According to police, Fiore, 28, was strangled to death and stuffed in a suitcase, which was found on Saturday morning in a trash receptacle in Buena Park, California. Jenkins, 32, had reported Fior missing on Saturday night, but has not been in contact with the police since. Concerned that he's attempting to flee to his native Canada, the Buena Park Police Department has issued an alert to the public, asking for information on the whereabouts of Jenkins, including a description of his car, and license plate. (Jenkins' publicist released a statement to TMZ, saying that he is speaking to his attorney, and plans on meeting with authorities "in the near future.")

Jenkins is a contestant on the VH1 dating show Megan Wants a Millionaire, in which men with a net worth of $1 million or more compete for the love of professional reality show contestant (and Sharon Osbourne victim) Megan Hauserman. (Jenkins was billed as a real estate investor worth $2.5 million.) The third episode, which aired this past Sunday, featured Jenkins' solo date with Hauserman (video to come). Rumor has it that Jenkins was a finalist on the show—which wrapped taping this past winter—but did not win. In a phone interview with TMZ, Hauserman said that, shortly after he was eliminated, Jenkins went to Las Vegas, met Fiore in a club, and married her two days later.

Today, VH1 yanked all material—posts, photos, and episodes—regarding the show from its site, and removed Megan Wants a Millionaire from the list of programs in its sidebar.

Curiously, all episodes have also been made unavailable on iTunes.

Further complicating matters for the network, TMZ has learned that Jenkins not only competed on the show I Love Money 3—which just wrapped taping last month—but also won the grand prize of $250,000, meaning that he would be on every episode of the season.

Update: VH1 has sent us a statement regarding Ryan Jenkins and Megan Wants a Millionaire.

Ryan Jenkins was a contestant on "Megan Wants A Millionaire," an outside production, produced and owned by 51 Minds, that is licensed to VH1. The show completed production at the end of March. Given the unfortunate circumstances, VH1 has postponed any future airings. This is a tragic situation and our thoughts go out to the victim's family.

Person Of Interest In Model Murder Married Victim [TMZ]
VH1 Reality Show Contestant Sought After Model's Body Found In Suitcase [ABC News]
Murdered Model's Husband Brags About $$$ [TMZ]

It's shocking how quickly Kate has gone from being publicly vilified as TV's most shrewish wife to being respected as the resilient mom focusing on her kids as her husband makes a public spectacle of himself. Though Kate repeated many of the declarations she's made on Jon and Kate Plus 8, saying in the clip above, "My focus still is the health and well being of my children as well as myself," she seemed much more sincere than in the past. Kate also appeared more fragile than before, admitting that she feels like a failure. "This is not what any mother sets out for their children," she said, but added, "I want my children to see a mother who's committed to her children, who's determined, who has integrity and perseverance and never gives up."

As for that wedding ring: Kate explained that she's been wearing the band for the children's benefit. "I don't want to upset them. I don't want to shock them," she said, beginning to cry. When interviewer Meredith Viera asked if Kate's still harboring hopes of reuniting with Jon, she replied, "No. I think its very clear that we are two different people at this point with two different sets of goals."

Speaking of: When Viera asked about Jon's relationship with Hailey Glassman, Kate said she's upset about how his actions hurt the children, adding, "those things, to be very honest... that's his life and they don't affect me directly at this point." Her answer seeemed weirdly disconnected, as it seems anyone would be directly affected by their estranged husband's highly publicized flings with a series of women (not to mention his troubling friendship with Michael Lohan).

In the clip below, from a second segment on the morning show, Gosselin explains that the money made off Jon & Kate Plus 8 will pay for a college education for each her kids and denies once again that she's dating her bodyguard Steve Neild or that she bought a condo to be near him. As for her publicly-critical brother Kevin Kreider and his wife Jodi, Kate says, "That's probably one of the most hurtful things in all of this, when family turns on you and makes up lies... and makes tens of thousands of dollars doing it." The thing is, the same could be said of the Gosselins: after all, neither has been selfless enough to stop allowing family problems be played out in front of the cameras.

Kate: "I'm Still Wearing My Wedding Ring For The Kids" [MSNBC]

There's a war afoot between Ayiiia and some of the boys. See, Ayiiia gets really drunk and says mean things and does dumb things. She doesn't really have any filter or off switch, she just sort of barrels along without a thought of the consequences. She's sort of a child that way, or a curious cat. She picks at scabs and thrusts her paws at electrical sockets and then cries and howls and when she gets hurt. She makes herself a victim! And she loves it.

Joey is just a purposeless antagonizer. He's got that dumb schoolyard thing that certain misanthropic boys have where he'll do some mean thing that he thinks is funny, over and over and over again, even though everyone else has long ago lost interest. He thinks people crying is funny. He thinks pasting signs all over a hotel suite in Mexico saying "Go Home, Ayiiia. Nobody likes you." is an intelligent, witty, grownup sort of thing to do.

So you can see how these two wouldn't get along. She attacks quickly, then runs away, and he relentlessly bounders after her, barking and barking and barking. Most of the roommates hate this about him. Except CJ. CJ is a big dumb turnip of a man, with a stupid shock of puffy hair and an ugly, meaty physique. He's also secretly a total trashbucket, slipping and saying "ain'ts" here and there, little breadcrumbs leading back to some dilapidated apartment building. Some squeaky black fake leather couch. Some blank, dirty white walls. Some sad soiled king sized mattress lying forlornly on the floor, without box spring or frame. Just there. Sitting on browning teal wall-to-wall, the thrum of a leaky air conditioner singing the scene a dirge.

So CJ profoundly sucks, we know this. It was proven further still when he just tittered and chuckled and called the not funny (not because they were mean, but because they just weren't funny) things that Joey was saying "awesome" or "classic," his rusting Isuzu Rodeo flashing quickly through his head.

Now, CJ did have a reason to be mad at first. Ayiiia came home all sloppy and drunk one night while CJ was trying to coax his way into some chippy named Amanda Hugginkiss' pants. (Ughhahsdfa;ldsfkjasdf... so gross. He's so gross.) The sad, embarrassing thing was that he was completely naked, flopping on top of her, while she was fully clothed. She didn't seem all that into it, and was very excited and relieved when she heard the clicking and stumbling of people trundling down the hall. "Put your clothes back on..." she hissed joyfully. CJ didn't want to. "They ain't comin' in here." But CJ! They is! They is comin' in there! Well, Emileee be, at least. She ran into the darkened room and shrieked because CJ was naked and grinding up on some girl and that is gross. But then Ayiiia started yelling things. See, the girls (or maybe just Ayiiia) call CJ's... um... male business "Piglet." "Where's your piglet," Ayiiia drunkenly slurred. After I had fallen over dead and was successfully revived by my helper monkey, I was forced to watch as CJ stormed out of his bedroom in the nude, Piglet windswept and eager, to yell at Ayiiia. He was so mad! He was finally going to get to have sex (no you weren't, CJ) and Ayiiia had ruined it! Just ruined it!! Ayiiia was sloshing around the hottub, and the scene just got yellier and yellier and yellier. Joey got involved too, because why the fuck not, he smelled blood in the jacuzzi, and it's fun to make already crazy girls even crazier by yelling at them for no reason.

(All the while I wondered: What happened to Amanda? The cameras didn't show her slinking off, shoes in hand, desperate to get to the elevator so she could leave this whole sorry scene behind her forever. What had she been thinking? Just what the hell had she been thinking exactly? "Oh, I'll just go work in Cancun for a while. That'll be fun." Jesus. Her dad was right, it was a huge mistake. All she wanted was to get on a plane back to St. Paul and forget this ever happened. God, she left Macalester for this! How dumb she'd been. She'd go back to school, get her degree, and go visit Jane in Berlin for a few weeks. Clear her head, then come back and start applying for jobs. Cancun?? Seriously?! What a fiasco. Ugh, where is this elevator?)

Anyway, the whole thing culminated in Ayiiia weeping and running around in her bra and underpants, sobbing to any of the girls who would listen about how she did nothing, Nothing!!!, to deserve this (except to disturb CJ while he was trying to bone and yelling about his teeny tiny Piggly Wiggly in front of dear, horrified Amanda). So it all seemed silly and overdone and oh won't you just shut up please Ayiiia... Until. Well, until Ayiiia went into the bathroom and cut herself. Ayiiia, I guess, has had a problem with cutting for a long while and she thought she was better. But. She wasn't. I mean... who could have predicted that?? Who could have predicted that someone with severe emotional issues would buckle and crack under the pressure of living on a TV show in a foreign country with a bunch of self-obsessed strangers? I mean that situation just sounds so safe! I'd be perfectly comfortable with both Mischa Barton and Margot Kidder doing this show. It's that stable an environment. Hell, throw in Brian Wilson for good measure. Why not! More the merrier!

So. That's that. That is that and Emileee dumbly chose to make Joey aware of the cutting, in the vain hopes that it would get him to ease off. Which, of course, it didn't. Because he is dumb and stubborn and unlikable, he started making fun of her cutting right to her face. Right in the kisser. She mostly shrugged it off, but after a while, she couldn't. Joey had left the aforementioned signs all over the house, in his quest to get Ayiiia to choose to leave the show, and this was her final straw. She threw something (maybe her foot) through a glass closet (Anderson, are you OK? Are you hurt?) and then wandered out to the patio to smoke cigarettes and bleed everywhere. Sagely, Jasmine the Brave went out there to try and calm her down. She told Emileee she was terrified about what Ayiiia might do next, and so was I. She's really unstable and should go home. Not because Joey is an ass, which he is. But because why stay? What do you have to gain, y'know?

Ah well. Nothing was really resolved with that whole thing in the end except that Ayiiia didn't kill anyone, and Joey and CJ laughed in their empty, girl-less beds. (Earlier, CJ said: "I'm not here just trying to bone [he really said bone] every chick on Spring Break. But if that happens... it happens." Because, yes, CJ. It's likely that you'll bone every chick on Spring Break. Every single one. Even Marjorie, who nobody likes because she's weird and smells like onions. You will even bone lonely Marjorie.) We'll just have to wait and see if any more blowdowns happen.

Some of the other roommates are getting short shrift because of all the dramz. Bronne, for example. Bronne's contribution to this episode was walking around in the middle of these crazy scenes and asking really dumb, obvious questions.

BRONNE: Ayiiia, are you crying? (Yes, Bronne. She's been doing this for like an hour. She's literally shrieking and wailing and inadvertently throwing Jasmine into a fucking wall, you noob.)

