The Amazing Race 17--Episode 10--Nick Shows His True Colors

After the most exciting and exotic episode of season 17 of The Amazing Race, we returned to familiar terrority this week--Hong Kong, a city we've been too at least three or four times, and one I've actually been to once. I distinctly remember a leg in this city in season two when teams had to find the White Star Line ferry and then find a fortune teller in a crowded market. Then in the season with the Asian-American father/daughter team weren't they here again and didn't they have to chauffeur some people and then find a real bouquet amid a store full of fakes? Or was that Tokyo? If I had my book about the Amazing Race--"My Ox Is Broken"--I could look it up, but I left it upstate.

Anyway, the main take-away from Episode 10 is that Nick is a jerk. At first I kinda liked this team because they didn't take themselves too seriously and admitted they were dumber than a bag of hammers. But then Nick started getting crankypants and nasty to Vicki. This week was too much, after bawling her out for missing the ferry because of her ashthma, laughing when Claire threw up, letting Vicki do all the work of eating all that sushi, he basically gave up on the sampan challenge and went to sleep leaving Vicki to keep searching for the number matching their bird cage. He quit just like Sarah Palin while his poor girlfriend who did not give up even after tossing her cookies, was still trying. I knew it was a non-elimination leg because there were still two episodes left before the finale, so the ending of this episode came as no surprise. They will probably luck out and there will be some kind of time equalizer in Korea. Nick is wrong; they are the luckiest team on the race. This is the second time they were saved because of a non-elimination. They will have to fly to get to Seoul, it's not a long flight. I took it when my Dad and I were on our big around-the-world trip in 1996.

Other observations this week: Jill and Thomas have NOTHING to be ashamed of for U-turning Brooke and Claire. Thomas is right, it's all part of the game and Team Home Shopping should take it as a compliment that they were seen as such a threat. Jill and Thomas made a serious mistake by taking the trolley rather than the sampan, but they realized their mistake and took the other roadblock quickly. I knew it would be harder to find three neon signs amid the glittering jungle of Hong Kong rather than locating a series of numbers on all those boats. That's only one serial number instead of three clues and you don't even know what you're looking for.
I think it's going to come down to Jill and Thomas vs. Nat and Kat. Claire will hold Brooke back.

Day 18--Wait for night flight from Dhaka to Singapore to Hong Kong, leaves 8 PM.
Day 19--Arrive Hong Kong, probably mid-day, challenges into the the late night, 4AM for Nick and Vicki

Oh and BTW, if Bristol Palin were the best dancer on Dancing With the Stars, I would have said she deserved to win, but she wasn't so she deserved to lose, regardless of her family and politics.

Scenes from the Life of an Amateur Comic Book Collector (19)--Supergirl and Superhorse: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Naaaah-me

A few weeks ago I acquired the largest haul of my comic book collecting career, several hundred comics from the early 1960s into the 1970s, almost all of them DC. I was at a birthday party for a neighbor when I started chatting with another neighbor. I mentioned my collecting craze. It turned out she had all her comic books from when she was a little girl and wanted to get rid of them to clean out her storage space. She wanted them to go to a good home and didn't want to have to drag them to a dealer. So I volunteered to take them off her hands.

My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I say she had four boxes stuffed to the gills with Silver Age stuff. I did have quite a lot of them already, but many I did not including a lot of Teen Titans, Aquaman, Green Lanterns, Inferior Fives, etc. We agreed on a price and with my granny shopping cart, hauled them back to my place. I haven't been able to read much else since--I did finish Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow and The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion, both short novels which did not interrupt the flow of Superman, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen. I also postponed my reading of the Fantastic Fours I had recently acquired, deciding to take a break from Marvel's nonstop soap opera of the past few decades.

Among the stories I had not read before where several of Supergirl's adventures. She was the second feature in Action Comics for many years before migrating over to Adventure. Hers is in interesting saga reflecting the shifting attitudes towards women in American society. When she lands on Earth after surviving the desctruction of Argo City, she is 15 and her cousin Superman decides she is not ready to start serving mankind. She must be his secret emergency weapon and hide as an orphan. the idea of a Superwoman equally as powerul as Superman was too alien and threatening a concept for the DC creative team. If there is a female superbeing, she must be a girl, not a grown woman. Later she is sprung on an unsuspecting public, but unlike her manly cousin, the maid of might is suspectable to female failings, like romance.

