If You’ve
Got a Taste For Terror, Take Kevin to the Prom

They're making prom gowns. And that brings the total number of prom references I've experienced in the mass media this week to a total of, well, two. But that's two more than I usually hear about. The first came from cochair of NBC Entertainment (Bravo's parent) and super-classy gentleman Ben Silverman, who called the striking Writers Guild members the "nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school" and accused them of trying to cancel the prom. The prom in this instance is the Golden Globe Awards. This comparison is, sadly, not quite accurate. Because the Golden Globes (cancelled -- ha HA!) are more like the way-less-important junior -- or maybe even the winter --prom than the big formal spring one for seniors. He should know that.

But he doesn't. And that's just one reason he's a dick.

Let's get back to me, though. I'm still sick. Just like last week. Hence the delayed posting of this recap. But I used up all my Garbage Pail Kids Movie analogies last time, so even though I remain full of lung items that need coughing up, I won't be punctuating this recap with whiny references to my ongoing sinus infection. That's what LiveJournal is for. I will, however, give you this week's fashion tip from my model friend Elyse. It has nothing to do with the episode at all, but I figured you'd still like to hear what a real live working model has to say about life and stuff. Here it is:

"Goyard bags. God, they're so ugly."

I like this as a style pronouncement because it's irrelevant to anyone who isn't rich enough to buy a Goyard bag. Personally, I was totally unaware of them until the Barneys "Go Green This Christmas" e-mail popped up in my in-box early in December. That advert-email contains many environment-increasing gifts to buy for all your eco-pals. One of them was an $1,100 Goyard grocery tote for carrying all your organic veggies home in. If I had one I'd make sure it was full of Pop-Tarts and Eggo Waffles and I'd say, "Put those Eggos in my Goyard bag that cost me $1,100 plus tax, damn you." And I don't think the bag was that ugly. But that's me. I like ugly stuff sometimes.

Spoiler (like it matters -- by the time you finish reading this you'll know): Kevin gets the heave-ho this week. And it's like they're already weaning you off usual shots of him shirtless first thing in the morning by giving you opening ablutions shots of everyone else: tooth-brushing Ricky, blow-drying Christian, blush-applying Victorya, and now shirtless, betoweled Rami. Victorya says, "Crazily enough, I miss [recently eliminated] Elisa."

I think it's crazy that Victorya misses anyone, but I miss Elisa too. I also miss Santino. And Melinda Doolittle. And the first Becky on Roseanne. My husband/partner/whatever is sort of consumed with missing Kynt And Vyxsin from this season of The Amazing Race. We all miss something. Mostly what I'm starting to miss is this show being fun. I'm not the first person to note that as the talent of the designers grows, so does their emotional maturity and their unwillingness to act out like lunatics. And honestly, that wouldn't be a problem for me (I just started watching Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew, and it's got enough serious disturbance for all of basic cable.) if the challenges seemed fresh, but up to now they haven't been.

The designers are seated by the runway. Heidi comes out in head-to-toe black. A disagreement ensues about the extreme super-bangs that nearly cover her eyes. I vote that they are amazing. Good friend Xtreem Aaron agrees with me because he and I share excellent taste in many things, including opinions about celebrity hairstyles. But the husband/partner/whatever has to naysay. "The only super-bangs in her life should come from Seal," he says, thinking he's so smart and funny.

"Are you ready for your next challenge?" Heidi asks. A wan half-hearted, borderline whiny chorus of "Sure" rises like creeping, anonymous flatulence from the group. Is it four in the morning? I know this happens sometimes. I have friends here in Los Angeles who work on TV sets and they tell me insane stories of all-night shoots where everybody's dead on their feet and no one goes home until way after the sun comes up. That's a job I could never handle. My body's clock needs an early to bed, early to rise routine or I become irritable and beaten down. So that could be it. Or they could be sugar-crashing from the Hershey challenge. Or maybe they're all just bored like the audience.

But oh, wait, perhaps I spoke too quickly. Because it might turn out to be an interesting challenge. Here come the short, real-bodied high-school girl models who will each have a prom dress created for them. As they enter, the designers begin laughing. Nice one, designers -- that's not every teenager's worst nightmare or anything, to inspire laughter by just walking into a room.

