It is the end of the line for the bitches and the hos. The final three are Eugena of the dismal personality and bad skin, Everybody Hates Melrose and CariDeeMented. It just doesn't get any lamer better than that, does it? Well, yes it does. In order to coach the girls on their Covergirl shoot, we have a "real" covergirl come to visit. Is it Heidi Klum? Is it Tyrant? Is it anyone you've ever seen on a cover of anything? No. It is last year's winner, Dani(elle). I loved Danielle or else I'd say that this is not only self-referential, but just pathetic.

We have our Covergirl commercial and our final runway show. They all blow chunks in the commercial, which is somehow cobbled together to make something watchable, if not memorable or good. CariDeeMented's eyes dart left and right throughout her shoot. Melrose has a big-ass smile. Eugena tries (and fails) not to have dead eyes and a deadlier persona.

Then we shoot stills. There is some foreshadowing when the photographer gives high fives to Melrose and CariDeeMented and wishes Eugena good luck.
Unfortunately for Eugena, the good luck wishes aren't enough to keep her going to the final two, despite all the footage we get of her and CariDeeMented snuggling with each other and whispering how much they want it to be just the two of them in the finals.

CariDee and Eugena cry in each others arms when Eugena is sent away. CariDeeMented murmmurs sweetly to Eugena that she'll "bring this home for you, baby." and sweet tap dancing Jesus I wish I was making that up. But I'm not. Didn't CariDee have a boyfriend at the beginning of this show? Before she nailed Dennis Quaid, the random Spanish model guy and anything else that showed up available during shooting.

Anyway, now that Eugena is out of the way, we are treated or subjected (take your pick) to the Battle of the Blondes. Eugena opines that a "natural" blonde should win. I'm not going to venture down that road of how she knows, but I will point out that it wasn't Melrose's choice to go blonde.

The runway show is another freakfest. It takes place after dark in an Antonio Gaudi building. The theme is Bride of Dracula. Each trot down the runway gets darker and freakydeakier until the girls are running and shrieking (but still looking fierce and fabulous) down the passageway lit by candles.

Melrose-the-Loathed absolutely rocks the runway. She is fierce, she is beautiful, she can walk, she never loses sight of the fact that she is modeling clothes. She twirls, she stomps, she gives CariDeeMented a serious up and down stink eye when they are supposed to dis each other in passing. She uses her flamenco lessons to her advantage as she brings up her arms. She is amazing, even in white face. She is amazing even after CariDeeMented (maybe) accidentally rips Melrose's train to shreds. She still whips that fabric around and works it.

All of a sudden Miss Jay gets up out of the front row and disappears. Is he going to tell Melrose to get a grip and ignore the hateful little CariDeeMented's antics? We wish. He is off to join the runway show and drag queen along in a black bride of Blacula wedding dress, showing the girls how to camp it up for the final pass.

Melrose is perfect. CariDeeMented is perfectly deranged. She flails around. She makes really ugly, contorted faces. She bunches up the wedding dress so high and so tight we almost see her lady bits (and wouldn't THAT be special). She shrieks, she camps, she's awful.

Final judging. There is some talk about how all the girls hate Melrose and Tyra says maybe they hate her because she's just that good. Nigel mouths some bullshit about how Melrose is perfect, but only because she's a perfectionist and works too hard at it and maybe isn't a natural talent. He disses her for her know-it-all aspect.

Mr. Jay shows that he's got cojones, after all and points out (quite rightly) that what Nigel is dissing Melrose for is exactly what they are constantly bitching at the rest of the girls for NOT having: a personality, a clue about personal style, a working and pretty comprehensive knowledge of the fashion industry and a ferocious work ethic.

She's toast.

Despite the fact that she is just batshit crazy, despite the fact that she asked Nigel if the giant stick he was holding came out of his ass after a previous judging, despite the fact that all of the judges acknowledged that her runway walk was a disaster of horrorific proportions, CariDeeMented was crowned America's Next Top Model. Proving that she is NOT all that, and did NOT deserve to win, she tries to use Danielle's patented Mommy, I'm a Covergirl line. It doesn't work.