BRONNE: Is that blood? (Yes, Bronne. Ayiiia shattered part of a glass closet [Ryan, hon, you all right?] and has left smears of blood all over the house. Remember when Ayiiia did that with the glass, literally three minutes ago, you buffoon?)

So that was that. Also in this episode was Jasmine's love affair with the skinnyminny named something I can't remember. Oh! Pat! Patrick. Nice. Well remembered, me. Anyway, Patrick is cute and Jasmine is cute with him but something's a little off... See, he takes her to do fun things like bowl (there's bowling in Cancun? Who uses the cosmic bowling alley in Cancun? Weird old Marjorie, that's who. "Lane for one please," she wheezes) and cliff diving (she was so scared! but she did it! plunged into the blue, Patrick holding her hand!) but then he's also sorta distant and unaffectionate. Plus there was a rumor floating around that Patrick had boned... Amanda! Yes, our Amanda! Amanda from Minnesota (go Bears!). So Jasmine just doesn't know what the eff to do. Joey tells her to leave it be. ("He's playing you. Trust me. I'm that guy." No you're not, you poltroon. You're just some fake punk kid ON THE FUCKING REAL WORLD, you dink.) Bleerrrrghh. Patrick is so cute though! So after learning from oily, disgusting CJ that Patrick had not, in fact, been to any of Amanda's ten thousand lakes, Jasmine screwed her courage to the sticking place and is going to go for it.

Like cliff diving!

At the end of the episode a great storm, a hurricane, came rushing up the coast and washed everything away. All of the mean words and bad things and shattered glass and turned over boozy cups and gross CJ wiglets and every terrible thing that's ever been done in that wasted hellhole of a place. All of it disappeared into the water and winds forever. And in a hundred years, once the lands and the jungles have reclaimed this expanse, the brown boys and girls will scramble up to the top of the vine-covered hotel ruins and they will spread their brave arms and point their small feet and go sailing into the sky. Nothing to catch them but limitless ocean, stretching out, blue and glowing, farther than the eye can see. And the world will be better because of it. The world will be a more beautiful place.

The world will finally be real again.

You know, like with different retellings of the same event from different perspectives. Not like Courage Under Fire level Rashomon homage. Like Vantage Point level Rashomon homage. But still, you get our point, right? That it'll be kind of interesting to get the "behind the seams" (ugh) look at how the pretty tall people think (or don't) about things and all that. But watching it directly after PR? Maybe not.

We'll give you an episode, Models. But just one!

No, I didn't find any love last night (and by last night I mean I just watched it while lying on the couch) but that's OK, I wasn't looking for it anyway. My wines and my Facebooks are alls that I need. But anyway! This isn't about me. This is about the eight Fulbright scholars who were sent to Mexico to do their research on that most elusive of topics: What happens to private parts after you feed them alcohol? Last night they found out.

See what you do in Cancrunk is drink. All you ever do is drink. When you are sitting on the toilet in the morning, you drink. When you are walking to the ATM, you drink. When you are staring absentmindedly at a bird as it flutters up in the sky this way and that, so free up there, you drink. When you are being told by your employer not to drink, you drink. The last one is important to remember. See, the kids are in Cancandy to drink, yes, but they are also there to roll up their sleeves, apply some elbow grease, and go about the proletariat work of giving back. Through labor—through sweat and blood and camaraderie—they will till the earth of this nation and collectively make it Good. The president of Mexico, Dr. Speedy Gonzalez Esq., has assigned these eight sons and daughters of the revolution to do what is perhaps the most important task: Shepherd drunken gringos around and try to make sure they don't kill themselves or others. And, actually, I'm hardly being jokey here. That actually is a really big part of Cancun's economy, this thing called Spring Break. So it sort of is a meaningful job. So you'd assume that the Real World kids, individuals chosen for their integrity and wit and grit, would treat such a heady task with the utmost of responsibility, right?

Well, hold onto your butts and fasten your knickers, because I'm about to blow your head beans. They don't. They don't take it seriously. See, there are only a few rules one has to follow when working for Student City, the Peabody, MA-based company the children have been conscripted into. Mainly they are: Do not get publicly falling down drunk, whether you're on shift or not. This seems strict, given that it's Cancun, but also fair. The other one is even fairer: Don't fuck any of the clients please. That's a rule they had to create some years back because I'm sure it was happening over and over and over again, and probably like on the first night so the rest of the week was really tense and awkward. These are not crazy rules right? I mean, they're not saying "You cannot step on the sidewalk cracks when it is raining or the first or third Thursday of the month." Or, "Please try not to breathe." They are saying don't be a drunken asshole who plows the customer. Other companies should consider instituting these policies right quick. (Staples, I'm looking in your direction.) Anyway. The kids... they've gone wild. And they just couldn't help themselves.

What had happened: Mostly Derek broke the rules. Derek broke the rules and nobody cared. Derek is a person from Arizona who is sweet but dumb, I think maybe. Anyway, his brother and his ex-boyfriend both came to visit at the same time, which was weird. Weird because it seemed like maybe his brother was gay too and that doesn't happen all that often? And also weird because Derek's boyfriend was skinny and small and maybe like 17 years old? Everyone went down to the pool to stand around and do shots and shriek and holler at each other like spider monkeys, because that is what you do in Cancun, whether or not you have family in town. While they were all screeching and throwing poop at everyone, Derek's ex, name of Kyle, started being a bit unruly. And by unruly I mean "He invited himself on a trip to a Mexican TV show that his ex-boyfriend was on and then he walked away to sleep with a 50-year-old midget." That's actually kind of not an exaggeration of what happened! Kyle disappeared into the hot, queef-filled Mexico air with an aged jockey or something and this hurt poor Derek's pound cake feelings.

So, sad. After banishing Kyle from the house forever (he called to apologize, weeping, and it was just about the most pathetic thing ever: "I'm...sob...so sorry I came down...sob...to be on your TV show...sob... and then....sob... slept with an elderly little person... sob."), Derek decided it was time to break those stupid Student City rules and get crunk nasty for his birthday. Yes it was Derek's 12th birthday and everyone went out dancing and drinking. Though, if that's what you do every damn night, how is it then a special occasion for a birthday? Did they change it up and go to Professor Fuckbags' instead of Mister Knobgobblers' that night? Did they do SoCo and lime shots instead of kamikazes? Did they wear underwear? Whatever their reasoning was, Derek got really really drunk and decided to lay down on a Mexican sidewalk and loll back and forth. Lying down on a Mexican sidewalk outside of a bar called Major Stinkfingers' doesn't seem like a good idea to me at all, but hey what the hell it was his birthday.

Derek's birthday present was that nobody from Student City walked by while he was making out with the floor, forcing them to fire him which would have meant adios Mexico, hello again Arizona. But Derek didn't take this is as any sort of celestial reprieve, a chance to mend his ways. No, he just barreled on with the business of saying hoof to those rules and the next night went out and started chatting up a Student City client. Derek! Remember Rule Number Two? If They're Payin', Stop Slayin'. It's there for a reason. To his credit, Derek did weakly slur "Ican'tmakeoutyouareStudentandthisisCity". But the boy, name of Meats, was clever and tore off his bracelet and then Derek was like "Oh, OK" and they started sucking face.

They sucked face everywhere! They sucked face under a palm tree. They sucked face on a rollercoaster. They sucked mug in the ladies room at the Baron Lickdicklets' nightclub and restaurant. They sucked face in Derek's bed... Yeah a total love connection was made and it was sort of cute, sort of cloying in that way that anyone who's in puppyish love seems sorta cute and sorta cloying when you're wheezing and shivering alone on your couch. But of course this love was star-crossed from the get go. Because Cancun is a fleeting and ephemeral place, unless you live there, like Derek does. Meats, though, doesn't live there.* So Meats had to go home and the two lovers tangled up in a goodbye embrace and Des'ree walked out from behind a bookshelf and sang "Kissing You," while all of the other roommates slow danced and wept in another room. When they parted, Derek ran along as the train sped up and away, north, back across the border. He waved his kerchief and wept openly, he didn't care who saw, and as his beloved Meats steamed out of his life, likely for forever, he missed Kyle all of a sudden. Just then, just a little quick moment. Kyle. Flashing in his head like heat lightning. And then it was gone.

Other things happened too! To people other than Derek!

Joey the Cute One bedded a girl named Whistles who was kind of cute in an unassuming way, was into music or some bullshit, but had moved to Cancun for some reason. What sort of normal-ish person moves to Cancun? She must not be normal, I guess. Too bad. Anyway, they boffed and Joey said really dumb things about girls and then his gramma died. Yeah, his gramma died and his Boston-drawl mother called him and he cried and it was sad. He went to Florida for the funeral.

C.J. fell in love with an employee at his hotel, an almond-eyed beauty named Barbara or something. Anyway, he and Babs went on an awkward double date with Joey and Not Normal Whistles, and Barbara said she was a vegetarian. They were at a steak restaurant. Why would a boy take a girl to a steak restaurant on a first date? Way too meaty. Anyway, it was funny to watch because CJ has exactly zero game despite all of his watermelony good looks. He's a doofus. A walking disaster. Fittingly, Barbara broke up with him the next day by the pool. Then she called Bronne fat. Hah. Poor Bronne.

The girls were all dumb, except for Jasmine who is funny because she has a crush on a skinny white Canadian DJ. Surprises! Funny.

Anyway. This is going on way too long. This show is so silly.

At the end of the episode, a great giant wave came rushing up the shore, a hundred stories tall, and everyone screamed. Just before it crashed and they were washed away forever, the roommates all swore they saw Joey's gramma and Meats, bestride dolphins, riding the crest of the wave, shining and glorious.