"I think prom is horrible and tacky and gross," says Christian on interview-cam. And are we all in agreement that he's 1000% correct? Mine was, anyway. A death sentence hanging over my head. For a senior in high school who had never even so much as touched a girl (or a guy), much less kissed one, the whole ordeal was nothing less than a humiliating scavenger hunt. Ask a girl to prom, rent a tux that smells like dry-cleaning, buy a corsage, pick her up, pin it on her, meet her parents, go to dinner, try to make conversation, go to the prom, pose for a picture, dance to "867-5309 (Jenny)" -- because my senior prom was in 1982 -- and then accumulate sex points. I had managed to skip my junior prom with some friends (We went to see The Empire Strikes Back instead. It was awesome.) but I had no choice but to go the next year. There was a girl with zero gaydar who had a crush on me. I figured I could at least use her to accomplish the goal of making out with another human being before graduation. I did, and we did. I got to second base, in fact, which was weird. I have no idea where she is now. I hope she's happily involved with someone of matching sexual orientation. Anyway, I'm with Christian on this one, even though I know that as far as prom dresses go in 2007, they've evolved far beyond the bell-shaped, Gone With the Wind-style doom-frocks that were still popular in Hobbs, N.M., in 1982. These days they look like real dresses that a real woman might actually want to wear. Sort of.

Heidi tells the designers that the girls have already chosen which designer they want to work with. On interview-cam Chris is wondering what the girl who chose him was thinking, as his portfolio is nothing but him in out-of-control theatrical drag with giant steer horns and fire hydrants on his head, which if you think about it, would look better than that thing that Molly Ringwald put together for herself at the end of Pretty in Pink. Remember how she was supposed to be so creative and punk rock? And then she shows up at the end wearing the gross mutant version of the vintage dress that Annie Potts picked out for her, and all you could think was, Well she must be really good at making out because both Blaine and Duckie still want to hit that. Better to have a fire hydrant on your head, really.

In the workroom Tim tells them that they have until midnight that day and then all the next, a budget of $250, and some clients coming in who will have "strong opinions" about the dress they're going to wear. He sends in the girls and almost immediately we get to see Kevin's prom picture. He has floppy hair, an orange tan, and both ears pierced. He cops to the tan and to stealing booze for the night. Then he guarantees parents that he'll put a chastity belt inside the dress. That's not me trying to be cute, either. He says that.

Rami's girl says she wants something that's not "too traditional." Rami says that this is perfect. Because, you know, he's so avant-garde. Victorya's girl fesses up that she got last pick and this doesn't seem to faze Victorya much. Sweet P's girl knows the true function of prom and asks for something that plunges deep in both the front and back. Christian's girl has done two years of fashion design in school and now believes that she's a teenage Yves Saint Laurent. She takes Christian's pencil away and starts sketching. I love this because I want Christian to flip out. He's got to start carrying the personality globe on his teeny little shoulders or this season's going to go comatose. Therefore, anything that winds him up is fine by me.

They all go to Mood. Kevin picks some red silk that he says "is so gorgeous it's going to glow on the runway." Now, see, that's my kind of hetero guy, the kind that says homo shit like that. Is there even a word for that kind of likes-to-ball-chicks-but-is-also-faggy guy? A straight fag. A strag? Is that a good word? Because that's Kevin.

Back in the workroom we see Christian's prom picture (tight black something on his body, a big chicken-y mohawk, standing next to two girlfriends) and he announces that he was voted best-dressed at the prom. Then he complains that the client requests have left him feeling fenced in and not "fierce." Cut to Jillian, who asserts that she wants her dress to look like the inside of a "joo-lery" box. Welcome to my worst pronunciation nightmare. I hate that even more than I hate "noo-kyuh-lar." And that's a lot of hate. It's a good thing Jillian is so sweet and cute. If it had been Ricky saying it, I'd have thrown something.

WHOA! KIT WAS A PROM PRINCESS! They show her picture. She looks absolutely unlike what I expected. Here I had an entire ska-based Orange County hardcore past constructed for her in my brain, and from the looks of the picture she was listening to the Lion King soundtrack in the little red Miata her dad bought for her.

In the workroom Ricky asks if anyone has any good jokes. Something tells me a producer put him up to this. Don't you know they're all panicking behind the scenes when every day the tape gets logged or reviewed or whatever and all the designers are just buzzing at their workstations like little bees, not bitching, not fighting, not screaming, not storming out in a huff, and, now that Jack is gone, NOT BEING CARRIED AROUND IN TOTE BAGS. SERIOUSLY, BRAVO, BRING JACK AND HIS DECEPTIVE BITCH-FACE BACK. OK, so anyway, here's the joke:

"What would you call the Flintstones if they were gay?" asks Chris. You knew he was the king of telling jokes.