Cut to Melrose crying and saying she was robbed (which she was). Fade to black. Has the show finally jumped the shark?

Between this and Jeffrey-the-Pinheaded-Shmoo winning Project Runway, I think I have finally had my fill of "reality" teevee. In the immortal words of my grandpa: "Feh."

Long-time readers of this blog know the great disdain I hold for the great southwest, a measured response to the dog-years I spent living there. But now another of my friends has decided to move to the tiny little blue dab of jelly in the huge red doughnut of Texas: P-Roo and her husband have packed the dogs and the car and headed out today to Austin.

P-Roo (a new nickname for my girlfriendgirl) and I have been friends for a million years, since the dark days when we were married to earlier, evil husbands. Those two men were as close to being friends as sociopathic lawyers can be, and every time we'd run into each other at some lame-ass law school function, she and I would be delighted to see one another and we'd beg our husbands to make plans for the four of us to go out. They'd agree, and then we wouldn't meet, and my ex, the Antichrist, would conveniently forget to give me their phone number or he wouldn't know it, or something.

We divorced at about the same time, she and I and immediately became the best of friends. Nothing like losing 160 pounds of inconvenient buzz-kill to lighten up a relationship.

P-Roo is an artist, too. She was a jeweler until health reasons forced her to give up metal working (and red meat, and alcohol and wheat and nuts and bananas and strawberries and pretty much everything that makes life liveable. Except coffee. She can still drink coffee. And smoke cigarettes, and what the fuck is it to you if we do?)

Now she is a quilter, and in fact, it is she who does all my machine quilting for me. She designs all of her own quilting patterns and they are pretty amazing. I particularly love the ones she based on a book of Gothic stonework (that I bought for her at a used book store in Sarasota a couple of summers ago). Synergy, people, synergy.

But today she left for Texas, and the only bright spot I can find in this is that the bitch will finally start reading my blog, just to keep up with me.

Any of you out there in Austin, or quilters looking for an amazing long-arm quilter to do your tops for you, drop me an e-mail and I'll tell you where to find her. Austin may be one of the hippest cities in America, but it still can be cold and lonely if you don't know anyone there.

Day three of laying in bed hacking up lung so hard that my ribs hurt and my abs hurt like I've been doing crunches non-stop for all three days. Which, if you saw me hacking, you'd know to be true.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and here's mine: I've just listed two quilts on Etsy. There's a Red Ribbons and Hearts quilt that I made for an AIDS auction that never happened. Instead, I'm going to donate half the sale price to CareResource, the AIDS organization on whose board I once sat.

Tante Leah's Handmades. On line and on sale now.

A portrait of Scotty Neaill, the first boy I had a crush on, the last boy I knew who got drafted for Viet Nam, and the first friend to die of AIDS.

Scotty was a year older than me, and I just adored him. He had this one eyebrow that sort of curled up on one side, very devilish and twinkly eyes with long dark lashes. He wasn't a blonde surfer, and he wasn't an athelete (like that would have driven me wild, even in those days) and he wasn't the most popular boy in school. He was just Scotty and I wanted to go out with him. Instead, I was his friend, the girl he told about all the other girls that had crushes on him that he didn't like. We'd go to the beach together.

Once I went to visit him when I was out horseback riding with another friend. We just trotted up to his house and hung around for a while. When we left, he told his mother, "she's sort of weird, but I like her." She told me that when I made my condolence call after he died.

He took me sailing on his Hobie Cat, and once we were becalmed on the St. Lucie River for several hours until we were able to tack back to the dock at the Sunrise Inn. When I finally made it home, my mother was furious, her mind filled with the horrid possibilities of what a young girl and a young man could do for three hours on the canvas deck of a Hobie in the middle of the river. Nothing much, I assure you, but Mummy was not so easily dissuaded from believing that.

Scotty gave me a strand of love beads, the summer of 1970 or 71. I still have them.

Scotty was drafted into the United States Army, the last of the Nam draftees, but he served his term in Japan, where he fell in love with Japanese landscaping and gardening. When he got out of the service, he tried to enroll in a school in Japan, but there was no room for a US citizen. So Scotty came back to America and moved to San Francisco, where he worked at Horchow, and tried to find local Japanese landscaping classes.