*Meats probably lives in Florida or Virginia Beach. Meats lives in the second floor of a condo with two other guys, and Meats drives a two-door 1998 Honda Accord that he's had since high school. He used to have jokey names for it with his high school girl friends, but he doesn't use them anymore unless they come to visit, which they do less and less. Meats goes to the local college and studies something like communications. Meats feels lonely and pretend a lot of the time, because Florida or Virginia Beach are sort of lonely, pretend places. Especially when you're gay, especially when you're the kind of guy who sometimes likes to listen to "Defying Gravity" from Wicked when you're driving home from a shift at Joe's American Bar & Grill (it's a good job, better than Chili's, Meats was lucky to get it, he knows that.) Sometimes Meats will smoke a few cigarettes, light ones, when he's out drinking, but mostly Meats lives pretty healthy. Meats has a feeling like maybe he'd like to move to a city, maybe Miami, maybe LA, maybe Boston he thinks sometimes because he used to love that Augustana song (another great driving song). Meats bought a plane ticket on Orbitz with some friends of his and he didn't have class until 3 so he lay down on his bed and stared up at the softly whirring ceiling fan and thought about Mexico. Something about it, something about the word of it, the sound of it, the feeling of it. He felt like something was going to happen. That the dull, opaque membrane of his life would maybe crack open when he was down there. That something strange and exciting was brewing and burbling in him. He liked this feeling. Liked feeling special and different and possessing of a secret. He liked his room, he decided. Liked the quiet view from the window. Liked his car, even if it stalled out sometimes and the back window wouldn't roll up all the way. He liked his job, liked his coworkers. Especially Andrea the new hostess. They were going to be friends, he could already tell. He liked life. Liked it well enough. But still something exciting and different was nice, too. "Mexico..." he thought to himself again. It was like a song, that word. Like driving in a car and never turning around.

The problem was with Ayiiiiiiia. How do you solve a problem like Ayiiiia? How do you catch a frown and ask it to leave the house? No one knows.

This episode was one of those ones that's edited to such a weird degree that you can't really tell what's what or when's when. As the vomit-splattered curtain was drawn back on the scene last night, Emily and Ayiiiia and Shabazzle were getting along famously. They were riding pennyfarthing bicycles down by the arcade. They were flying kites and going to kissing booths and eating cotton candy and doing this and doing all of this stuff and it was summertime every minute of every day, just breezes and balms. Everyone was so happy!

Except Johnnay. Johnnay wasn't happy because she was sitting up on the deck, her black hair matted in nest-like snarls atop her little round marble head, staring down at the three frolicking ladies and seething. But she didn't care, she didn't care that they were having the best time of their lives, that they were becoming Sistahs with a capital SISTAHS, because she had the boys. She had tumble-topped Binky with his suspicious accent, creepy-faced Bronne with his bleary creeper features, that gay one, and Melody, the tattooed rocker hunk with chestnutty good looks and a badass attitude. She has all of them! So she doesn't need Ayiiiia or Emily or Mafarffle. And they don't need her.

So the house was divided and everyone was drunk so they couldn't stand. While at the club one night, Ayiiiia decided to up and leave and everyone got worried because this is downtown Mexico where the national pastime is gringo abduction and the official currency is crumpled twenties covered in blood. After 45 minutes of looking and yelling her name for a while ("Ayiiiia! Ayiiiiiiiia!" it sounded like Japanese soldiers dying in comic books from World War II), they finally found her standing on the street. Now if your roommates had been looking for you and had been worried that you were going to wind up mostly dead in the back of a rusted-out El Camino, you'd naturally do what Ayiiiiia did, I think. Which was yell at them. She got mad that they'd been worried and looking for her. Because... that makes complete sense I guess. So we started to see some cracks in the Ayiiiia veneer there.

This didn't stop the three girlyfriends from hanging out though. Mad that Johnnay had gone to lunch with the boys one day, they decided to go out club dancing without her. Just Ayiiiia and Emily and Verdell. So they went and drank fizzy drinks and the lights swirled and Emily saw Ayiiiia there across the way, grinding her hips into the air, her horsey bucks and thrusts hypnotic in their crassness. So when the ladies got home, sprawling down the stairs in their pointy boots and pointier features, Ayiiiiia and Emily left Gargamel twirling in the kitchen and went to bed. They went to bed, not to sleep. If you catch my meaning. If you're picking up what I'm laying down. What I mean to say is... I'm pretty sure that Emily and Ayiiia from The Real World: Cancun had sexual relations with each other after their girls' night out. So.

Sistahs were totally bonded! Everything was peachy keen! Except nothing was peachy keen. See while the three weird sisters were friendies, Johnnay was still hulking off in the perimeter, like Sirius Black in dog form. And as she stewed in her lonely juices, she riled up the dumb boys, who were just off in a corner hooting and throwing their feces around and drinking and annoying Emily. Dark clouds began to form in Em's eyes and the Earth began to tremble ever so slightly. But no one noticed, not yet. But soon they would.

Because they are nice or vain or probably both, the straight boys Binky and Bronne agreed to escort Derek to a gay bar for gay people. The gay bar in Cancun was basically like any other bar in Cancun except it was full of mens and only a scattered handful of women—those that just wanted to dance and not be bothered, those that needed the reassuring touch of a man but couldn't find it in Straightville. Bronne had asked Derek to "gay him up as hard as he could," which I half-chuckled at and thought That could make a could joke but really it's just too flat and boring. Gay me up real hard. Hardee hard hard. Bronne. Bronne was that guy you knew in college who was always just trying a little too hard. Wanted to be the party animal and the ladykiller and brah's brah and all that but was never quite sure how to do it, and you could tell that he was wildly reinventing himself from some nerdy obscurity he toiled in in high school and you sorta felt bad for him so you tolerated him and let him hang around but the more and more he pushed and pushed and pushed the more you got angry at him and eventually you just ditched him forever because oh holy God it was worth being an asshole and losing karma points because now he's gone and won't bother you and ahh blessed relief. Remember that dude? That is Bronne. It's sad.

ANYWAY. Nothing remarkable happened at the gay nightclub for gay people except that on the way back Derek got caught by a groundskeeper for peeing in the bushes and the small fellow tried to take him to apologize to the manager but Derek deftly eluded him by saying "No, I was just vomiting" and then making throw-up noises and motions. Blehhh Blehhhh! he went. And I felt bad for the teeny tiny Mexican man who was just trying to do his job, but really, son? Peeing in the bushes merits an awkward sitdown with the manager? This is Can-motherhumpin'-cun, friendo! The bushes must be practically made of pee at this point. Let it slide, dude. Just let it slide.

So the boys were supes drunks that night and when they woke up at 8 am, for a very important Student City business conference that involved ziplines and seal kissing, they were still drunk. Melody really wanted to be on time so he started bellowing the time to everyone and Bronne just acted cray-zay (it was just so exhausting to watch) and Emily started clawing at the walls and eventually she exploded into a furious ball of boy hating and screaming. The boys were not scared of her rage, just bemused by it, so they kept egging her on and she got madder and madder and when they finally got to the Student City Sitting In a Hammock Leadership Conference, she refused to participate in any of their reindeer games. She was mad at her roommates so she decided to punish herself with no fun zipline rides. I don't get it.

ANYWAY. Emily was also kinda mad at her once beloved Ayiiiia, because when the shit hit the fan with the boys, only brave Mulligatawny was woman enough to stand at her side and fight. Ayiiiia, on the other hand, just disappeared into an occluding smoke and mist of mutters and bleeped swears, carrying on some fight with herself and maybe other people, it was hard to tell. Whatever it was, Emily felt it was a Reason Why Not to like Ayiiiiia anymore. So being a mature individual, she decided to just not talk to her anymore. Like, really, she just blatantly ignored direct questions. She and Bilbao finally made friends with the boys and Johnnay again, and Emily apologized for being a bitchy bitch because it's not nice to be that way when you live with people for a TV show.

Ayiiiia sat alone in a hammock, sticking pins into little Melody-shaped dolls.

Back at the ranch, Ayiiia was stomping around and starting fights with people. She shoved Binky down a flight of stairs for no good reason. Derek came up and tried to give her a hug, so Ayiiiia ran him through with a curtain rod. He slumped over dead. Melody came walking by, singing a song, and she based a priceless Ming vase over his head. Ker-thunk. Johnnay was in another room entirely, doing her knitting, but Ayiiiiia closed her eyes really really tight and focused really really hard and suddenly Johnnay felt a pain in her head and then fell over, perished. Suffices to say, Ayiiiiia was in a bad mood. But then she made a critical error. She started some shit with Schlimazel. Their fight went like this:

AYIIIIA: Let's get in a fight, but don't be attitudey.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? Who's got attitude?

AYIIIIA: You've got attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? I've got attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude: You've got it.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude.

That was a verbatim transcription. They just said the word attitude back and forth for ten minutes and then both stormed away. Later Shlomo was bitching to Emily about their newfound Enemy and said Enemy was caught lurking behind curtains, listening. It was like that movie The Lives of Others except in this case instead of a conflicted East German Stasi officer listening in on a playwright, it was a stupid girl named Ayiiiia who won an online contest to be on a reality show standing behind a curtain in Cancun. But they're close relatives!

Finally the two lovers, dim Emily and rabid Ayiiiiiia, got in the spat to end all spats, shrieking and caterwauling while the other roommates milled about the living room like Sims that you don't control, they're part of some other person's game, and finally Ayiiiia said "At least I wasn't fucking adopted!!!" and ... oh dear, Ayiiiiiia. Just oh dear.

So that was basically the end of Ayiiiiia. All the other roommates were happy as clams, and decided to play kings. When they got to 9 Bust a Rhyme, Crickets or Fallujah or Jasmine or Attitudes or whatever her name is said both "cat" and "hat" which is really annoying because she took two words when she only needed one.

ANYWAY. Ayiiiiia went to go drink wine on the porch by herself. Which, all things being equal, is not a bad way to spend an evening. Watching the Mexican waves roll in while sipping wine and not having to go to work or pay bills or do anything unpleasant tomorrow. But when you're roommates are inside doing waterfalls and 2 For Yous and hating you, I guess it's a sad thing to be doing. So I guess Ayiiiia might go home. Pity.

What is it, though, about these contest winners? They never work out! Remember that fool from the Hollywood season a couple years back? Man that guy was a DISASTER. I mean, Ayiiiia sorta worked for a little while—she even did a lady!—but I guess it had to come to this. Yelling for no reason and then lonely porch drinking. Maybe the end came in the beginning, when she started bitching about dishes. It's never a good idea to bitch about dishes on this show. It just never works out well.

ANYWAY.

Here:

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Yes, the Real World: Cancun had its first obligatory The Roommates Who Hate Each Other/The Roommates Who Fuck Each Other episode last night, and it just sort of farted into existence, all quiet and smelly, as if MTV was splayed out on the neighboring bed, our hotel room ruined, that cruel beach sun slanting in through the curtains, reminding us that day has arrived but our hangovers have not left. These kids are just sort of dull, the half-baked sorta people you'd see on a show like Fear Factor where personality doesn't matter. You just have to be trashy and scrappy and thoughtless. And these kids have that in spades!