"What?" asks Ricky and Kit.

"Fags."

Hey, that's a good one. Ricky doesn't laugh, of course. Instead he says, "I get it." See, that's the kind of gay I'm not interested in knowing. If you can't laugh at a good fag joke, then you obviously don't like things that are great. This leads us a heart-to-heart phone call from Ricky to his mom, who we learn was a self-taught seamstress. She taught Ricky everything he knows. That figures, because everything he does looks like crap to me. And I'd also like to stop here for a second and thank the editors/producers for not being dumbly obvious about who's going home based on the backstory we get. Recently you've been able to tell who was going home based on how much face-time the person got in that episode. And like I already said, it's Kevin's turn to get two final cheek-smooches from Heidi. But we get Ricky personality footage instead. We also get Ricky weeping and expressing deep fond wishes for winning and doors opening and blah-blah-I-want-this-so-badly-blah. Fag.

More scenes of work work work, sew sew sew, no-fighting no-fighting no-fighting. The day ends; everyone's beat.

Commercials:

1. You can buy a Gwen Stefani printer for your computer now? That's...odd.

2. Oh, good, my favorite L'Oreal commercial with Penelope Cruz where they only allow her to speak three words. Here they are: "Eet's poe-see-buhl" and "br-eye-ter." Clearly someone at L'Oreal saw how great she was in All About My Mother and Volver and was like, "Well she can do anything." And yet there is the small matter of Sahara. Also Vanilla Sky, a movie that my husband/partner/whatever, a man born in Atlanta to a Basque father and a mother from Madrid, is fond of quoting with a thick Castillian accent. "Hopen Joo Ayes!" he likes to say, because there's this recurring moment in the movie where P.C. tells Tom Cruise, "Open your eyes." When my husband/partner/whatever does this, I laugh quite a bit.

OK, so now it's day 2. This is the day Christian freaks out hard. But before he does that he helps Victorya WIN THE CHALLENGE. You see him assisting her, showing her how to make it more youthful after she complains that she's created something that an older Italian divorcee would wear. Then she says that she trusts his judgment. Meanwhile, the kid he's making the dress for doesn't trust him at all, and so now his own compromised garment has about 37 things going on, which is about 34 too many.

Oh, good, the moms are coming in to look at the dresses. This turns into three minutes of "make sure you cover up her tits." And one of the moms is especially clueless. Because Ricky says, to the kid, "Girl, you look hot," and the mom chimes in, "Hey, that's my daughter."

Now, I'm 43. If I were straight and married and had kids, it's conceivable that I could have a daughter of prom-going age by now. In any case, that mom is approximately a Generation X member, someone born roughly in the same decade as me. And maybe the readers of this recap on this gay website aren't the right people to ask, but I will anyway: Is there seriously a middle-aged person alive on the planet who could look at Ricky and not think, "That guy is, I'm nearly certain, a homosexual." This isn't a cultural moment like in the '50s where women saw Liberace on TV and swooned over how dreamy he was. This is now. You can see gays all over the place now if you have a TV. I don't get it. Meanwhile Kevin has his face in his client's butt while her mother pats her on the tummy and says, "You look pregnant." That's too many weird things at once for me to think about.

Christian is doing his best not to fight with his teen. But she keeps complaining. The way they do. I was a teacher for several years, is how I know. It's the teen vocation. It follows "knowing it all" and "feeling put-upon" on the high school to-do list. I even asked a teen I know if I was correct about this. His response was: "All they care about is how they look, what people think about them, and how they are treated. They can't see into the future because their skanky clothes and bad bleach job hairstyles are blocking the view. They get these issues from their mid-life crisis parents, who are freaking out because celebrities are their age and look 10 times better."

There. Straight from the 19-year-old mouth of a member of Generation Y or Z or the Millennials or whatever they're being called. I have no idea if he's right or not. But it sounds good.

Rami, on interview-cam, expresses concern that Christian hasn't taken control of the situation. And that is sort of weird, considering that Christian is usually so determined to do it all his own way. Maybe teen girls are his Kryptonite since he's still not that far away from having just been a teenager himself. Maybe, unlike Sweet P, who's just said to the camera that she's not going home because she listened to some 17-year-old, they can still make him feel bad? The show doesn't delve into the whys of the situation, they just show you Christian becoming more and more upset and considering the possibility that he'll get sent home. Jillian says, "I feel bad. He's totally suffering." Dang, so much empathy and camaraderie. Fighting! MORE FIGHTING!

