Archive for September, 2010
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BigLittleWolf says, “A (French) man once told me that he’d had a menage à trois, but only once. His clarification: “It’s hard enough to please one woman, pleasing two at the same time is impossible.”
You know the story. A group of women sit around a table at a restaurant, book club, cafe, commiserating over marriage.
“My husband leaves the toilet seat up,” one says.
“He never, ever hangs up his clothes,” another says.
“And what’s with one hand on the TV remote and the other down his pants?” another one questions.
“I asked him to [fill in blank] and he forgot,” one laments.
And then as the conversation always does, someone says, “You know what I need? I need a wife.”
I know I told you I swore off reality TV, but bear with me. The “stars” of SISTER WIVES practically begged me (and the rest of Americans) to watch them last Sunday night. The multiple family implored us to witness what their lifestyle was all about. Plus Kelly was watching it.
If you have managed to escape them on THE TODAY SHOW, THE JOY BEHAR SHOW, etc., etc., this TLC program is about Kody Brown and his four wives, Meri (his first and only legal marriage), Janelle, Christine and Robyn and their combined 13 children. According to Kody, he practices polygamy based on his fundamentalist Mormon beliefs. I was disappointed he didn’t explain how taking multiple wives gets him closer to God (This is not sarcasm. I really want to know.).
“I just fell in love. Then I fell in love again, and I fell in love again,” Kody says as his explanation for marrying his current three wives. He marries Robyn during the show.
Okay, I promised (no, I didn’t) that I would have an open mind. But really bully for him. Here’s a man who has a schedule as to which wive he sleeps with each night. Oh, it’s so charming when he wakes up with his crazy bed head hair and he’s discombobulated and finds himself in Janelle’s apartment when he’s supposed to be in Christine’s (or the other way around). The hilarity…This is sarcasm.
Here are my observations about the reality show:
- The wives signed on for this. All were adults when they made the decision to “marry” Kody and be part of a plural family. I have to say it seems the sister wives are more than happy to raise their children collectively and share Kody as well. While Janelle goes off to work every day, Christine takes care of Janelle’s six children. This is the way they both like it.
- They all seem happy. There is a lot of ribbing and laughing. Meri follows Christine’s children (I think they are Christine’s children) with a tissue to pull out their respective loose teeth.
- There appears to be a lot of love (BIG LOVE…get it?) amongst the clan. I actually admired the way the wives and kids rolled up there sleeves to create a family that functions well.
Here’s what I don’t get: they wanted to open up their home(s) to show all of us how even though they are polygamists, they are still a family. Plus they were tired of being secretive about their arrangement. I buy it, or part of it. What I don’t understand is why they would open themselves up on television. Haven’t they heard of Jon and Kate, Carmen and Dave, Jessica and Nick and all of the Bachelor couples? All these reality couples have all imploded on TV. Hello???
Okay, I’m back. I get the whole sister wive thing (see above). The biggest issue is Kody. If we could just get rid of the Lexus-driving, go to work everyday to come home to HIS family, I’d be better about the whole situation. I’m very aware of my bias/prejudice against the men in these families. They seem like nothing more than roosters or a stud horse, spreading his seed and flapping his wings. Tell me if there is any other reason a man would sign up for such an arrangement. Because I know what men say about wives with all of our carping and telling our husbands what to do. Would you all really sign up to have three more of us?
I think dentistry should be the eighth deadly sin. As far as I’m concerned, it’s right up there with pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and lust. It’s not personal. Some my best friends are dentists. Okay, that’s a lie. But I really like my dentist. He told me he thought I was his age (mid-thirties) even with that ridiculous light beating down on my forty-something face.
There are two statistics you can’t deny. Dentists have the highest suicide rate of any other profession, and around the world tooth pain is the number one cause of suicides. I didn’t verify these stats. But I heard them from a couple of sources and if it works for Wikipedia it works for me. Plus I have personal data to support the tooth pain and suicide fact, although mine was more like homicidal.
Last June I had a root canal. I’m an Olympic grinder. I’d managed to wear my teeth down so much that Dr. Ray had to put a crown on my tooth because he couldn’t give me another filling. Too late. Bacteria had hustled down to the root causing inflammation and yes, lots of !@$%%^^$#@!! pain.
“You’ll need a root canal,” Dr. Ray calmly told me, as if this didn’t require hours of sitting in a dentist’s chair with paraphernalia, tools, four hands in my petite mouth (Yes, I have a small mouth), while I drooled and the dentist asked me questions that I couldn’t possibly answer with all the aforementioned things in my mouth.
