We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier

by Celia Rivenbark

  They have a media room in their new home, and it is lovely except for the black hole where the TV should be.

  No TV, they say in that unmistakably I’m-smarter-than-you-are singsong so favored by their kind.

  Now, far be it from me to point out the threat of impending macular degeneration on the tots downstairs in one of the nonmedia rooms as they strain and tilt to get a better view of Spider-Man, the inch-tall version.

  To each his own, I always say. Well. Not really. Actually I never say that. I’m hooked on TV, unapologetically, unregretfully, unabashedly. Sure, there’s some stinky stuff on TV, but, hey, there are crappy books, too, am I right?

  I’m forever telling my friend about all the great shows she’s missing, and she’s forever telling me that she is very, very worried about me. Believe me, if I had it to do over again, I’d never have told her that if I had a boy, we were going to name him Cable.

  It’s just that I can’t understand how anyone can get through the week without Iron Chef or Trading Spaces.

  For those of you who haven’t seen Iron Chef, let me explain, my dear “clueless-san.” Four top chefs from Japan compete with a challenger, preparing elaborate multicourse meals using a preselected ingredient (often something that looks as if it came off the bottom of someone’s shoe and frequently still wriggling a bit). The dishes, all prepared in one hour, are then judged by a Japanese panel that includes a politician who has never met a cup of sake he didn’t like, a waiflike actress, a snooty fortune-teller, and some actor. The show is in Japanese so it’s dubbed, and painfully so. “Watakushi no kioku ga tashika naraba” then becomes simply “Yep.”

  Japanese think we all talk like John Wayne or Sheriff Buford Pusser. They always dub in answers like “Yep,” “Nope,” or “I shoulda shot you when I had the chance, pilgrim.”

  For truly crazed fans, there’s even an Iron Chef drinking game in which viewers down a beer each time the show’s creator, “Chairman” Takeshi Kata, says “Allez cuisine!” (“To the kitchen!”) or anytime the ubiquitous birdlike actress takes a bite during the judging segment, flutters nervously, and says, “Oh! I feel an explosion in my mouth!” The way she says it, I’m fairly convinced she’s no stranger to porn.

  The cult following for Iron Chef is huge, perhaps because of the campy Kaga, who wears Elvis hair and lacy capes with ruffly gloves and looks like some nice Asian family’s flaming cousin that they’re not allowed to talk about anymore.

  At Kaga’s command, the four Iron Chefs rise to the rafters on hydraulic pedestals. Just like I’m sure y’all do every time it’s time to make the meat loaf.

  Kaga then announces the ingredient, which is lowered from the ceiling, I kid you not, and never resembles anything in the all-American pantry. Stuff like natto (fermented soybean mush), lotus leaves, and octopus eyes, all of which will very likely be turned into some kind of sorbet during the dessert portion. The Japanese are very big on sorbet, even if it winks back.

  The Iron Chefs are especially snippy when facing an American challenger. In a recent episode, play-by-play announcer Ota Shinichiro sniffed at “the American from San Franceesco” who couldn’t possibly know anything about fresh seafood.

  Sure, homeboy was used to dealing with grouper and mahi more than steroidal sardines and six-foot-long eels, but he won and I was proud to be an American. Yep, I was.

  Trading Spaces is equally addictive. The premise is simple: armed with a budget of one thousand dollars, a designer, and carpenter, neighbors redo one room in each other’s house. Neither couple is allowed to see what’s going on in their home until time’s up, forty-eight hours later.

  Can you say train wreck?

  I’ve only seen one or two participants burst into tears when shown the “new” room, but there’s always that delicious tension as the details sink in.

  The show’s designers are young, hip, and relentlessly cheerful. One thing I’ve learned from watching Trading Spaces is that all designers hate ceiling fans. They’d rather see you install life-size ceramic spaniels wearing glue-on eyelashes on either side of your fireplace.

  Letting the neighbors decorate your house is scary, or not, depending on where you live. (“Melba, what we need with a laundry room when we got a perfectly good front porch?”)

  I’ve had some neighbors that I wouldn’t trust to decorate a goldfish bowl. And what if you find out, too late, that they’re just doing this to get even with you for tossing their dog’s poop back into their yard. Well. On their front steps, actually.