So the two couples were:

Those That Hate
Swoony rockerbilly Joey likes to antagonize girls because he's a little pissant punk-wannabe with that kind of sitting-at-the-back-of-the-class bravado that's, oh you know, catnip to some of us. The girl he most likes to antagonize, because she is ridiculous, is Ayiiiiiia. They fight about basically everything. She walks around like she owns the place, he has mysterious herpes on his lip, he says mean sarcastic things to her, she yells about cigarettes, and then he spits in her taco. Yes m'am JoJo done up and spit in that girl's damn taco when they had been out there after the club tryin' to get theyselves some food. This was in retaliation for Ayiiiiiia running down the street and shrieking "Herpes on your lip! Herpes on your lip! You've got herpes on your lip!" It actually turned into a little song and I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a pot and a wooden spoon and paraded around the house banging them together, as if Ramona Quimby were a sad lonely 26-year-old in Brooklyn, sing-chanting "Herpes on your lip! Herpes on your lip! Everybody's got herpes on their lip!" It was a fun song, and a fun moment, until my roommate came up and spit in my taco. Well, I actually didn't have a taco and she didn't spit, but she did give me a withering look that seemed to say Only one more month..., but on the show Joey did, in fact, spit in the lady's taco. So that started a whole clusterkaduddle and everybody was yelling and Fuckface from UMass got involved and started getting upset.

So the girls were out on the balcony complaining about Joey and eating the tacos that had not been spit on. Those bitches really wanted some tacos. I mean, that's commitment. Inside the other roommates were just unsure what to do. Hilariously, the girl from Cadillac Stevens' Foodhut, Jonna, was sitting on a couch-bed eating rolls of ham of cheese. Like taking deli-sliced meats and deli-sliced cheeses and rolling them up into little cylinders and eating them. It was very funny because we've all been there, or at least I have. Points to you, Jonna. So everyone was confused and eating ham and cheese and Joey still wasn't done being in attack mode so he strode out onto the veranda playing a song called "Nobody Cares About Your Spit Taco" and the girls got so mad that they threw water at him and some of the water went into his guitar. His thousand-dollar guitar that is partly electric and now it's ruined. So Joey went to another balcony and cried and Derek the Gay tried valiantly to take advantage of him in his time of need (someday, Derek! believe in yourself!) and everyone was sad. Well, the girls didn't care. Ayiiiiia thought it was funny. Because Ayiiiiiia is annoying. I think I hear Joe Rogan calling, m'dear. Go be on that show.

Anyway, eventually the next day or whatever Joey apologized to Fuckface and she was all "Aw, I love everyone," and then later he took a walk with Ayiiiiiia and they brokered a tentative peace accord. Derek unzipped his fly and unleashed the doves from his pants and there they fluttered and flapped, into the silver-streaked azure sky, looking like souls should look, dancing. Then they decided it would be funny to pretend for the other roommates that they'd just gotten in another fight and she'd hit him so they ran back home and put on a show where Joey raged and Ayiiiiia threw things and all the other roommates were like "Ohhh, she's going home" and hilariously no one seemed to be unhappy about that but then oh ha ha, Ayiiiia and JoJo gave each other a hug and the roommates said "Aww, we're friends again!" and Derek unzipped his pants and instead of releasing more doves he just looked plaintively and expectantly at Joey, though he looked in vain. Everyone just sort of cleared their throats and said, OK, yeah, and slowly walked out of the room and Derek stood there alone, bare feet on the cold marble, a clock ticking off in some other room.

Those That Mate
Binky and Jonna are in love. Binky and Jonna are in love but there's nothing they can do about it because Jonna has a boyfriend back home in Sunstain, AZ and she's so loyal to him. She's so loyal to him that when she's grind dancing and spooning in a hammock and gratuitously hugging and talking about making out with Binky, all her thoughts are on her boyfriend. Every one of them. Every thought other than Man I want to fuck this roommate, every single other one, is about the boyfriend. Binky is upset because he broke up with his lady, and c'mon it's Can-fuckin'-cun, let's partay down. Invested in this whole lovers' duet more than more than the actual lovers is creepy Bronne. Creepy Bronne looooves to call Binky "the Heartthrob" and he's always smirking and leering while Binky and Jonna dance or flirt or dry hump in a vestibule, staring right at them, with intense bleary eyes. He's a creeper. At one point when Binks and Jinx were spooning in the hammock Bronne walked out wearing a wig and tapped out Jinkies and got next to Binky and Binks, thinking it was Jinx, pulled him in close and said "Mmmm..." You'd think that would be one of the stupid things I make up to entertain myself while writing these things, but it's not! It actually happened! Bronne walked out wearing a Jonna wig and spooned with Binky. He will murder someone. And he will murder them hard.

Anyway, at the clurrrb Binky tried to kiss Jonna on the mouth-hole and she was all "Nunh unh!" and later she called her boyfriend and said "Why would you think that I want to be with anyone else?" while her foot massaged Binky's crotch and she sat there naked drawing an arrow on her tummy that pointed down to her unmentionables.

So, they're totally gonna do it.

All Those Other Things That They've Done
Oh, and, they got their jobs! Yeah yeah yeah! They'll be working for Student City, an underground luxury travel agency for sex tourists and date rapists. They met their boss, the dimwitted Christina, and she told them the rules. And the Rules, my friends? The Rules are pretty goddamned strict. The Rules are:

- No drinking in front of clients.
- No sexing the clients.
- No smoking near clients.
- If you murder a client, make sure you dispose of the body in a manner befitting Student City's new Go Greeen! initiative.
- If a client murders someone, give them the $700 cash you have in your emergency pouch and point them towards El Salvador.
- Fridays are casual.

Now the whole murdering thing ey'body was aight with, but not that DRINKING RULE. Holy fuck, if I want to go out in Cancun and get shitfaced, that is my right as an American abroad on a television station's dime. That is my RIGHT. Ayiiiiia was especially adamant about this and it was truly beautiful to watch. It was like watching Harvey Milk come speechmaking out of his mother's womb. Like seeing Malcom X first clench his fist. Like stumbling by accident on Susan B. Anthony in the bathroom and her swatting her hand at you or at the door you can't quite tell and yelling "Hey, get outta here!" It was truly something. She brought a little soapbox with her to the Student City interview process, where the kids had to talk to Christina about what they wanted to do for the sex tourists and semi-professional Roofie-appliers. Christina just shook her melony head and said "Sorry, babe, no can do. We can't have anything reflect badly on the company." Which was... wait, what? On the company that organizes low-rent trips for horrid sunburned assholes from Ohio to get drunk and sloppily fuck and do horrible things they'll forever regret? That company? What, exactly, could possibly reflect badly on that company? Accidentally decapitating an old Real World cast member while just trying to get them to shut the hell up? Oh Paula, we hardly knew ye.

So that's gonna cause a problem and everyone will get drunk and several will die. At one point during the Christina Interviews, Fuckface said "I'm a leader." Fuckface works at Hooters. If that doesn't spell leadership, I don't know what does.

I don't know how to end this. So, here:

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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, MEXICO.

See, the youth network has been slipping some in the ratings the past two years, as generations shift and get older, and once-boffo programming like the aforementioned Hills start to get creaky and stale. Though head of programming Tony DiSanto, who's spearheading this overhaul, served as an executive producer on both The Hills and its predecessor Laguna Beach, he recognizes that tastes change pretty rapidly, and that the cinematic forgery of the Hills genre is losing all of its clout because kids know it's not, well, real:

While most of that stems from the aging of such stalwarts as "The Hills" and the dearth of big new hits, some of the slippage can be attributed to the generational shift of MTV viewers, with the channel's brass focusing on the new teens and twentysomethings, "the millennials."

DiSanto called them "the transparent generation" and said MTV's development is being altered to appeal to them. "They don't want to see a reality show that feels produced or is film-like," he said. "It's got to be real, authentic."

He points to the recently premiered "16 and Pregnant" as an example of the type of unscripted fare that MTV is now after and touts it as one series that could fuel a turnaround.

While we've not seen 16 and Pregnant, we assume it hews closer to the network's excellent True Life series (each installment of which is pitched and produced by independent production companies) than it does to, say, a show about rich pseudo-celebrities teetering around in expensive clothes, like The City.

So, minor cultural boom over? Has the Hills era seen the last of its glory days? Let's hope so. You kids might be smarter than everyone thought. Well, if not smarter, at least fickle in the right ways. Lauren Conrad, you got out just in time.

I mean at this point we've set the bar of expectation so low for these kids that if a cast manages to survive the first night and maybe gurgle out a few American English words to the camera before collapsing in a heap of their own vomit and bedsheets, we pretty much consider them winners. Yes, last season was MTV's ruminative chamber piece Brooklyn, but for the most part the Real World has been a parade of bloat and toolery. So a Cancun-set season seemed to promise the worst there ever could be. A city devoted to drinking, devoid all else, overrun by sombreros and kids from worthless colleges all sweating and furiously fist-pumping and dreaming of nothing but the here and now. It's a futureless, featureless place, so we assume that the MTV kids will sink into the void, lost in obliteration, to the atomic tests of history.

And they will! Oh surely they will. They just didn't last night. No instead we had pleasant meet-and-greets between the eight victims, all of them bright-eyed and chipmunk'd, their insides queasy with possibility. There's Mork and Mindy, two waiters who know each other because they both work at the Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill in Tempe, AZ. Yes, the Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill. As in the six-time James Beard Award-winning Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill. Anyway. Mork is a homosexual, so he'll probably be plagued with alcohol problems and wildness, as is the one of two functions for gays on the Real World (the other being a disappearing act, like poor Simon in Paris). Mindy has a piercing in her finger that signifies her undying love for her boyfriend.

There's Emilee, a brown beauty from Boston who went to UMass and works at Hooters. She's dull and emotionally plain, as are so many brown haired girls from UMass. But underneath there somewhere hides a troubled temptress, a coiled, dithering serpent waiting to wend its way around the best piece of meat. That piece of meat would be CJ, a footballin' beau-hunk who shall heretofore be known in these recaps as Binky. Binky has a cauliflower tuft of springy blonde hair and a papercut streak of backwoods Florida in his voice that hints at hidden seediness. Speaking of hidden seediness! Meet Joey, the tattooed and faux-punked-out rocker boi who's the cutest of the bunch but also the most precarious. He reminds me a bit of the poor late Frankie from San Diego, with his raspy rocker attitude and well-worn sense of abandon. He didn't do anything cray-zay this episode, but I worry he will. Or he'll be the surprise of the season and will just turn in a likable, unerratic performance and will then disappear back into obscurity, bypassing all the challenges.

