Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (11 page)

Learning that Montel has basically been high since 1999 is kinda funny when you consider all those “scared straight” lectures and teen boot camps he sponsors. All he wants to do, turns out, is puff some cheeb legal-like.

And so do Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs. That’s right! I found their names, along with Montel’s, on a list of celebrities who support legalizing marijuana for sick folks. And did I mention that my bunions have been driving me kuh-razy?

Says the grandfatherly Cronkite, “At the end of the day, me and the missus like to burn a coupla buddha-sticks and stare at the sunset. Dude.” Okay, not really, but a girl can dream.

And Hugh “Ganja-man” Downs? Who knew? Of course, there were some nonsurprises on the list, namely Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who define Hollywood hipness with their hybrid cars and illegitimate children, and Woody Harrelson, who—hello!—wears only clothes made out of hemp.

In an interview, Montel said that there are days when he doesn’t even want to get out of bed.

I feel ya. The irony is that when the rich and powerful get sick, politics can get pretty strange. Witness the militaristic Montel and the conservative Nancy Reagan bravely
fighting her own kind for stem-cell research. When illness hits home, it’s amazing how marijuana becomes less reefer madness and more “compassionate access.” Either way, I’m glad Montel’s feeling groovy. Sick people should be able to find relief where they can. Word.

When I first read about Fox’s new reality series
The Simple Life,
I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the show about two vapid Beverly Hills honeys dumped on a rural Arkansas pig farm. I tried to fight it, hons, but, before I knew it, it was back to the Barcalounger with a box of Smart Ones eclairs, clicker in hand.

I can’t resist reality TV, although I do have some standards. How’s about a tiny little shout out for my refusal to watch
The Littlest Groom?

To say that the stars of
The Simple Life,
famous ick girls Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, appear to be shallow and self-absorbed is like saying that Joan Rivers appears to have had some cosmetic surgery.

Paris and Nicole (dumb and dumber) haven’t got enough
meat on their bones to make a poor man a pot of soup, but that’s not why I love to hate them. Although it certainly helps.

Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why we like these Dumb Rich People shows that are sprouting up faster ‘n toadstools after an Arkansas thunder-buster. They’re fun to watch because we get to do a little superior dance.

I may not inherit a $360 million hotel chain, but I have sense enough to know that (in the most famous Paris pronouncement) Wal-Mart doesn’t “like, uh, just sell walls.”

Nicole is clearly the second banana in this show, and I’m waiting for the poor thing to figure that out. She’s Gilligan to Paris’s Skipper. I fully expect Paris to grab Nicole’s hat and hit her over the head with it repeatedly. Nicole is the noxious wind beneath Paris’s wings, limited to sighing and squealing as soon as she sees Paris sigh or squeal. The scene in which both girls recoil at the notion of plucking a chicken while Arkansas granny just shakes her head and huffs about the layabout Hollywood harlots is simply television at its finest.

Paris, whose nudie video continues to cause a stir, likes to visit the local eight-aisle Superette wearing jeans cut so low that she resembles a plumber more than a runway model. Classy!

In the earliest episodes, there appeared to be some small amount of chemistry between the Justin Timberlake-ish
oldest brother in the host family and Paris, who is obsessed with discovering new ways to expose her “coin slot.”

So, yes, we watch this show because it makes us feel good. We may never have enough money to casually spend $1,500 on a Gucci dog carrier like Paris (and one wonders if she really wants to buy a Nicole carrier for her little hanger-on buddy), but we can drive a straight shift without ripping the transmission out.

Yeah, we can.

Of course, some reality TV is too bad even to enjoy as a guilty pleasure. I’m thinking about the sincerely awful vehicle featuring Monica Lewinsky as the perky/wise hostess of a romantic reality and dating show. Yes, that’s right. Monica Lewinsky dispensing dating advice to the lovelorn.

I was hoping we’d seen the last of the D.C. strumpet when she tearfully ran off the set of her own HBO special and into the arms of her Nutter Butter-brained mama, but nooooo. Monica has grabbed her fifteen minutes of fame, wrassled them to the ground, and is holding them—and us—hostage. She, like a bad burrito, simply won’t go away.