Scotty died in 1988, the first of way too many friends to die of AIDS. He left behind no garden to bear witness to his passion. His younger brother Richard became a landscape architect, perhaps in Scotty's memory, perhaps because he too loved plants and flowers and making them take on the vision you hold in your head. Richard died of AIDS, too, maybe eight years after Scotty.

Remember your friends, and those who are living, tell them you love them. Make a donation today to your local AIDS service organization or national research group, like AMFAR. Light a candle. Say a prayer.

We are down to the last four bitches and hos, we are in Barthelona (no visit yet from Manuel, but I'm still hopeful) and it is the week the B&Hs learn to Flamenco. I'll wait for you all to stop choking with laughter.
All better now? Good. Because when you see these four and their pathetic footwork, you will only start choking again. Amanda starts the episode by interviewing that she is really, really sorry that her twin is gone, but then again, it's just one less bitch to beat out to the finals, so y'know? Blood, water, whatever. CariDee comes around to tell Amanda that she knows it's lonely for her without Michelle, and she, CariDee is there if Amanada needs a cuddle. Wrong twin, CariDee.

The girls get a Tyra mail about partnering and it, of course, leaves them clueless. But I'm beginning to think that with this particular litter, you could just spell it out: Tyra says this week you learn to dance. and they still would all be hanging over each other's shoulders going "wha?"

Flamenco! They pile into a dance studio and meet the maestro and his interpreter and a pack of slim-hipped men in high heels - their flamenco partners. The maestro shows them a couple of simple steps, a forward, back, sweep and step that anyone who never fell over their own Reeboks in a Jazzercise class could master (that would, of course, leave out yours truly, who once said to her own mother "Why did God make Jews smart, I'd have gladly given up a few IQ points for a little natural rhythm." and got slapped for being a wiseass). The maestro's name is Nacho, but he's a different Nacho than the one who didn't want to kiss Jaeda-I-Hate-My-Hair. To which I can only ask: WTF? When did Nacho become a popular Spanish name, or are they fucking with us?

But we are talking about the ANTM hamsters here, so it goes without saying that Amanda is lame, Melrose overthinks it, CariDee hates Melrose and will "puke" if she wins, and Eugena plays the "I GOT natural rhythm, so I have no problems with this one" card. No, she really said it on national TV. Really.

We see them practice with their attractive, slim-hipped and graceful partners. Nothing seems to rub off on the hamsters, but Amanda's shoes rubbed her heels and we are treated to a shot of her picking at her blisters while she voices over something that I couldn't hear because the voice in my head was shrieking too loudly in horror about the visual.

They go home. They practice more. They all interview about how much they hate Melrose. Melrose doesn't care that they hate her (and neither do I, to tell you the truth. I'm pretty much over this bunch. How many more weeks do we have to suffer these fools?).

They go to another (or maybe the same one they shot the Secret commercial in) park and there is a small wooden dance floor, a guitarist and a handful of random people who are never identified sitting at cafe tables where they can watch the dance. The Maestro and his interpreter are there to judge. Again, CariDee hates Melrose a lot. Even when she's dancing, it's still all about how much she hates Melrose. This is the Flamenco of hate. She's not bad.

Eugena is great, if you are grading on a curve, and you have Amanda with her backward feet setting the curve.

Amanda has her feet on backwards today, proving that she really is Gumby, Dammit. But she tries, and she looks sort of pretty.

Melrose loses the beat in the first eight bars, blames it on her partner (as if, bitch -- I mean, who's the pro here?) and then loses it completely when she realizes that she isn't going to win. No, Eugena of the Natural Rhythm wins and gets to pick a friend to share her prize. Proving once more that no matter how many hours of footage they show us of two girls sharing a bed, gossiping about how much they hate Melrose (ahem, CariDee and Eugena) these hamsters are all two or more faced and Eugena picks Amanada to share her prize. CariDee gamely says that she would have shared with Amanda too, because Amanda hasn't won ANYTHING yet.