Someone sure to show up on the challenges is Bronne, a fluke worm of a fellow with a little curling Cheshire Cat grin. He seems kind, embracing the gay fellow without a hint of "Ewww" (actually everyone was really good about that, so kudos to MTV for not deliberately placing an abject homophobe in the group), but he also seems a bit gross. He was a nude model for art classes! Ewwwwww!

There are two other girls, Jasmine and Ayiiiiiiiia, and they are fast friends. Jasmine is small, feisty, and from Texas and will throw shit in an episode or two. Ayiiiiiiiia won a contest to be on the show so the roommates will always slightly look down on her because she didn't realize her Real World dream in the proper way. She's like people who backdoor their way into Columbia (ahem, ahem Kelly Bensimon).

So, all these kids met at a restaurant and they talked about the obligatory: Who's Single? Who's Gay? Who's Drunk? Who's Punk? Who's A Virgin? Etc. and etc. until we all fell asleep, bored of these tropes. Next season they should cast a bunch of weirdos who've never even heard of the show. Then we could get a whole fresh start, rather than the well-trod "OMG NICE HOUSESEEESESEESE" shriek when the door is opened (in this case it's a two-level suite in a chintzy beachside resort hotel) and the requisite First Night Out that involves freak dancin' and someone saying "So we were all just havin' a good time..." And they were all just havin' a good time, except for Joey the Rocker who passed out in bed, snoring softly like an inked kitten. And that was it. Everyone came home, fairly lucid. Mork and Bronne made a sangawich and chatted in the kitchen. Everyone else went to bed. WTF? Isn't this MOTHERFUCKIN' CANCUN???? Shouldn't someone have died? I mean they have a balcony for fuck's sake!!

Other things that happened:

Mindy's piercing boyfriend sent her an email stating all thing things about her that he missed:
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Can you read that? It says romantic things like "your butt" and "the way you talk dirty". We live in a beautiful world.

Binky got his hair in cornrows. Binky got his hair in cornrows and everyone tried not to laugh. Binky also spooned with Emilee, who's developing a crush, and then Binky told his trashy girlfriend on the phone ("ain't there no couches you can sleep on?"), and then Binky wrote a long email basically breaking up with the girlfriend for getting upset about the spooning and then read it aloud to everyone. "Four Scores and seven beers ago..." It was a declamatory moment.

At the second night of the clurrb, things got a little more rowdy. Joey the Rocker met a girl named Courtnee the Rocker and they sucked mug and eventually bumped uglies while snickering Ayiiiiia and Jasmine snuck into the room and watched. Oh how darling! Also at the clurrb? Weirdo, nerd-o Bronne totally made out with Courtnee the Rockers MOMZ. Old ass lady lookin' like Sharon Osborne with her purple chunky hair and wrinkly-assed old face. Bronne didn't really provide an explanation for why that happened. Basically he's a total creeper and a lurking weirdo and we should all be aware of where he is at all times.

So that was the episode. Nothing earth-shattering. Just some dumb kids yelling "Hola amigo!!!" really loudly whenever they entered their hotelhouse. Just some dumb kids pounding a few drinks and talking about sex and talking about how they are Different and about Hooters (Joey the Rocker gave Emilee the Dumb shit for working there, so she got sad. She also got sad that she broke up Binky and Danielle. Oh well.) Just some dumb kids parasailing off into the primes of their lives, blissfully unaware of any cloud that awaits them. And there are indeed clouds that await them.

They didn't notice them, not then. They were too busy standing and taking pictures on the deck. Mork made margaritas, mesmerized and jazzed by the whir-whir-whir of the blender, by the electric tingle in his bones. Emilee pushed the big hurting down and smiled and sipped her drink and let the ocean breeze surround her. Some others danced, some others laughed. Binky felt free and untethered, all of a sudden. Florida was a long way away. Joey the Rocker could still taste the salt of Courtnee, still feel the thump of rattling club base. But behind there, did you see them?

There lurking on the Western edge of the azure-orange sky. There above some other resort, casting a pall on Senor Frog's. There chilling the sunbathers and blotting out joy like the Nothing. There were the clouds, those whispering water-filled Langoliers. There were the things that would eat them and beat them and leave them for dead. There was all that would go wrong, tumbling toward them.

But for now it was just a deck, just kids, just drinks. The horizon they thought, where the sea dipped and sky ran down to greet it, there was a smile. A thin seam of a grin.

And they foolishly trusted it. They figured it friendly, and danced on, oblivious.

There's still totally a game room and confessional room (used mostly for masturbating, if Real World lore of old is to be believed) and the producers' control bunker, and all that. Because the show is set in DC and everyone is Politics these days, we expect this to be the drafting for a beautiful new political salon for concerned young Beltwayers. Hence, no hot tub!

One thing that the producers maybe should have reconsidered: Stairs. There have been stairs in many a Real World house. They are rarely a good idea. Lawsuits, folks. Injuries. Think about it.

[Washington City Paper]

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When first we saw our girls last night, mighty Teresa had the servants unfurl the banners, the fountain creaked into life, various scullery maids and houseladies scurried about, making preparations, while the Queen de Medici herself stood anxious in the foyer, rubbing little imperfections off the granite walls with her stubby little thumb. See, Dina was coming to tour the new palace built of cash that Teresa now rattles around in, and T.T. wanted everything to be just right. As the heaving three-hundred-pound door swung open and Dina stepped in, she was smacked in the face with the stench of money and marble. Everything was shiny and smooth. Teresa lives at the Sheraton near the airport. I half expected Dina to walk up to a counter and check in with somebody.

As the tour went on, Dina became more impressed with the opulence of the chateau. Teresa was so proud, relaying how she had designed everything, how there would be two grand chandeliers there, a beautiful twisty column here. It was a house designed by someone who doesn't understand anything. Really, anything at all. She just sort of blinks and breathes, waiting for the wind to blow her in one direction. I'm amazed she can tie her shoes in the morning. The coup de grâce of the studio tour was a visit to the wine cellar where Teresa's squat bulldog husband will make various wines and hopefully not explode himself. Teresa was proud of a little sign that hung on the wall that made it seem like a real vineyard or restaurant or something. She pointed at it, smiled. There it was. A little sign. She liked it. She liked it a lot. Sometimes she'll be driving somewhere, on the highway or just through the woods, and that little sign will pop up in her mind. And she'll smile then too. The Giudice family vineyards. Ristorante di Giudice. It's her favorite sign.

Dina thought the wine cellar smelled bad, so they decided to leave.

So they went outside and sat at a table near the fountain, the staff grooming the green, green grass, an old yardswoman shooing away birds with her big white apron, the lazy Italian sun dolloping pockets of light on everyone through stands of skinny cypress trees. The ladies sipped wines and Teresa yammered about how she wanted to have a big housewarming party. The only problem is this: the house isn't ready! So she's decided to have a housewarming party at her favorite ristorante. Dina smiled that mean smile of knowing everything and said "OK." Teresa then informed Dina that she was planning on inviting old Garbanzo Bean herself to the upscale soiree. Because, um, it was her idea! Sure, sure her idea. Allll her. There was no one else, off camera perhaps, pulling those strings. Dina frowned then smiled then frowned again and gulped her wine. She looked off, out onto the Umbrian hills, rolling out like shadowy curves of a post-surgery woman. In the distance she saw four people, kids really, running wildly into the hills. They were fleeing the plague, she realized. They'd stay up there, making love and reciting poetry and being young, while below them the city festered and died. Teresa's cat, Boccaccio, curled around Dina's feet. Everything felt very familiar all of a sudden. The world was ending.

After a small pause, Dina turned to Teresa and smiled yet again. "It's good wine," she said, nodding. "It really is." And Teresa beamed.

Over at Jacqueline's sad deflating funhouse, there was much talk about grades and automobiles and odd, lumpy daughters who feel they deserve everything when probably the exact opposite is true. Jacqui's well-reasoned parents were in town from the sizzling horrorscape of Las Vegas, and darned if her dad wasn't sensible and smart and wise. What he, a retired army colonel, must think about all this brown and stone and Botox and bullshit is a wonder. I'll bet it makes him sad. Sad that he's eager to get back in the RV and watch New Jersey fade to pebble size in the mirror. Sad that his daughter suddenly woke up one day speaking a whole different language, that she was separated from him suddenly by a thin sheet of onyx. Where do people go, when they disappear? They go to New Jersey, I guess.

Anyway, Puffenstuff has been doing well in charm school and there's that blazing white Jeep Grand Cherokee just collecting dust in an old dingy warehouse that Jacqui's husband suspiciously has access to, so maybe we should just give her the damn car?

Give her the damn car they did, and as it rolled up into the driveway, gleaming white like a blimp made of bird poop, Puffenstuff clapped and jumped and wept and moaned. "How long have you had this???" she squealed. Jacqui grinned and said "Remember that day you got upset? Well, Daddy felt bad for you." And then, really, everyone seemed nice and normal and happy. Puffenstuff called her stepdad "Dad," which is nice, and laws were laid down about when the turdmobile could be driven, what her responsibilities were, and Jacqui's father stood with his arms crossed, watching the whole thing unfold. And he thought to himself She may as well be driving away in that thing right now, because it all felt very far away from him in his slacks, standing next to his trusty old lady. Ah but the pine trees swayed and it was time to go inside for dinner and so everyone did, Puffenstuff giddily eying the car keys the whole time, a new itchy urge suddenly full bloom inside her.

Over at Dina's rambling, ramshackle pile of bricks, it was time for Lexie to grow up and throw out her approximately four and a half million stuffed animals. They filled bags and bags and bags with the creatures—little stuffed purple bats named Leon, a giraffe named Sue with a lazy eye and a drinking problem, a pair of lions who had fallen out of love some time after the last cub was born, a sneaky little stuffed monkey who takes pills in wee fistfuls, an elephant named Gladys who's quiet and dull. Out and away went all these plush lives, back to the landfill mystery that had created them, or, one hopes, to a charity. A child always has use for a finicky triceratops named Albert or a stuffed flamingo who has dreams of being a dancer. But then that child gets older and they're just stuffing in a bag, replaced by important adult cares, like bubbies. Bubbies are way more important than you, Dennis the epileptic alligator. Sorry to say it.

