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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
"Survivor" predictably drops its best character. Plus: I've only seen him on a TV promo, but I think I've seen the next great child star.
Nov 27, 2003 | Sweetums, get that rat and smash!
It happens at around the same time every season. Just when you think "Survivor" is really starting to heat up, with a bunch of worthy contestants battling it out in earnest, everything changes. Inevitably, the most offensive of the bunch join forces with the weakest, and any remaining charismatic and/or able-bodied contestants are sent packing, post-haste. Thus was Sweetums double-crossed by Hippie Wrongstockings and his pathetic gaggle of losers.
In fact, Wrongstockings is such an unethical slimebag and has shown so few similarities to even the lowest, most unlikable young bandwagon variety of hippie, he really doesn't deserve the "hippie" part of his nickname at all. He's sneaky and smug and nasty, and it was a huge mistake for Sweetums and company not to get rid of him a long time ago when they had the chance.
To add insult to the usual midseason injury, Burton and Lill came back from the dead and now appear to be controlling the game. Is that really fair to Sweetums? Those two were voted off, fair and square, and now they're in the catbird seat, as Keith Jackson would say. I'm willing to concede that Burton is a tough competitor, even if he is pretty much a zero interpersonally. But Lill is the absolute worst. She's self-righteous, obsessive and weak, and she whines loudly about doing the right thing as if it'll make us forget that she's been consistently self-serving from the start. If she believed a word she preached about how unfair it was for her tribe to vote her off, given all the hard work she did, she would never in a million years have agreed to axe Sweetums. But this is exactly how the most irritating and mediocre players make it to the end of the game, year after year.
I still like Sandra a lot, and Tijuana really hasn't done anything to annoy me, but the overall picture looks bleak. Clearly, the remaining four young women (Sandra, Christa, Tijuana and Darrah) should join forces and boot Burton, Lill and Dippy. Otherwise, Burton will win every single challenge, and he'll drag Dippy to the very end, since Dippy has a better chance of spontaneously combusting than he has of winning the million-dollar prize.
But, all projections aside: Frankly, I'm depressed. I hate that a player as good as Sweetums is out of the game, particularly when his outlook upon departing was so grim. "This would have made my life a lot better," he said once he was voted off. "I always get hurt trusting people. I want so badly to be accepted, and I never get the acceptance that I want. I don't fit. So much for my dreams." Get off your pity potty, Sweetums! We accept you! Tough as it is to hear such painfully vulnerable words from Sweetums, it's important to remember that Sweetums is an emotional guy, and it's nice for Sweetums that Sweetums can report his emotions, no matter how embarrassing they might be or how inconsolable Sweetums might feel in that moment. After all, the rest of us don't admit to such shameful feelings. Instead, we go to the deli around the corner and buy a bag of imported Italian cookies, the really tasty crunchy almond-flavored kind, and eat them until they're all gone.
Or, if we're very rich, we purchase handbags. In fact, you can tell exactly how much baggage a wealthy woman has by counting the number of handbags in her closet.
If I were a rich girl, daidle deedle daidle
Digguh digguh deedle daidle dum. All day long I'd biddy biddy bum, getting my hair and my toenails done. Last week, the "Rich Girls" moved past their tedious, self-serious contemplation of Third World horrors, abandoning the white man's burden for Ferrari shopping in the Hamptons and whimsical toy purchases at FAO Schwarz.
Better yet, Ally and Jaime visited Daddy's design department to give his horrified designers brutally critical feedback on the Juniors line. Despite the empathy I felt for those poor souls watching their best work axed by the deus ex machina of Daddy's little girls, there were some serious vicarious thrills to be had. If you grew up in a medium-to-small town and spent a lifetime of shuffling impatiently through racks of wildly ugly clothing in crappy department stores as I did, then you'd probably get that same rush I did when I imagined marching straight into the bad-idea epicenter and declaring every cluttered pattern and scratchy material utterly awful.
Meanwhile, Tommy Hilfiger, adorable little sprite that he is, stood by and encouraged the girls to be as honest as humanly possible, making him the closest thing to "Fun Dad" from Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" as I've ever seen.
