone when he takes it off. Despite what he says, it is not that he looks bad with hair (we’ve seen the pix from his own modeling days) it is that the short, nappy little wig is atrocious and would look indecent on anyone.

Reviews: Salacious D is showing a lot of neck, and looking good as auto parts. Jenah got cleaned up for the judging and looks as good in person as she does in her shot (except, you know, for the rat weave) and Nigel says he’d book her. Is that Nigel-speak for something dirty? We can only dream. Ambreal is dead in the eyes, and she says it was because her false eyelashes were falling off. Tyra calls foul and says (no, really) “It’s always something.” but it is the model’s job to sell it despite whatever. Lisa has smoothed her poodle curls down again (she ain’t liking that poodle cut at all), and the judges say that she was too “modeling 101” easy, sure poses and no fire. Binaca was too stiff, but she had smiling eyes (You’ve been practicing!). Sarah was good, but she’s losing weight, and she should stay full figured. Ebony is told that it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t want to hear criticism, they are only giving it too her because they believe in her. You can do it! (I’m hearing echoes of the old Tiffany from the Hood “I’ve never yelled at any girl the way I’m yelling at you now.”). Ebony just rolls her eyes, chews her lips, shrugs her shoulders and prays for the ax to fall. Chantallobotomy has hair in front of her face from her movement shot, and Tyson hates it and the other judges love it (because you can’t see that she’s a forceps baby with one half of her asymmetry covered?) and Heather gets all the love. Full face! Hot hot hot! Love, love, love! (Kiss of death, death, death????)

Salacious D is called first this week and praised for her growth and improvement. Then Jenah, who is deemed hot stuff. Heather is one of the best of the bunch. Binaca is getting better. Sarah has to put some pounds back on, and stop denying that she’s losing weight. Nigel says if she can keep the weight on, she could be a super star in the plus-size world. That’s because she’s a size 6. Which is not plus sized in the real world. But I digress. Chantallobotomy (I was born to win this) is OK in person but meh on film. Lisa is playing it safe, she’s stagnating. (Kind of like the New Jersey swamps from whence she came, if you ask me.) And that leaves Ambreal and Ebony. I didn’t hear what Tyra said to them because I was calling the emergency vet to see if I should be worried that JoJo, the dog of very little brain, had found and eaten a tube of cortisone cream. The answer was no, but our home remedy of burnt toast wouldn’t hurt, either. The dog is an endless source of love, and an equally bottomless pit. Even the vet calls her a garbage scow.

In any event, the girl with the most potential is Ebony, and she refuses to take her photo. Y’know, Tyra, she says, I just don’t want to be here any more. I don’t think that modeling is really for me. Tyra, having once screeched at a girl with the same ghetto-fabulousness and long, Naomi weave, doesn’t yell this time. She just tells Ebony that the real reason she wants to leave is that she can’t handle the truth, and that there is nothing uglier to Tyra than a quitter, and for that reason Miss Ebony-the-Ingrate can just take her stank attitude and get the fuck out of the house. And Ambreal? You get to stay after all, and you’d better work this last, final, really we mean it this time chance. And the girls stand around in dumbfoundedness, blinking in shock and awe, and watch as Ebony saunters out, happy that she is free at last, free at last.