In one of the weirdest relationships in comics, Supergirl acquires a pet Superhorse. You know the stereotype that all girls love horses, right? Well, this one is special, and not just because he has superpowers. Comet the Superhorse is actually a centaur from ancient Greece transformed into a full horse by a magic spell from an evil wizard. Circe the sorceress cannot reverse the spell but takes pity on him and grants him the powers of the gods like flying and superstrength. He time travels to the present and Supergirl adopts him. She is unaware of his unnatural attraction to her--he is really half-human after all. When a certain comet is within earth's orbit, the spell is broken and Comet can become a man. He assumes the guise of a cowboy and Supergirl in her secret identity of Linda Lee falls in love with him. The implications of interspecies love are lost to the comic writers. Fortunately, the comet leaves Earth's orbit and Comet reverts back to being all horse. What kind of children would they have had?? Though he is telepathic, Comet never reveals his true feelings for his human mistress. Sick, I know.

More on Supergirl: The mighty Supergirl later forgets about Superhorse. Later comics in the early 1970s reveal another weird shift in her depiction. Just as the Women's Liberation movement is gaining power, DC removed Supergirl's full strength. She falls victim to a plot by a female villainess named Starfire who arranges to have a superpower-depriving pill slipped to her by a handsome stud--again she is tricked by her female weakness for love. As a result, her superpowers come and go. Interestngly just a year or two earlier Wonder Woman lost her powers and become mortal, opening a mod fashion shop and becoming a judo expert. It's no coincidence that DC decided to weaken its two strongest female heroes just as real women were becoming more powerful and demanding to be given equal rights.

There are many more observations serious and otherwise to come based on this gigantic comic haul.

The Un-Thanksgiving

This year my partner Jerry and I were too exhausted to do anything for Thanksgiving, even cook. He had major surgery five weeks ago and is just now getting back to his old self. Plus I seemed to have more than the usual amount of stuff to do at work such as interviewing the stars of The King's Speech, putting together a panel of casting directors for Back Stage and the SAG Foundation, and covering a lot of shows. (There were more than usual for this time of year.) Jerry had spent that time recuperating, and we haven't even thought about the usual holiday stuff like what kind of turkey to get or should we invite anyone over. We finally decided to come up to our country place in upstate NY and do nothing for the whole weekend. We drove up on Tues. night.

The only work involved doing a phone interview with Guy Pearce to complete the King's Speech article (see previous blog on the interviews with Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth; I had spoken to Geoffrey Rush on the phone from Australia already). It was difficult to arrange, but the only time he could give me was the day before Thanksgiving. Pearce called my cellphone from Serbia where he is filming a sci-fi action picture with an international crew.

On Thanksgiving Day itself, our plan was to eat out and see a movie. We didn't even have the energy to cook our own meal. The day was overcast, we just relaxed and watched the Macy's Parade which was interesting because this year they seemed to consciously include more multicultural entertainment including an Indian dance troupe doing a salute to Bollywood and a Latino troupe doing a wild extravangza. The rest of the day I put in the storm windows for our enclosed porch and sealed the air conditioner so the back room wouldn't be drafty, then read Supergirl comics and playscripts--I'm on a committee to chose the best new play produced outside of NYC. It was strange not to be smelling cranberries or stuffing, but it was also nice to just be and not have to make an effort for the holiday.

The plan was to eat at the local Chinese restaurant and go to Unstoppable with Denzel Washington which had received good reviews for an action picture. We figured they would be open--but no, they were closed along with every other eatery around. If he had stayed in the city, we would have found something open, but up here there was nothing. I wasn't so much worried about not having a nice dinner in a restaraunt, but not getting any dinner at all. Finally, we settled on buying some sandwiches at Walmart. Yes, Walmart, the only establishment open. It was kinda weird being in the deli section of the half-empty super Walmart with employees there away from their families and a handful of customers getting a head start on their Christmas shopping. I had a ham and cheese sandwich with potato salad while Jerry had a turkey wrap. BTW, I ate a frozen turkey dinner for lunch so it wasn't totally untraditional. We eat our makeshift dinner along with potato chips and diet coke in the car and then drove to the movie. I wasn't upset or depressed we had such a non-holiday meal, it was fine. The important thing was we were together. We both were just so tired it was easier not to observe the holiday and regard it as a nice day off from all responsibilities.

The Amazing Race 17--Episode 9--Double U-Turn in Dhaka

This was the best Amazing race episode for this season. We were in an exotic and bizarre location (Dhaka, Bangladesh), the tasks were pretty challenging, teams yelled at each other while carrying bricks, and there was a double U-turn. At first I thought they were going to spend too much time at the airport, but even that usually boring sequence turned out to be pretty good when Chad was slupring on his Blizzard ("I didn't get enough graham crackers in the crust") while Jill and Thomas were smart enough not to be satisified with being on the same flight as everybody else and finding an earlier one to Bangladesh. Then the punk rockers actually showed some brains and worked to get an earlier flight, too. Though they booked one behind Jill and Thomas they were still way ahead of the other three teams.