The prize is clothing from the famous and fabulous Custo Barcelona. As usual, the only one with a clue about who or what Custo is is Melrose. Have we mentioned yet that everybody hates Melrose? Because she's fake. Because she can model. Because she has more than two brain cells still functioning. Because she cooks. Because she keeps winning challenges. Because she tries harder. Because she won't take off the goddam raspberry beret. Although I have to admit, she wears it well.

Since the theme this week is twosies, the photo shoot also involves working in pairs. The girls will be posing in evening gowns, floating in a swimming pool, looking like (and how many times did they say this so we idiot viewers could get the point) aquatic angels. Yeah, whatevs. First up is Melrose and Eugena. Jay and Tyra giggle a little about how "Don't these two hate each other?" Yep. That's a knee-slapper, alright. Jay also rolls his eyes, despairs that Eugena never listens to direction and laments that it was just another typical Eugena shoot. Ugh.

Tyra is on set to coach, and we see in flashback that back in the earlies, say season two or so, she used to go on set and coach more often. I say that she should do this more often. It actually is helpful to the girls, and interesting to see her work it. Because, even though we call her Tyrant and snark about her fading beauty and all, the bitch WAS all that in her day and she does know her shit. Just seeing her in the flashback showing some forgettable prior contestant--one of the early man/girls--pose like Grace Jones was worth watching this whole episode.

The pool is cold. The models bitch. The fan blogs are rampant with suggestions that this was done on purpose to add drama. Allow me to weigh in on that.

I live in Miami. I have a very small, unheated pool. Even though it's 90 degrees during the day in the early spring, there is no way you could swim in my pool. It's just too fucking cold. That was a large pool they were in. Barcelona is many latitudes north of Miami. I don't think there was any producer hanky-panky involved. That said, I used to have swim team practice in an unheated pool in the winter. Colder than a witches tit. After a few dozen laps, we were fine. Until we had to get out of the water and into the cold air. These girls didn't move at all, and they have no body fat. Of course they were cold. However, if it's cold enough for one girl to develop hypothermia, it was probably cold enough for all of them to do so. Did they? Did Amanada the skeleton get hypothermia? No. Did Eugena? No. Of course Melrose didn't and if she did she would have kept her mouth shut and toughed it out. Did CariDee of the perpetual whining and constant neediness have to be pulled out of the pool and coddled? You better believe it. The girl is a hot mess of high maintenence.

And the photos were amazing. I hate when that happens. But they were. This whole season has had some amazing shoots.

Judging. Prizes. Stills from the dance recital. There is a horrifying moment where the camera zooms in on Amanda's backwards foot, the judges all cringe and she shows them, live, in person, how she can twist her foot 180 degrees from front. Eeew. Gumby, dammit. The judges allow as how CariDee is a whiny, needy, high maintenence sort of girl, and let her stay. They allow how everybody hates Melrose, and they aren't too fond of her either, especially that fucking beret, but she does take a fantastic picture every single fucking time, so what can you do except let her stay. Eugena gets to stay because there is no way in hell there could be three white finalists, and she has gotten better, even if her skin hasn't and they haven't paid for a dermatologist this year and she did show natural rhythm and danced OK. And anyway, if they get rid of her, who can CariDee whine to about how much she hates Melrose.

That means that Twin II gets the boot. Don't worry, little twins, you'll have a contract in no time. You two have faces that the camera loves, and more importantly, you have a gimmick. We'll miss you.

Next week, someone wins. The big question is, will anybody care.

By the time I got home, the head cold from hell was manifesting as a real flu. I have been in bed since, drinking hot toddies (Thanks Gigi and RJ), sleeping and groaning in pain. The flu makes your joints hurt, you know. But did you know that you have joints in your skull? Yep. They hurt, too.

I took the strongest OTC decongestant there is: something that you can only take once every 24 hours. Hasn't made a dent in the quanity of liquid oozing from my head.

Warning: TMI coming in the next sentence. That which isn't dripping from the front of my nose is making its way down into my lungs, gearing up for a lovely episode of bronchitis.

On the other hand, I'm so out of it that I was able to play my favorite stupid computer game and reach a new high score. OK, that exhausted me. Time to go horizontal again. I promise an ANTM recap when I wake up.