  Even if your neighbors are delightful people of taste, it’s still kind of creepy to think about them pawing through your things, tossing out your antique rice bed and botanical prints and replacing them with painted dollar-store pillows, some sad homemade futon, and framed magazine covers, all in the name of “freshening up!”

  Just once I’d love to see the neighbors come to blows. Call it X-treme decorating. Let’s be honest. In the case of the couple who stenciled purple harlequins on their neighbors’ living room walls, I’m thinking that the classic “But Your Honor, they needed killin’ ” defense might just work.

  Although I love the show, I’ll never be able to participate because my hubby and I aren’t handy. The Trading Spaces couples are all nauseatingly competent. If the designer says, “We’ve got an hour! Go stuff and sew seven bolster pillows and hand-paint a scroll pattern on all the furniture!” they just smile and say upbeat Mid western things like, “Righty-o!” or “We’re on it!” We’d just stare blankly and say, “Do who?”

  Trading Spaces is part of the reality-TV trend which includes The Osbournes, a surprisingly appealing look into the domestic life of bathead-eating rocker Ozzy Osbourne, his supportive foulmouthed wife, and spoiled, foulmouthed teenagers.

  There’s something enormously appealing about watching Ozzy take his trash out. We’re mystified that rich people take their own trash out and Ozzy, in turn, is puzzled that we would think he has “a @#$% trash roadie.”

  Although I admit to loving Ozzy, things have gotten ridiculous when Anna Nicole Smith gets her own reality-TV series. Not to mention planned shows starring the poutsome Sean P. Diddy Combs, who hasn’t stopped nagging MTV for his own show ever since he saw Ozzy’s Nielsens. VH-1 fortunately wriggled out of a deal to film newlyweds Liza Minnelli and David Gest whose marriage lasted slightly longer than a cough drop.

  Kiss frontman Gene Simmons is pitching a show about his life but I don’t hold out much hope for it. How many times can he brush his teeth and show us his famous tongue in a single thirty-minute episode?

  Even “actress” Cybill Shepherd is begging for cameras to be installed in her home. No, thanks. I think I have to wash my hair that night.

  Face it. Not everybody’s life is worth watching. I don’t want to see a reality-TV show about Ashley Judd, who men love because she looks that great and can make a pan of homemade biscuits for her man in the time it takes for you to say, “Well, shouldn’t she just be taken out and shot?”

  And spare me Life with Naomi Campbell in which the supermodel lounges about in patched jeans and a T-shirt that reads Like a Virgin. Guess her The Drunker I Get, the Better You Look shirt was still at the cleaners.

  But back to Liza, whose ill-fated Big Fat Geek Wedding should have satisfied her PR jones for a while. Now in divorce court, Liza’s probably relieved that VH-1 nixed plans to film her and Gest as they sat around Caesar’s penthouse counting their money between plastic surgery appointments. Let’s face it; if this guy gets any more brow lifts, he’s going to have eyes in the back of his head for real.

  I’m not picking on the rich and famous. The fact is poor and middle-class folks are often boring, too. You don’t see me lobbying the networks for a reality show on my life, do you? It wouldn’t exactly be a ratings bonanza.

  Typical day?

  7:30 A.M.: Stumble into kitchen, eat Fruity Pebbles from the box; read paper in jammies; pack lunch for hubby; clean up cat throw-up; drink lots of coffee.

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sp; Noon: Stumble into kitchen, fix lunch for five-year-old, who announces she’s “booooorrrreeeed” despite morning summer camp that included simulated “croc wrestling” and construction of realistic log fort. Watch (you guessed it) Days of Our Lives while ironing hubby’s shirts. Get through half a shirt before abandoning project to devote full attention to sexy new character, Tony DiMera.

  3:00 P.M.–6:00 P.M.: Make appointment to have tires rotated, clean up cat throw-up (again), play eight games of Chutes and Ladders until I win, deliver shirts to dry cleaners because “I don’t have to live like this,” inform pesky telemarketer that I can’t afford a home security system unless I sell another kidney.

  6:30 P.M.–7:00 P.M.: Write enticing newspaper ad offering free cat to “just so-so home.”