In Bangladesh, we were introduced to a new innovation--the Double U-turn. Jill and Thomas U-turned Team Home Shopping which kinda surprised me. I do think they should have U-turned someone, unlike some other people on the internet who are saying they should have skipped it like Nick and Vicki did later because they were seven hours ahead of everyone else and there was no way anyone else was going to catch them. But it was an important strategic move if they wanted to get rid of a competitive team. I would have U turned Chad and Stephanie as the doctors later did. I don't think Brooke and Claire were as big a threat as those two. But I do have to hand it to the salesladies, the blonde pushed the one who had gotten the melon in her face in leg one really hard and they wound up neck and neck with the other teams even though they had to go all the way back to the dock and haul bricks.

Another thing I liked about this episode was that it was action packed. Even getting the first clue involved performing a task--squeezing out the juice from those bamboo things and then drinking a whole glass of it. Then they had to deliver food to a ship or haul bricks, then build a rickshaw. It all looked really tough. The doctors did the right thing in taking the second U turn and giving it to Chad and Stephanie. They had no choice. If they didn't they would have been eliminated for sure. They're just lucky the punk rockers didn't use their U turn. I'm not sad Chad and Stephanie are eliminated, but I will miss Chad's meltdowns. He was never as crazy as some of the classic Amazing Race temper tantrum throwers like Jonathan who pushed his wife in Berlin I think it was or that couple who cried when they go eliminated in Hong Kong and the guy said "I feel like our relationship just died."

Now it's looking like Jill and Thomas are the team to beat unless Brooke can drag Claire's tired ass over the finish line. I do admire Team Home Shopping, but I don't think they can beat Jill and Thomas.

Day 16--Head for airport in Muscat, book flights to Dhaka
Day 17--Arrive Dhaka, Bangladesh

The Amazing Race 17--Episodes 6, 7, and 8--Stuck in Russia

After two weeks in St. Petersburg, things finally heated up on the most recent leg of The Amazing Race. For the second time this season, we were stuck in the same city for two legs. Talk about budget cuts. Previously we hung around Accra, Ghana, now we had to mark time in St. Petersburg, a city we've visited in previous races. There were actually difficult challenges in Russia especially the classic music versus classic film one. As soon as they showed the roomful of pianos all playing different pieces, I said to msyelf, "They'll never get this." I recognized Pictures at an Exhibition, it was the theme for Cinema 13. But unbelievably Chad and Stephanie stuck to it and got it while other teams gave up despite Chad's existential despair--"I wish we could go back in time and never have picked this challenge."

The second St. Petersburg episode was actually pretty exciting with the outcome hanging by a matter of minutes and how much of a penalty the father-son team would incur. BTW, there is nothing wrong with Nick's lying at the Russian mystery roadblock. I had DVRed the episode and Undercover Boss, the next show, because of the frequent football-related delays. But this week, wouldn't you know it, goddamn football ran over by one hour and about five minutes! I didn't tape the show after Undercover Boss, so just as the camera is showing who's about to be eliminated, the sign comes on to save or delete the show. Now do I have to tape NCI or CSI or whatever it is that follows Undercover Boss? Fortunately, I was able to catch the outcome online. The father and son took a cab when they weren't supposed to and were panalized a whole 30 mins., allowing Chad and Stephanie to step in.

Episode 8 had the six remaining teams FINALLY getting out of Russia to Muscat, Oman, a totally new and exciting location. I love it when spoiled Americans are totally out of their comfort zones. Camera-hog Chad proposed to Stephanie on national TV while Nick screamed at Vicki for letting slip some info at a gas station. Miss Perky Kentucky lost her sparkle as she and Dad got lost on the way to the first task. I hope it doesn't boil down to a race between the newly engaged couple--so cute that their subtitle changed, is that a first?--and the Notre Dame guy and the Cosmetology Univ. grad. That would be so cliched, the young fit heterosexual couple winning, especailly when the producers obviously went to so mcuh trouble to get strong all-female teams. I would have no problem with Team Home Shopping winning, or the doctors, but both are behind. BTW, what is this rule you aren't allowed to pay a cab to lead you somehwere? This cost Thomas and Jill first place. Was it conspiracy to get Chad and Steph a honeymoon trip to Belize, especially after oversleeping by three hours?