Who can we blame for Monica’s TV show,
Mr. Personality?
Could it beeee Satan? No, but you’re close: the Fox Network.

In Episode One, an attractive stockbroker named Hayley must choose her ideal date from among twenty masked men. Get it? She can’t see what they look like, so the guys must rely on their personalities to win her over. Personally,
I’m pulling for the troll with the one eye in the center of his forehead. As we say in the South, that oughta learn her.

Fox, in its own twisted way, probably thought the show was actually virtuous, even high-minded. After all, female contestants would be forced to date a guy based on his inner beauty.

Memo to Fox: Any guy with even an ounce of “inner beauty” wouldn’t participate in this dreck.

As hostess, it would be Monica’s job to act as Hayley’s confidante, sharing dating advice.

If only I had had a chance to take Hayley aside, I would’ve told her that I know it’s been a bad year for stockbrokers. (I know this because I just got the quarterly statement for my ever-dwindling 401-Kiss my money good-bye Plan and have spent most of the year mapping out a Fancy Feast retirement with my own Mr. Personality.)

But, girl, please. You do not want to take dating advice from Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps you’ve forgotten: Monica didn’t get the guy. What’s your next move? Acting classes from Mariah Carey?

Seeing Monica back in the news after so much time reminded me of a theory that I have about her: She is really an Osmond. No, really. The big black hair, the chipmunk cheeks, the Chiclets teeth. She is the Missing Osmond, the one they never talk about. The, as Donnie might say, “one bad apple.”

Monica says her new job shouldn’t surprise people. She
told
Newsweek
that her affair with President Clinton had made her a public figure and, “I’ve come to realize that I’ve already had my own reality show.”

I can’t see how to make this any tawdrier unless Fox makes Monica wolf a bowl of wriggling beetle larvae at the end of every show.

Memo to Fox: Settle down. I thought of it first.

The best reality shows are the ones that feature ordinary people. How much do we really want to watch of Farrah Fawcett carping at her bloated boyfriend, Ryan O’Neal? Give me
The Amazing Race
any day.

The thing that blows my mind is how many people will do anything to get on TV.

I have spent hours I can never get back watching TLC’s trademark shows:
A Dating Story, A Wedding Story, A Baby Story,
and the like, and I can only hope that a
He Cheated and Now I’m Divorcing His Triflin’ Ass Story
is in the works.

One of TLC’s most popular shows is
What Not to Wear,
and, hons, it’s as mean as Star Jones on Day Five of the Atkins Diet.

The premise is creepsome. Two “celebrity stylists” watch videotapes of women who dress poorly that have been
supplied by their friends and families.
(More on this later.) The stylists then confront the justifiably horrified bad dresser as she weeps into her plaid poncho with pom-poms, circa 1977, and promises to try to dress better, with their help.

The “stylists” have changed over the years. In the first
season, the show starred a flamboyant Fabio-haired Wayne Scot Lukas, who played off the diminutive and chatty Stacy London.

Mr. Lukas, who has since left the show, favored a signature look that mixed puka shells and buckskins. On camera, he was too easily distracted by the beauty of his own hair and spent much of the show flipping and tossing it about like a rather hard-faced Breck girl. In an interview, he explained that the show’s important because “We all have body issues and all of our body issues are huge and all of our body issues are secrets.”

Say what?

Stacy, who remains on the show with the milquetoast Clinton Somebody, dresses well enough but is as annoying as nail fungus with her constant squeals of “Shut
up!”
She says the show is all about confronting one’s lack of style.

Or as Wayne Scot once put it, “When me and Stacy get you naked in a room, and we say, ‘What do you hate about your body?’ When they have to say it, their world crumbles.”

As we vacuum the remnants of shattered self-esteem off the dressing room floor, let’s consider the show’s real villains, the family and “friends” who supply the humiliating videos of dear ol’ Mom wearing her beloved fuzzy house-coat and bunny slippers in the privacy (ha-ha!) of her own home.

Reality TV is addictive, though. How else do you explain this disappointing vignette of my married life?