  9:00 P.M.–10:00 P.M.: Read stories and sing songs to five-year-old, who refuses to go to sleep because she’s excited having “just made a poopie the size of a ham.”

  Midnight: Wake up in child’s bed clutching copy of

  Oh Say Can You Seed?

  Yeah, I’m not quite ready for TV yet. I just like to watch.

  My TV-hating friend does enjoy going to movies and we’ve spent the summer taking our tots to a bunch of them, the lure of a dark, cold theater and a frosty, five-dollar Coke proving irrationally powerful.

  That said, we have been grappling with the mommy moral dilemma: Is it ever okay to tank the kiddies up on fruit roll-ups and “buttered” popcorn, kiss their noggins, and sneak next door to watch a grown-up movie?

  As I sat beside my daughter and her friends watching Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and feeling like “Mommy: Resentful of Formulaic Kid Movies with Dubious Heroes,” I realized I might be on kid-movie overload.

  After all, everybody gushes about this movie about a handsome animated horse that wants to roam free instead of live in a sixth-floor walkup like his horse buddies in the city. Actually, it’s about the Evil Railroad coming through the West and how one mythical horse managed to blow up enough buildings, railroad tracks, and people to stop Progress. I believe I was the only person in the crowded theater who thought it was sad that all the railroad workers got blown to kingdom come, being silly expendable humans, while the horses were free at last, free at last. (A romantic subplot had Cimarron fall for a pretty girl horse who, you guessed it, turned out to be a nag.)

  We went to Lilo & Stitch next, a Disney movie with a hero (Stitch) that looks a lot like that thing that burst out of Sigourney Weaver’s chest so many years ago, only it’s blue. Lilo is a plump, disliked Hawaiian child who makes friends with alien Stitch, who is posing as a plump, disliked Hawaiian dog. I hated ’em both.

  I did like Lilo’s older sister (and kudos to Disney for finally drawing a heroine who is pretty and has enormous thighs) who is hassled by Child Protective Services for leaving the bratsome Lilo home alone with power tools and aliens and such. I’m thinking, who could blame her?

  My friend without the TV says she’s not too worried about her kids missing Spy Kids 2 because it will be available on DVD soon, anyway.

  Y’all pray for their little eyeballs.

  7

  CIRRUS, SCHMIRRUS …

  They’re All Just Puffy to Me

  My friend Lisa Marie turned me on to the video trivia games at a local wings-and-beer restaurant and I haven’t been the same since.

  Quick! Where in the body would you find the dura mater? The heart, lungs, bottom of the feet, circulatory system, or skull?

  Lisa guessed right (skull) and got one thousand points; me? I got zero, zip, nada, goose egg.

  Quick again! Before Thirtysomething, actor Timothy Busfield starred as a doctor’s stepson on which medical drama? Quincy; St. Elsewhere; Trapper John, MD; Emergency; or Medical Center?

  Lisa Marie smugly punched the number for Trapper John. Did I imagine it or did she appear to be shielding her answer from me? I guessed Quincy but when she won another one thousand points, I pathetically asked her if she recalled that Chad Everett had starred in Medical Center back in the ’80s.

  “It was the seventies,” she said, dismissing me with a wave and readjusting her librarian-ass glasses. Okay, I was starting to get bitter.

  The geography “brain-buster” round was supremely embarrassing for me. I’d never gotten beyond the fourth-grade geography class in which Rosalita and Pedro baked tamales on an outdoor heated stone somewhere in South America. Unless the next question was going to be about my mythical nine-year-old friends wearing their gaily colored serapes, forget it.

  While Lisa Marie’s tally climbed for all the world—or, okay, just this particular 5,500 square feet of it—to see, I regretted the hubris I had shown by using my real name for the five-letter “screen name” that would be flashed overhead on ten different monitors. There was my name, everywhere, with a big fat “0” beside it. I should have opted for “l-o-s-e-r.”

  Lisa Marie was on fire, and not just from the jalapenño poppers. She was fighting it out for the top spot with a guy she recognized as a regular and seated at the bar.

  “He comes here every night,” she said with a sneer.

  “Lisa Marie, for God’s sake, the man is in a wheelchair,” I said.