Tim Gunn visits:

Tells Kevin to finish the hem because Nina will notice; has nothing much to say to Rami because Rami has immunity this week, and that's a good thing because Rami keeps making the same Grecian dress over and over; also says nothing to Victorya when she declares her intention to apply ugly multicolored paste jewels to the front of her dress because she thinks it'll make it "look rich" on the runway; gives Christian a serious "buck up" talk about his depressing dress; says "Make it work" to the gang.

Sewing sewing sewing. The day is over.

Elimination Day:

The kids come in for final fittings. Ricky announces that he once had a girlfriend and that he made her prom dress for her. He could probably have another girlfriend now if he wanted. He could date his client's mom and she'd never know something was amiss. They'd go shoe shopping and get frozen coffee drinks and watch Ugly Betty together. It'd be perfect.

And now -- FINALLY -- we get to see Sweet P's prom picture. She took a guy who makes Jeff Spiccoli look like Wally Cleaver, whose parole officer is standing 10 feet away, and claims that she had a "great time" before waving the blushing heat away from her face. Chris says he didn't go to his prom. He stayed home and watched old movies and got drunk. Smart man. He could have come with me and my friends to see The Empire Strikes Back. I'm glad Chris got a second chance. He's a jolly presence that the show needs if they're not going to have excellent fighting. But imagine how he might rise to the occasion and provide humorous on-site commentary if there were fighting. At this point I'm just trying to be happy with the lemons instead of the lemonade I'd really prefer.

Teen models are in the make-up room, getting themselves tarted. Chris is badgering Kevin to hem his dress. Christian's model is difficult, and he's coaching her on what to say to the judges. "Admit it," she says. "You love me."

Guess what, kid. He wishes he could pour a bucket of pig blood on you.

Runway time. Kors, Nina, and Gilles Mendel, designer of the not-especially-interesting line J. Mendel, are the judges.

Sweet P: Floor-length champagne-colored silk halter dress. It's finished and pretty and makes her girl look very grown-up.

Victorya: Royal blue short bubble-skirt thing with a neck full of fake jewels. It's a modern shape, so the judges obviously will dig it. And I can see how the barfy jewels would look nice. From a distance.

Chris: A green pageant gown. Not hideous.

Kevin: I'm reading this great book right now called Grotesque by the Japanese author Natsuo Kirino. It's about two bitterly hateful sisters. One grows up to be a corporate drone. The other becomes a prostitute. Then the prostitute one is murdered and it looks somehow like maybe the sister knows more than she's letting on. Anyway, as the prostitute sister ages, she relies on this one tacky red dress because men like whores to wear red. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.

Jillian: Celeryish-green thing that looks JUST LIKE THE INSIDE OF A JOO-LERY BOX!

Christian: Coppery-brown puffball thing with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of details. He slumps down in his seat, dejected.

Kit: Goes blue like Victorya, primary color panels across the boob area.

Ricky: Similar bubble skirt and fake jewels as Victorya, but the version of it you'd see at Fashion Bug.

Rami: Has immunity. Used this immunity to copy earlier designs he's already sent down the runway.

Kit, Jillian, and Chris are safe.

Sweet P is praised. The judges attack Kevin for the red, for the cheapness, for the way it ages his model. Christian uses his moment to talk about how he fought with his model. Bad move. The judges don't like this. But again, given Christian's age, it's easy to see why he doesn't think it's inappropriate to start in on that. He's barely five years older than his client. Still, though, a dumb-ass strategy. Nina says, "I don't like that you're blaming her." No one likes Ricky's dress. Nina calls it "sloppy."

They do a good job of tricking you into thinking that Ricky is the one going home because the judges can't stop shitting all over what he did. Kors even says that Ricky falls short of doing good work "every time." But then they remember how much they hate Kevin's "$29.99" ho-dress.

Victorya is the winner. Sweet P is safe. Rami is safe. RICKY IS SAFE, which blows my mind. Even Kevin's slut-rag looks better than Ricky's boring, inept peach thing. In the end it's down to Christian and Kevin. Christian's dress is fine, but they want to punish him for tattling on his model. My favorite part of this final bit of haranguing is when Heidi nearly barks out their names before telling them each how they blew it. I really wish she'd do this part in German and they could have some subtitles on the bottom of the screen. That would make it way better.

Anyway, Christian stays. Kevin goes, but not before reasserting his heterosexuality and saying that it was nice to get a kiss from Heidi Klum. Fag.