Elsewhere poor Garbanzo showed her even poorer kids her modeling photos. Unfortunately they were all blurred out, but you could tell from the girls' expressions that there was something primal and horrifying about them. Danielle talked wistfully of modeling, and planted a seed of hope in her girls' hearts for their futures. But she also cautioned that it's a tricky, dangerous game. Suddenly it's 24 years later, and it all begins to seem like a mistake.

Other things happened, I think. There was maybe something with Dina quitting her job and something with Strega Nona, I don't really remember. But it's not important. No, what's important is where we were all headed from the very start. From the first moment we laid eyes on Lady Teresa Giudice, in a preview special months and months and many long months ago. Of course we are heading into the dinner scene, nodding politely at the busboys and waiters standing at attention, observing the paintings on the wall on the way to the private room in the back, seeing our table lavishly set, finding our seats and sitting down, ready to watch the explosion we've long been promised. But first, of course, we had to talk about bubbies.

See, T.T. was being silly. T.T. was clearly nervous that her big fancy grownup dinner party that she did nothing for except make reservations was going to go awry. So she started telling "funny" stories about her husband wanting to pull over to the side of the road and play hide the sopressata the day that T had gotten her new bubbelehs. He's always wantin' it these days! He wants it in the morning, in the afternoon, in the eveningtime too. He wants it on Ferris wheels and rollercoasters, in line at the movies and at the Yankee Candle. He wants it in strangers' beds, in the backs of various vans. He wants it at stationery stores and at the onyx quarry. He wants it poached, fried, and over-easy. He wants it on trolley cars and in the swinging, precarious baskets of hot air balloons. This is to say that he wants it a lot, he wants it all the time. And Teresa just laughs and laughs and laughs about it, while the rest of the guests cackle in Dina's case or shift awkwardly and blush, like poor Albie. Poor Albie who had such screen potential but was given short shrift. Poor Albie who could have been a golden god of reality show arcana but instead is just a sputtered start, a dusty misfire, a meme deferred. Ah well.

Anyway, after all the sex talk died down and the children at the other end of the room stopped having blood pour out of their ears while they wept, it was time for old Garbanzo to pounce. Oh, see, she did accept the invitation and sauntered in late with her two girls and everyone said awkward hellos and Teresa sat the head of the table, slurping wine after wine after wine, so scared that her dinner party was going to go off the rails, and oh if she'd only known then. In the great play August: Osage County (go see it with Phylicia Rashad right now, she's incredible), there's a line that goes something like "Thank God we can't tell the future, otherwise we'd never get out of bed." And oh Teresa, thank God you couldn't. Because then you never would have had this masterful dinner table blowdown, much like the dinner table blowdown that happens in that play! Oh wheels within wheels! Seamus Heaney would be proud.

The Fight:

Danielle reaches into her gaping purse and pulls out a copy of The Book. (The Book is: a tell-all written by an old husband of G's who was an informant for the FBI called The Watcher in the 'Hoods) There it went, almost in slow motion, spinning and plummeting down on that white tablecloth like an atom bomb ready to burst. It fell with a deafening thud and everyone fell silent. Was this it? Was this the moment just before they'd all pause and explode forever? Yes! Yes it was! Garbanzo basically yelled like George's dad on Seinfeld "I have a lot of problems with you people!" and she launched into a tirade about the book, about how the book was shown to everyone in town, how it was brought into the Quaker meeting house that is the Chateau salon "behind the Market basket and next to starbucks" so all the ladies of the canyon could gawp and be horrified. How dare anyone, she shriekingly wanted to know. How dare anyone.

After Teresa had her girls Fendi, Berlusconi, and PrinceSpaghettiDay ushered off into the dark recesses of another room, the fight was allowed to continue. G was aiming all of her venom at Dina, who played innocent and said "I never touched that book!" while Strega Nona began to curl up into attack mode, her glare getting sharper and more focused with each passing, enraging second. In the corner Jacqueline wept and thrashed at herself, tearing at her hair and clothing, shrieking "stop it just stop it please please stop it!!!" over and over again, while the older children shifted awkwardly in their seats and learned a lesson about who their parents are, about who adults are. About how life is full of things that will make you angry and unhappy and some bury it and contain it, and some keep it loose but tight and eventually work their way through it, and then some scream, let it come rushing out like the doom of Herculaneum. Their parents were screamers, they realized. They were more porous than some. Their parents were sieves.

Eventually Caroline made her move and bellowed "I did it!!! It was me!!!!" and everyone knew that she was just circling the wagons to protect her babybird sister, who was still indignant and big-boobed about the whole thing, pouting with a vague smile. Dina thought the whole thing was hysterical. Teresa just kept drinking and drinking, fairly convinced that the dinner party was not, in fact, going well at this point, but maybe there was still hope! If you listen closely, you can hear her start to tell another bubbie story, talking to no one really, but it gets lost under the din of Garbanzo spewing acid from her mouth and Stregz shooting flames from her fiery hair and Jacqueline gnashing her teeth and gnawing on the furniture.

G became more and more cornered, losing traction by the second. But finally Jacqueline, sensing a moment to be a friend and not just a bulldozed sister-in-law, yelled at Dina "Liar!!!!" And she kept yelling, saying that it was Dina that had passed around the book, that it was Dina all along, that it's always been Dina. Always been Dina sending whispers about Danielle over the lakes of Franklin. Always been Dina saying snide quiet things while getting foils at Chateau. Always Dina who comes over to her brother's house and makes jokey little comments about the decor and about the food when Jacqui is sitting right there, I mean right there, and she makes me feel like a little dog or a bug or something, and she's just so mean and I feel like I'm stuck in pudding, like I can't swing my arms or my legs or do anything on my own, I feel like I don't have any bones, and it's all Dina's fault and I—Oh, hah. Where was Jacqui? Oh, yes, Jacqui was protecting Danielle from the Sisters Helliwell and with one blazing look from Dina to Jacqui, you knew that there'd be a reckoning for old J. A reckoning the cameras couldn't have caught if they'd tried, because the howling and light would be too great to capture.

So we didn't really get anywhere on the affair of the book, but at least it's out now. It didn't matter anyway, because the biggest fireworks were yet to come. Teresa was pretty drunk at this point, and as she watched Jacqui set herself ablaze and throw herself crashing through a window, she realized that this wasn't the most successful dinner party in the restaurant's history, probably. And this made her angry. This made Teresa very, very angry and from some new energy pulsating out of her new bubbies, a rage erupted in her the likes of which no one had ever seen. "Book... it's true... prostitution whore!!" she screamed at Garbanzo, who just slightly raised her antennae eyebrows in bewilderment. Teresa then decided to thrash the table, it was all the table's fault, which sent glasses clanking and wine spilling and you were glad that Puccini and Arlequino and Beatrice were elsewhere, spirited away in some place of serenity, because their mother was not their mother anymore. Their mother was a hissing, olive-oil beast with spills of squid ink hair and glowing garnet skin. She continued to scream and lunge at Danielle even as her husband ran up and tackled her and immediately started trying to have sex with her. "Not now," Teresa moaned, and suddenly, just as quickly as it had started, like a summer squall, it was gone.

Garbanzo straightened her hair and calmly collected her daughters. It was time to leave. She'd said her piece. And then she'd had a table thrown at her. Caroline and Dina stayed close together, glowering and hissing at poor Jacqui, who was just lying in a smoldering heap on the pavement below, her nice, beleaguered husband sifting bravely through the ashes. He found her wedding ring, put it in his breast pocket, and walked off into the evening.

Teresa and Bulldog made quick rabbit love in the broom closet and then collected their three cara mias and it was back to the marble mansion. Back to slip on those floors and imagine those chandeliers. As she was leaving, Teresa told us that she considers herself "a classy person," and you felt so bad for her then. That she'd tried to have a nice sophisticated dinner party so the viewers at home could see how upper crust she is, but all it ended up being was sex talk and a table fight. It's a sad thing, that. But oh well.

So here we are. Done. Done like dinner. Done like Dominick. We got tiny little uninformative updates about the girls. There are babies being had and jobs being quit and all the things that happen in lives, all over the world.

I wonder what the girls think about this short, truncated experiment. Was it what they'd hoped? Did Danielle find her fame, did she find the recognition she's always craved, all these years? Did it make her daughters love her more or less, did she find a man, did her face finally settle, did she give up the ghost of 20 and embrace the fact of 50? Who knows. I suppose we might find out during the next go around.

I wonder too did Caroline feel plucked out from everything. She got so little airtime and not one story of her own. Do her cherished sons sit by the phone, anxiously, waiting for Bravo to call and offer them a series? Does that other one, the girl one, do anything at all? And does Dina stay golden and her daughter weird? Are they adept at the camera, or are they really that kinda... well, fun? Does Jacqueline still get scared of the dark, does the rumble of approaching thunderstorms still make her heart leap into her throat, does the quiet still remind her of that desert that haunted her dreams for so long? That coyote-flecked tundra, that hot merciless thing. In the dreams she'd be running, even though you can't run in dreams, she was running through the brown dirt deserts of Nevada and finally, after miles and miles and miles, she'd spot what she'd been looking for. As she approached it she'd begin to make out its form: a person, small, brown hair. And as she got closer she'd realize—with a terrible dread, with a snapping elastic hope—that the figure was her, but older. It was her she'd been chasing down in that desert for so long. I wonder if she still has those dreams.

And I wonder of Princess Teresa. I wonder of that castle that she built. The house must get cold and lonely sometimes. All that echoing. What will it be like once Gia, Gabriella, and Milania grow up and go away? When those black tendrils have faded to gray, when the Bulldog just keeps expanding in all the wrong directions. That house, fashioned from marble and granite and onyx, is forever. In Italy you can still find the Roman ruins, built of similar stone, and though they're weathered and beaten, they still remain. Is that what Teresa the Master Builder was building all along? A permanent fortress, a buttress against time. Something that will stand eternally, there in New Jersey.

Among the pines and maples, the quiet roads rolling into busy, ugly towns. The names, Elizabeth and Edison and Princeton, the Lakes, the caucus of seas. Among the tollbooths and turnpikes, the drawls and the stutters, the pinched features and orange hide, the wish to make rougher things smooth. The shore, the casinos, the Devil.

The Jersey Devil who stands somewhere in the Pine Barrens, heaving his heavy breaths, his eyes glowing dim red, the dark pulse of this fearsome state. And he thinks about them—about Danielle, about Jacqueline, about Dina and Caroline, about Teresa—and he worries. He worries the worry of any old thing, he worries the worry of time slipping away.