Not long ago, there was a moving and provocative documentary on PBS that detailed, in a most compelling way, the horrible racial strife in 1950s Mississippi. I knew it would be excellent, the kind of programming that makes even the no-TV nuts get their heads out of their subtitled “films” and rethink their position.

Of course, I didn’t watch it. I had to
see Joe Millionaire,
in which a muscle-bound and rather vacant cutie pie courts greedy women who
think
he’s a millionaire when, in fact, he’s a bulldozer operator.

Oh, hons, I am
so
ashamed.

Joe Millionaire?
My husband walked through the living room just as I flipped to the documentary so he’d think I was smart instead of the kind of person who secretly enjoys those awful fat baby shows on
Maury
and
Dr. Phil.
(And speaking of which, am I the only one to make the fat baby-fat mama connection? Hell-oooo.)

But I flipped channels too late. I was so busted. The moment had that kind of awful shame attached to it that is usually reserved for wolfing the last piece of cold pizza over the sink (where calories never count).

“Joe Millionaire?”
he said. His tone hovered somewhere between disapproval and pity. I guess he felt like Connie Chung, who probably tells her girlfriends, “I thought I was
marrying a serious journalist, and now he has this show where he has contests to see who can pull the fat baby off the tricycle. I can hardly hold my head up at the network correspondents’ dinner every year.”

What is wrong with me? With our nation? Why, during a sneak preview of Fox’s
Bridezilla,
which follows the weddings of the nation’s most whiniest bitches, did I think, “Oh, baby, I am
so
TiVo-ing that.”

Or Fox’s
High School Reunion.
Typically, Fox likes lots of skin, so they plan to keep reunions to ten years, instead of, say, thirty, when it’s doubtful anyone wants to bounce around the hot tub in a thong and conversations might revolve around who drove what route to get there and how steel-cut oatmeal had turned their lives and colons around.

Taking a tip from Fox, NBC’s
Fear Factor
selects only female contestants with exceedingly large fake breasts and no measurable amount of body fat. These women are the kind who can convincingly make suggestive comments while devouring a plate of pig rectum. Hey, it’s a gift.

I’m not proud of my viewing habits, but I can quit anytime I like. Well. Almost anytime. Dr. Phil has a 180-pound two-year-old toddler coming up, and I think he’s looking for a wife.

It’s time to fess up: I have been imprisoned by a serious addiction for more than twenty-five years. The prison is in effect only from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, but still.

My addiction to the idiotic
Days of Our Lives
is hugely embarrassing. I mean on the order of the time I had a big fight with my bank and emerged victorious only to discover that I had spinach glued to
every single one of my teeth.
Damn those veggie burritos.

Anyway, yes, I know that it is a stupid, stupid TV show full of cardboard cutout characters and poorly acted “plots.” No matter. I find
Days
as irresistible as Horton family matriarch Grandma Alice’s homemade doughnuts, which the poor ol’ thing trots out for weddings, funerals, and serial killings.

HOPE BRADY
: Gran, the Salem serial killer has just struck again! My father, my mother-in-law, and my stepfather-in-law are all dead!

MRS. H
.: Have another doughnut, dear.

But, lately, something strange has been happening on
Days:
It’s gotten interesting.

See, the serial killer who is killing off the cast one by one, sometimes as many as two a week, is none other than Salem’s most esteemed psychiatrist, Dr. Marlena Evans, the sincere-faced long-legged beauty who has been the heart and soul of this show for decades.

Marlena—Doc to us—has counseled all of Salem at one time or the other, and now she’s,
ick,
stabbing them with a letter opener to the carotid, outsmarting her buddies who spend much of every show saying, “We’re going to get the killer. This won’t happen again,” but before we even go to a commercial break, oopsie, there’s another body.

Truthfully, most victims have been, well, expendable. I was mildly miffed when she killed her ex-husband, Roman Brady, on his wedding day. I was hoping Roman would find true happiness with reformed whore Kate Roberts, but no.

After murdering him at his wedding reception, Marlena even comforted the grieving sorta-widow, patting her and offering the earnest-faced consolation we’ve come to expect.