It’s the pits! The ANTM recap

Where is Barack Obama when you really need him?
Because racial disharmony was breaking out all over Casa de ANTM last night, in a big way.
It started with Cover Girl of the Week hogger Claire. (Anyone else remember when the CGotW was different from week to week? Yeah, me neither. I’m totally voting for Svetlana next week, just to mix things up.*)
“Marvita is a hood rat,” she said. She said this in such a chipper and innocuous way, I actually had to rewind to make sure she’d actually said it. But she did. Not nice, Clairey!

Then, of course, Jade 2: the Revenge, a.k.a. Dominique started going nuts, calling Whitney racist, while explaining hastily that Whitney could be racist toward a Catholic girl with red hair and green eyes and a Jewish girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. First: Dominique, get a dictionary. Second, a Jew with blonde hair and blue eyes? Where? (Ya see, I can do that because I’m Jewish. . .Really, folks, it’s so easy to negotiate the tangly world of speech politics.)
Whitney, of course, retorted with everyone’s favorite defensive cliché: “My best friend is black!” Good one, Whit.

Later in the show, Fatima claimed that Marvita acts ghetto and is so “hood.” Cut to a shot of Marvita downing a 40 (not nice, editors!) and Marvita wondering out loud, “Maybe I am too ghetto.” Poor dear, a few weeks in a house with Dominique and Fatima and they totally crushed her spirit. Can she come back again next year?

The most baffling exchange in the midst of all this fighting, however, occurred between Dominique and Whitney.
Dominique (to Whitney): “You look like you’re all of 30 and act 10!” (Talk about the pot calling the kettle haggard.)
Whitney (to no one in particular): “Where’s the Saran Wrap?”
Huh?
Did she suddenly have an insatiable need to hermitically seal food?
Did she want to suffocate Dominique with the Saran Wrap?
Had Tyra told the girls to mention the sponsors whenever possible, so with her mind completely blank (probably not an unfamiliar sensation to Whit), she spat out a random product plug?
The mind races.

Off in the Fab Cab the girls went, meeting with Benny Ninja and his house of voguers.
“This is where I fit in!” announced Dominique. (Hey, you said it, not me.)
Can I have a little rant about Benny Ninja for a moment here? Remember last year, when the girls were instructed by Miss J to be tasteful with their clothing choices and Benny Ninja got those girls into Old Navy and started yelling, “More baubles! More scarves! More showgirls!”
It’s the same deal with this runway vogueing. I’ve seen many fashion shows on TV, and never have I seen the girls do Cirque de Soleil style contortion moves and full-on splits on the runway. Bottom line: There’s drag queen fashion shows and couture fashion shows and they are not the same damn thing. Why confuse these poor girls even more?
That being said, it didn’t take long for the girls to figure out that the more over-the-top they were, the better their chances of winning. (Why Whitney was criticized for her split, I have no idea, since half the girls were writhing on the floor anyway.)
Next onto a cool beauty shot with trickling paint. (An aside: I love beauty shots, they should do more of them).

At judging, we were re-introduced to Vendela, host of Top Model: Scandinavia and Tyra dropped this bomb: “America’s Next Top Model is on in 120 countries.”
Whoah. She has to mean that it airs in 120 countries, right? There can’t possibly be 120 distinct version of this show: We don’t have, like, Bulgaria’s Next Top Model and Uruguay’s Top Model, do we? (Note to self: Do Wikipedia search.)

Next, my favorite moment of the show: Fatima’s hairy armpit.
I'll admit it: I love the fact that Fatima spent so much time practicing her runway (and bragging about it) that homegirl forgot to shave her pits! Let me tell you this: When I forget to shave my pits for even a day, I do not go around raising my hand like I’m sure, and I sure as hell don’t thrust my underarm into a camera.
“I thought you’d re-touch it,” she whined, which led to Nigel’s: “A razor is a dollar. Retouching an armpit is $1,000.” And watching Fatima’s face as this exchange occurred: priceless.

But, as noted, Marvita got the boot. Maybe it was the paint, maybe it was the angle of the head, but her picture looked a lot like a sad clown. And since there’s not a whole lot of demand for the sad clown look these days in Paris, it was her time to go.


*Okay, I realize that there is no Svetlana in this competition. But hey, with all those Anyas and Katarzyna’s, you can’t blame a girl for being confused.