The Devil, you see, worries that he's been replaced.

Teresa de Medici has a problem with boobages. You see she's just a bit bee-stung, mosquito-bit. There ain't much there. Though her hair spills out of her workmanlike head in soupy tendrils, like squid ink pasta through a colander, and though her ass has been bouncing a steady series of quarters since the early-late 80s, something is still amiss. Her husband, who Teresa sagely and seriously describes as an ass guy, doesn't much care. He's too busy, I dunno, goin to work, to care about such things. But hey, happy wife, happy life. So if T.T. wants some bears? Go get 'em.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We must start somewhere towards the very beginning. Back when silicone hadn't been scooped out of the valley and stuffed down some lady's front like two oversized crumpets into a toaster. Before all this, the ladeez were going to Atlantic City. You see they really needed a break from all the wear and tear of swimming around in giant vats of white wine, which is what they do when they're not in A.C. Freshly brined and tanned, the ladies—Strega Nona the Brave, Dina the Darling, Teresa the Titless, and Friend the Forgettable—trotted off to some fancy dancy hotel/spa kinda place that almost looked like Las Vegas, even though it was in Atlantic City, which is sort of to Las Vegas what an old tractor behind a barn is to Monte Carlo.

The girls didn't do much. They sat by the pool and Teresa cooed about fancy drinks and Dina apologized for her weirdo friend and Strega Nona just looked stern and bird-like, alert and vigilant. One begins to suspect that perhaps Stregz wasn't kidding when she espoused her "I'll fuck you up" attitude about protecting her and hers. One begins to suspect that perhaps Streg goes looking for conflict, her balled fists twitching and whirring, aching to be used. "Just gimme one good reason...." she'll say menacingly to a cowering El Salvadoran cleaning lady. An angry bulldog of a woman. An Italian pitbull who remembers Napoli.

But what the ladies did best was shop for jewels. Diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires and more diamonds and rhinestones and garnets and amethysts and opals and diamonds and pearls. But mostly diamonds. Mostly Teresa wanted diamonds. "Hey guys... what do you think about this bracelet?", Teresa whined, holding up a fly strip of diamonds. "It's two hundred and eighty thousand." Dina smirked and just rolled her eyes. Teresa, having been half serious about actually maybe buying the gaudy thing, smiled stupidly. The bracelet glittered, like two houses for low income families dancing in the sun. Teresa then tried on a million dollar cat o' nine tails made of diamonds. Oh, how I wish she'd bought it. Just to see her try to count out a bamillion dollars in cashmoney hundreds. "Wait... lemme start over. One one hundred, two one hundred, three one hundred..."

Back in the austere hamlet of Franklin Lakes, a bug was zipping around and pestering two young girls. "Mom, stop it!" Garbanzo's daughters moaned, satisfied finally when their mother alit on a bed and began gabbing to them about boys. See what happened was this: G's little boytoy, Stilwell Angel, was actin' all kindsa shifty. See he's a very young 38, and Garbanzo is in her late 70s, so it just wasn't really going to work. Also, Stilwell Angel was jeeping on her with another laday. He called Teresa, being an associate of her husband's, and asked if he and this galpal could use T's Jersey shore house. Teresa wondered about Garbs, but not too much, and basically said OK. In the background, Dina smiled wickedly. Anyway, G knew somethin' was up so she took Stilwell out to lunch and, after affixing his bib and cutting up his hotdog for him, it was time to end the relationship. Just because, you know, they were going different places. She was going toward stability and a new chance at love and the tumble of years that would be her two pretty daughters growing up very fast. And he was going towards the Jersey Shore with his friend Lisa in like an hour so could we hurry this up maybe? Eyebrows telling no secrets or lies, Dina smiled sadly and helped him back into his PowerWheels and watched, hand shielding her eyes from the sun, as he puttered off down the road and disappeared. She heaved a buggy sigh. How things go sometimes, huh?

Back on the bed with the two girls, G decided to break the news that the affair had ended. The girls seemed unfazed, in a war-weary way. G promised that Stilwell wouldn't be like the other men, that he'd come around and say hi to the goils and whatnot. They didn't believe it. He'd be just like... oh we shouldn't say his name. Garbanzo didn't want to say his name. But then like a chickadee chirping quietly out of winter, while the snow melts, the littlest G said "Like Jay." Yes, like Jay, everyone agreed. The mysterious Jay. Who was he, I wondered. This Jay. I'm sure we'll figure it out, eventually.

When all had been packed up and purchased, villas paid and maids untipped, the ladies left beautiful A.C. for ruined, desolate F.L. Back at home, Teresa had very important things to consider. All of the girls had been telling her to get boobages. Because it would make her life happier, because it would complete the package, because if you don't partially announce the rest of yourself when turning into a room, you could be attacked by a paranoid husband. It's very possible. And also because why not, you're bored and rich and your marble palace has already been erected and sometimes, when Albergo and Lunedi and Cimabue are asleep, the place is just awfully quiet. Too quiet. Bubbies would help that. Bubbies would be friends. They practically talk.

The only person who was a bit against this was Dina. Dina got enormous breasticles because her husband, genetically different from T's, is a chest man. So Dina hates them but it makes her husband happy, so what can you do? You can't play tennis, that's for sure. Dina insisted that Teresa didn't want huuuge ones and Teresa agreed, because there is, to quote Dina, a line between tasteful and tacky. The idea that any of these women have any perception of what either tastelessness or tackiness are makes me chuckle with sad, drunken laughter—a sound like a platypus burping, or calling out for help while having a nightmare. A terrible platypus nightmare.

Of course the most important person to discuss this with was her husband. And her three small children. Setting a good example of how girls should be—and let's face it, Teresa has already done such a bang up job, wasn't watching little actress child Camorra primp and preen at the dinner table like all those girls you hated in high school and college except she's like six just so heartening?—she decided to discuss the matter at the family's favorite Italian restaurant, Quiznos. She told the girls to cover their ears and then yelled "Boobs! I want boobs!" and her husband just chuckled awkwardly and stared at a small red stain on his pants. Fuck... Gotta burn these, he thought.

So with his blessing Teresa trotted off to the boob clinic with her friends in tow. They all guffawed and whinnied at the smarmy doctor and very important medical matters were discussed. Would they feel like bags of sand? Do they fall off or get scared during thunderstorms? Can they see into the future? The doctor chuckled and smiled. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "Of course! They do all those things. And more." After the girls watched a grainy educational film about how one's new bubbies can also solve mysteries and govern small island nations and recite Pi to a hundred places, Teresa was prepped and ferried off to get the insertions. A funny moment happened when she was drugged and the nurse tried to have her count backwards from three. From three. But old T.T. couldn't do it. Because she can only count upwards, in increments of a hundred. So instead she mumbled something about her friend sending her a text message and then she whispered, strangely and ominously, "Fidelio..." and then she was out. Out cold. Like an oranging pimento loaf, sitting in some forgotten, dusty deli counter in Edison.

After a long recovery, Teresa finally awoke and asked what size she was. A healthy C. Just like she'd sorta wanted. Her husband shuffled in and said "Oh, you got somethin' there now" and Teresa smiled and maybe slowly started to realize that this was all terribly silly. Had she been kidding when she said, as means to "preplay" (she meant foreplay), that she was considering putting a stripper pole in the bedroom? She didn't even know anymore. But now that she had these things—these inert puppies, these sacks of chemical, these blimpy over-leavend kaiser rolls—stuffed into her body, she might have to start acting some part. Would she need to sleep with sweaty, stenchy teenage boy gardeners? Would she need to lean over and purr at Parent/Teacher conferences, trying to secure good grades (and a bright, bright future!) for little Lazio? She suspected she might.

Speaking of good grades! Sad deerbaby Jacqueline decided it was time to be tough and really crack walnuts and ask her aging daughter Britannica about her summer school grades. She and the child were already on rocky terms, because of a disastrous photoshoot. See, like any wayward teenage girl who's suddenly thrust in front of television cameras and told to be interesting and charming and most importantly pretty, young Britannica has decided she's pretty curious about modeling and acting. Many young people are curious, even covetous, about such things, but because Bravo's there, sifting through the sausage-stained wreckage of her life, she now has agency to misguidedly pursue a career in the self-centered arts. So Jacqui took her on a bigtime modeling photoshoot. The photographer had one time photographed one of the America's Next Top Model girls and if that doesn't spell success, it at least spells suces. Moored there against a gray backdrop, listlessly banging into it and being startled by a fan, the poor dear didn't seem exactly a natural. And when she saw the prints! Oh how she mooped and moaned. She just didn't like them. The photographer smiled piteously. Because he knew that when Brit sat there at the bank of monitors and gazed longingly, disappointedly, at what she saw... Well, he knew that she was really, fundamentally, unhappy with something more bedrock and immovable. And she knew it too. And everyone knew it. But we all just pretended. The next photoshoot! That one will be better. The future will always be better.

Anyway, Jacqui still demanded to see the grades and, lo and behold, they were actually good. She even got extra credit on one test! So Jacqui smiled and barked a happy bark and little Brit said "Now can I have a car...?" And even though, yes, there was already a car waiting for her in a warehouse, Jacqui played it cool for the first time in her life and said "Well, this certainly helps your cause." And you could see that glimmer of satisfaction dance across her face. How strangely fun and empowering it was to be an adult sometimes! How nice it was to feel traction under her feet. Sadly her moment of triumph was ruined when, nearby outside, a car backfired and poor Jacqui widdled on the floor and then ran behind her hiding chair and cowered and shivered. The world was still a scary and menacing place sometimes. Brittanica just stared at the yellow puddle and blinked slowly. A model, she thought. A real life model.

After the noises monsters had definitely moved on and she'd stopped shaking so much, Jacqueline bravely put on her best hat and set out for Garbanzo. You see it was G's 78th birthday, and a dinner was in order. When they sat down, G's eyebrows told no stories, no memories, but still old matters had to be addressed. The book. The crook book. The crooked little book that Dina (allegedly! but I don't care! I love her! like I really, really like her and her weirdo daughter! sue me!) passed around town to ruin G's life. Jacqui, remembering that soaring grownup moment in the kitchen, held firm. "I can't hear about that stuff. You know, it's family. It just isn't right." Garbanzo seemed frustrated, flattened. A fairweather friend, Jacqui was. But a friend, at least. Here's something. So she smiled and said "Fair enough." And they toasted and drank wine and dinner was dinner. An evening was an evening. Just one out of many, one in a year. A birthday, like any other day.