Next week, or tonight actually, I am that far behind, we get the first ever double U-turn and the spoiled Americans go even further into the third world in Bangladesh which I'm sure makes Accra look like Beverly Hills.

Day 9--Drive to train station in Norway, 8:30 PM
Day 10--Train to Stockholm to get flight to St. Petersburgh
Day 11--Arrive in St. Petersburgh, film vs. music, babushka potato digging
Day 12--Circus challenge, Russian mystery
Day 13--Fly from St. Petersburg to Oman
Day 14--Arrive Oman at night
Day 15--Enter the fort, Chad proposes, day of challenges, repelling, delivering water, etc.

Crazy Monday

Monday was kind of a crazy day. I arrived at the Regency Hotel to interview Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter in connection with their new film The King's Speech. To my surprise, the whole block was cordoned off with a police barricade and there was an X-ray machine and a metal detector in front of the entrance. I had been to the Regency a few times in the past to see cabaret shows at Michael Feinstein's club, but there was never a security check, not even for Mitzi Gaynor. So to get in the building I had to give the police my bag for the X-ray machine and walk through the metal detector just like at the airport. I later heard the reason for the heavy duty security was Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was staying at the hotel.

The interview went well. I was given about 20 minutes with the very tall Mr. Firth and ten minutes with Miss Bonham Carter who I think had a cold. She sat curled up on the sofa of her hotel suite wearing clunky glasses and the same jewelry she had on in The Hollywood Reporter cover shoot, clutching a stuffed animal and sipping tea her publicist had brought her. She graciously asked if I wanted anything, but I figured I would be in and out of there so fast, I wouldn't have time for more than a sip of anything. Geoffrey Rush was supposed to be on the junket with his co-stars, but he was still filming Pirates of the Caribbean part 37 which went overschedule.

The whole thing took about 30 minutes. Then back to the office. That night I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt I was at the Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival, but I was locked out of my hotel room and no one had a schedule of the plays. I wandered through the theatre trying to figure out which plays were performing when and what I had reservations for, but no one knew. Finally, I found my way to the first play which starred Kathy Griffin and Derek Jacobi. What do you think that means? Don't answer that, except with comments--I never get any. Please, leave your interpretations of the dream.

Project Runway Season 8: Finale--Miscarriage of Justice

A week later I finally caught up with the Project Runway finale and did my imitation of Edvard Munch's The Scream when the winner was announced. All I can say is Tim Gunn was right about the judges smoking crack. What happened between the stand-off between the Nina Garcia-Michael Kors faction and the Heidi-Jessica Simpson alliance when they said they were deadlocked and then Gretchen being declared the winner? Did Nina say, "Jessica is only a guest judge and Michael and I are more important"? I was really stunned because Mondo definitely deserved to win. The two people who would actually be wearing the clothes--Heidi and Jessica--favored Mondo, but Michael and Nina were saying Gretchen's snoozefest would sell more easily at the local J.C. Penny's.

This does not make any sense and is totally inconsistant with past seasons. Last year, for instance, the judges crowned Seth Aaron's Third Reich parade in front of Der Feurher over Emilio's very wearable and pretty collection. Nina even said in the reunion show when Emilio tearfully asked why he lost that his was a "line" rather than a collection, meaning it was too everyday. Gretchen's was definitely everyday while Mondo's was a wild, fun party--so what if it was too young, Nina. Then there was Katho whose stylish yet flattering looks lost to that shy girl--can't remember her name--with the art-school concept-y wave things. (I did like them but who would wear them except to a costume party?) And let's not forget Christian's all-black, high-couture whacky train wreck with those enormous hats. I can just see wearing one of those to the Pathmark. Obviously, Michael and Nina decided being on-trend and safe was more important this time than taking a risk.

I think the real reason for their choice was those two were pissed off that Mondo did not listen to them about the circus and kept the headpieces and the bubble dress which everybody else including Heidi thought was fabulous. They rewarded Gretchen for listening to them by heightening the styling. They praised the styling but doesn't that say that the clothes themselves need help?

IMHO, Gretchen had one or two nice outfits you could wear while shopping on a summer day in Darien, Conn. or to an afternoon tea party on Cape Cod. Mondo's looks were exciting and different and definitely his own. Gretchen's were bland and that jewelry was meh. As Heidi said, it's a fashion show, not a jewelry show.

And what were those voluminous cargo pants Andy was wearing? He had some cute outfits, but they were too similar--his models looks like high-fashion elves with all that green and those star headthingies.