“Can’t you just extract it?” I asked Dr. Ray. One less tooth in my mouth wasn’t going to kill me. One more flippin’ procedure on said tooth just might. Remember the suicide stat above?
“That really wouldn’t get to the root of the problem,” Dr. Ray said. “Get it?”
Have you ever met a stand up comedian whose former job was dentistry? Neither have I.
So I found myself sitting in a chair in an endodentist’s office for my root canal. The room was decorated in 1985 circa mint green paint with a thick blind over the alleged window. I couldn’t see daylight in the tomb of a room. And the smell…What is that smell? A combination of mint toothpaste, rubbing alcohol and plastic gloves? I’m getting a headache just thinking of it.
Dr. B. seemed like a nice enough man. They always do. But holy, moly, you should have seen the size of his fingers. They were as thick as a Bratwurst sausages. For next two hours, as I reclined in the chair so tense I developed a neck ache for the rest of the week, I got to listen Dr. B’s large belly make gurgling noises right next to my ear.
I won’t bore you with the details but the root canal which is supposed to deaden the pain…didn’t. Two months after the procedure, I had such bad pain I started self-medicating with red wine and Vicodin. Even this didn’t work. I went to work with ibuprofin pulsing through my blood but not deadening the pain. Can you say postal? I finally broke down, quite literally, and called Dr. Ray.
“You have very unique teeth,” he said when I found myself AGAIN in his dentist’s chair. I nearly bit down on his hand after he tapped on my teeth. “Yep, the root canal didn’t take.”
No shit, Sherlock.
“You’ll have to go back and have the procedure over again,” he said, as if I didn’t wish in that moment for a gun.
Then he said, “You know if I was stuck on a desert island, I would want to be stuck on it with a dentist. Yeah, think about it dentists can do something about tooth pain. We can perform surgery if you get bitten by something poisonous. We can amputate limbs.”
I don’t know what desert island this man is going to but I’m going where there is no tooth pain, where I have perfect teeth and a perfect margarita on the rocks.
And because it’s the kind of gal I am, I leave you with this.
You will long for the days of reality TV which meant The Real World. You remember the worse that happened on the first The Real World was racial tensions between Kevin and the rest of his roommates and the sexual chemistry between the naive and virginal Julie and the play-ah Eric. Now you shake your head over the antics of the current The Real World kids: sex, drugs, drinking, sex, drinking. You think you might be too old for this and you stop watching all together unless your girls are watching it and you’ll sit down and reminisce about the good ol’ days.
“Now it’s just sex, drugs, drinking, sex…” you’ll say even though your daughters aren’t listening.
And forget about The Jersey Shore. You don’t understand those black haired, orange tanned, overly processed, gum chopping, Guidos and Guidettes. Fogeddahboutit.
You’ve been tainted. There are directors for reality shows, people. Now you can see the manipulations, the “direction” given by the director. You are no longer naive. There are too many reality “stars” desperate for another fifteen minutes of fame. Danny Bonaduce, Kate Plus Eight, Jake the Bachelor, Joaquin Phoenix, and all the people on Celebrity Rehab. There are too many people like Linsey Lohan who can’t get enough of the limelight. She tweets about failing her bazillionth drug test. Honey, you want to tell her, go off to Idaho, away from the cameras and get your act together. You’re a talented actress. Right now, you’re a hot mess whose every move is being captured on camera. You know this is the way Lohan likes it, but this reality is killing her and you’re watching it.
And there are plain folks anxious to grab the spotlight. Richard Heene told police his six-year-old son stowed away in a helium balloon he made. Police helicopters and sheriffs in cars followed the balloon for miles, while we all watched in horror as the young boy got farther and farther away. This madness stopped when it’s discovered the boy named Falcon is hiding in his home, told by his father to keep quiet. All this for a shot at fame. Really?
The final straw comes when Bethany Storro, a 28-year-old Vancouver woman who claimed a black woman threw acid in her face. Within days it became apparent that Storro’s injuries were self-inflicted. But this was after she had called a news conference and she’d been given money by good samaritans. She wanted to kill herself, she says. Instead she got on the news. A woman in Mesa, Arizona was watching. She threw acid in 41-year-old, Derri Velarde’s face.
You’re done with reality TV.
You know it’s time to get back to reality.
It’s time to get back to the real world.
What do you think of reality TV?