  “His brain isn’t handicapped,” she snapped. “Just look at his score.”

  “He’s handi-capable,” I said. “They don’t like to be called handicapped anymore.”

  “Oh, screw that PC stuff,” Lisa Marie said. “You only have two minutes to pee between games. Be right back.”

  She stood up, kicked her chair back, sprinted toward the ladies’ room, and, when she thought I wasn’t looking, gave the finger to the guy in the wheelchair.

  She returned in what must’ve been some kind of Woman’s World Potty Record, about forty-five seconds, and informed me that she’d learned how to pee standing up just for occasions such as this.

  “Anybody can do it,” she said, “it just takes a little practice.”

  Who was this woman? And what was going on inside her dura mater?

  Once settled, Lisa Marie resumed scowling at the only person keeping her from an uncontested number-one ranking.

  “He’s here every damn night,” she said again with that poor-thing-he-has-no-life tone in her voice.

  “Oh yeah?” I mustered, suddenly feeling like the brainiac. “How do you know?”

  It was a real Perry Mason moment, I swear. And, yes, Raymond Burr played Perry way before he went on to star (in a wheelchair!) in Ironsides with Don Galloway and, uh, Barbara something-or-other. So where were those kinds of questions? Huh? I can’t hear you.

  Lisa Marie didn’t answer me because she was already demonstrating her fast-fingers prowess by punching in the correct answer to a question about which fish actually exists: brainfish, kidneyfish, liverfish, lungfish, or thumbfish. She selected “lungfish” while I went for the obviously correct “brainfish.”

  “They call it brain food for a reason,” I chided her, as we waited for the correct answer to flash on the wide screen.

  “Looks like you better tank up on some more,” she said, as “lungfish” appeared overhead in huge letters.

  Lisa Marie’s total climbed into six figures. I was one cooked tamale.

  At last, I got on the board by knowing that Winona Ryder’s real last name was Horowitz but it was too little, too late. Lisa Marie knew the difference between “stratus” and “cirrus” clouds. All this time, I just thought they were all “puffy.”

  Ever since Lisa Marie kicked my ass at trivia, I’ve gone back at least once a week to play the game. I’ve learned that it’s more fun if you make it a point to play with really stupid people. Like Trent Lott. Sadly, Trent’s usually busy, plus he’s forever trying to get me to listen to the latest MP3 from Pusha T and Malice while I’m trying to play.

  “It’s blackalicious!” Trent’s always telling me as we share a basket of jerk-sauce wings, not surprisingly his favorite flavor, while he just goes on and on and on about the importance of reparations to the desce
ndants of slaves.

  Okay, I made that part up. Trent Lott and I have never technically shared anything except, perhaps, an irrational fondness for big hair.

  After all this practice, I’m still not very good at trivia, or peeing standing up, but I’m strangely hooked. Like a lungfish.

  8

  I AM BOOBALICIOUS,

  Hear Me Roar

  How Computer Hackers Ruined My Rep

  I’ve had a stressful week ever since some evil, smelly little computer hacker got my password and started sending some frighteningly nasty porn to everyone in my address book.

  In my screen name.

  Sadly, I’ve heard from at least a half dozen pervs across this great nation who say they sure did enjoy what “I” sent them (signing off as “Boobalicious” no less) and wondering where they can download some more.

  Well I never.

  I am a Methodist Sunday school teacher, for heaven’s sake, the mama of a small innocent child. I do not spend my nights downloading files to strangers describing my stupendous ta-tas. Anybody who knows me personally would realize that I can barely scrape up a “ta,” so that’s just crazy.

  No, Mr. Porn Creep Hacker, I spend my spare time tinting icing red so I can make twenty graham cracker “fire trucks” complete with ladders made of pretzel sticks and tires made of Oreos, for my daughter’s kindergarten class. It is Fire Safety Week, you know. Asshole.

  So, do not write me! I am not Boobalicious, the “randy woman from Carolina” that you think I am. As Aunt Neecie said after she foolishly answered the front door wearing only her pantyhose, I am “prostate with embarrassment.”

  I wouldn’t have known anything about this except my Internet service provider revoked my password and cut me off from the world, saying, in so many words, that I was making them sick.