When Garby got home that night she stood in the kitchen for a spell, drinking a final glass of wine, admiring the wooden elephant (they never forget...) that her daughter had made for her birthday. It was a good life sometimes, she thought. Even if it wasn't always full. Even if her dangerously pretty and growing-up older daughter thought that men only wanted her "goodies", even if she wanted something different, sex-wise, for her girls, wanted it fiercely, but was nonetheless powerless to stop it. And then there it came again. That name. That name that turned over and over in her head like balls at a bingo parlor. Like the lottery machines on TV. Jay. Suddenly it just ran up, pushed its way through her lips, desperate to taste some fresh air. "Jay." She said it out loud. That person. That man.

They'd met on vacation. The girls back home with a babysitter. Garbs had found a little extra money here and there and bought herself a ticket, first class, to Mexico. She spent the first quiet days walking up and down the beach, thinking about times she'd been there before, during that cokey carnival that some folks called the 80s. It had looked different back then. Both bigger and smaller. Now it was just... Just a beach. Just beautiful sand stretching to hug beautiful water. And then, one sunset-streaked evening, there he'd been. Suddenly there. In his billowing white twill shirt, barefoot, simple khaki shorts. He'd been a charmer, talking her up, walking her back to the outdoor bar. They sat and drank stingingly sour drinks. He taught her little Mexican words like "cerveza" and "siesta" and she'd played along, acted like she didn't know what they meant even though she did. Pablo had taught her Spanish one dreary October in Bogota. But it was fun to play the game, so she did. And they chatted and drank and ate very little and made love under a canopy and Danielle could feel her whole world reopening. How shuttered she'd been! How skittish and scared! But no more. Past was past, done was done. Here was something. Here was something new.

Before they went back, before New Jersey climbed in and poisoned it like some cursed vine, they'd spent four more days down in Mexico. Feeling the sand between their toes, talking about nothing and everything, sharing sunny, wistful hopes for the way things could be. On the last night, at dinner, he'd reached his hand across the table and grabbed hers. He'd smiled, differently. This was a new one. There's still so much to learn, Danielle thought. "I want you to meet someone," he said softly. "OK," she said. "I'll meet anyone."

He led her to one of the private villas the hotel kept a bit down the beach. There was soft music wafting out from the inside, Huey Lewis maybe. Jay knocked on the door and, after a bit, Danielle heard a gruff, smoky voice say "Just a minute. Just a damn minute." Danielle suddenly felt knotted and nervous. Who was this scary-sounding person—scary in an old, familiar way. Finally, the door creaked open and standing there, all brown and dappled, grizzled and glorious, was a woman, about Danielle's age.

"Danielle," Jay grinned. "This is my sister. I'd like you to meet my sister."

The woman raised an eyebrow. She lit a cigarette. She chuckled.

"Nice to meet ya. The name's LuAnn."

Danielle shook her hand. "Nice to meet you too."

"Well?" LuAnn barked, clapping her hands. "We drinkin' or what?"

And so they did.

As the story goes: Heidi and Spencer got down there, and hated it, and quit the show. Twice.

So much of the story that ensues - the premise of the show, the extent of the Pratts' involvement, whether or not Heidi sustained any kind of injuries or sickness, the entire dimension in which it takes place! - could be or probably is utter and complete bullshit. Take, for example, a statement obtained by E! via one Mr. Paul Telegdy:

Last week, NBC exec Paul Telegdy said the "insincere, lazy, entitled" Pratts had to endure a stint in "isolation" before producers would decide the twosome's fate on Monday's show, vowing that the Pratts "really are going to bare their souls."

About this Telegdy fellow: he works under Ben Silverman at NBC, heading up reality programming. Our source explains that Telegdy was the one who recruited the Pratts for the show, capitalizing on their desire to transition from cable stars to network television properties. Telegdy - a British, former BBC exec, to paint the picture - had to fly down to Costa Rica himself to convince the Pratts to stay on the show after they realized that (1) the other celebrities sucked, (2) they'd actually have to do the stunts (eating bugs, etc) and (3) they wanted more money to do it. They walked off the set, and Telegdy came in and negotiated a higher salary for the Pratts to hang in there. They still weren't happy.

Meanwhile in LA, Ben Silverman has to cancel the season's first strategy meeting on Thursday with all the new showrunners, creative executives, and producers citing Telegdy's absence, creating a bit of a mess back at a somewhat troubled, fourth-place NBC.

You know what happens next: they're back on the show, and all of the sudden, Heidi gets "rushed" to the hospital last night. Spencer Pratt Twitters: "locked in a dark room for 3 days w no food or water."

TMZ notes that it was no more than ten hours, with food, and water. Furthermore, there were medics on the scene, the entire thing was filmed, they're full of shit.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.And just this evening: "Spencer and Heidi Pratt quit the show last Monday, and stayed in hotels for three days." Nice. This is presumably while Telegdy was negotiating their new salary. Also: "They were indoors at all times protected from the elements, even though other cast members have been sleeping outside in daily thunderstorms." Their kicker, however, is brilliant: "Spencer says it's all BS ... they were effectively tortured and he's planning on suing NBC."

So, what's the upshot of all this?

The publicity's a win-win: Speidi will take whatever attention they can get, if that hasn't been made obvious enough. NBC got their show publicized for free by a huge news cycle.

Telegdy will probably be seen as an absolute genius for making this work if the ratings for the show prove his worth. If they don't, he'll be to blame for the entire thing away, Pratt mess or no mess. His employers are only interested in numbers. Silverman's going to be judged on the same criteria as Telegdy. But the Pratts?

Who would want to work with them in Hollywood ever again? If this is all true: they took a set hostage, they fucked up meetings, timetables, production schedules, and tried to pin what sounds like absolute bullshit on their producers. In a just world, nobody. But they're probably going to get a feature in the next month or two, because that's the way this all works.

Really, the only losers in this thing are us. It's so hard to discern what's bullshit and what isn't in regards to reality show "stars" and their happenings, their product, and their image, that - rather than go through the complicated process of sifting out what's real and what isn't - it's easier to just accept all of this as an ultimate blurring of truth and fiction and get over our hangups in discerning the difference.

Maybe Heidi Pratt is sick, maybe she isn't. But the next time you read something about Heidi falling into a volcano on the set of Celebrity Bounty Hunter: Xtreme Edition, you'd probably just do best to ignore it, lest your head hurt any more than it does now.

Maher, whose career as a paid informant for DEA, FBI, and NYPD was memorialized in Charles Kipps' Cop Without a Badge, sold the torrid, seedy, and exclamation-pointed story of his marriage to Staub to the tabloid weekly. Here's the good stuff:

Maher met Staub in Miami in 1986. "[She] was a paid escort with a local service, says Kevin, and claimed that she had been with numerous celebrities. She was also a 'raging nymphomaniac.'"

They met cute a party that sounds exactly like you'd imagine a party in Miami in 1986 would be: "Everyone was having sex out in the open in the suite. Beverly was on top of a guy on the couch, but she was looking at me. Afterward, when she went into the bathroom to shower, I followed her in—we had sex on the floor!"

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Unsurprisingly, Maher says they "were both messed up because of all the cocaine we were doing," which naturally led to marital discord. "We'd have big arguments, she'd kick and punch and the cops would come," he told Star. "They arrested me four or five times. Once, they arrested both of us after she slashed my arm with a knife."

As a stripper, Staub did some pretty neat tricks: "She was like a gymnast! She could do anything! One time, on her birthday, she came home with $6,000—and I was sure there were some sexual favors involved."

Sorry, Kevin, we don't believe this one: "Having sex six times a day wouldn't even satisfy her!"

The couple married in 1988, while Maher was still married to another woman. They split the next year. Maher also told Star that Staub was dating a high-level Colombian cocaine dealer and out on $10,000 bail related to an extortion charge when they met. Her boyfriend had held one of his clients hostage for nonpayment, and she was got caught up in the arrest. She pleaded guilty and did five years' probation.

On last night's show, Staub vaguely denied the charges laid out in "the book," saying she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when her boyfriend was arrested and refusing to answer anything else. "Even if I was that person, that monster they portrayed me to be, wouldn't they have picked up on that?" We guess, maybe, sure!

"This book has come to haunt me," she said, "and I have to do a lot of damage control about things that I lived in my life and things that have happened. [But] there's dialogue and dialect written everywhere about everyone."

We were curious so we called Maher and got some more information. He told us that Staub actually put her boyfriend and an accomplice away, and that he's worried they might come looking for her. "She locked up two people," he said. "That was part of the deal." When Maher found out Staub was out on bail, he used his law enforcement connections to cut her a deal.

"You give this guy and another guy," he says he told her, "and I'll go to the U.S. Attorney and get you a supervised release." Staub cooperated, and her boyfriend was sentenced to 15 years.

"The guy she locked up was a high-level drug dealer from Medellín," Maher said. "Now he's out. What do you think he's gonna do when he sees her face on TV and knows exactly where she lives? She's got to be out of her fucking mind." She probably is. But Bravo is not, and Maher says the network should have known that, given Staub's past, letting her pursue her own aggrandizement on their air might have consequences: "How culpable is Bravo going to be when this woman gets killed?" It's a strange argument coming from an informant who put plenty of people in jail and went on to participate in a book about his exploits, but he would know.

Maher also said that Staub is a bisexual, which we guess makes sense in a porny kind of way. "Let's talk about her bisexuality," he said. "She liked strip clubs for two reasons: The fast money, and the availability of beautiful young women around her."

And Maher told us the names of those "celebrities" Staub claimed to have slept with. We'll let you know who they are soon as we give them a chance to respond.

Yes, Heidi and Spencer's rep type person says they're still taping the show. So we guess this was some sour little stunt orchestrated by the pair, NBC, the producers, hosts Damien "Carson Daly's Sloppy Seconds" Fahey and the British lady, everyone. They never showed up at LAX draped in black cloaks! They never even stormed off set! Well, if they did, they still came right back. Even though NBC has them x'ed out on the show's website, we're sure there will be some grand surprise and they'll come shuffling back in, dumb grins on their faces. Which is all terribly annoying and embarrassing.

Really it mostly looks bad for NBC. We expect this kind of stupid stuntery from the reality couple. Their idea of clever is kicking you in the shins and then ten minutes later if you ask them, "Heidi, Spencer... did you guys kick me in the shins?" they giggle and say "Noooo..." So, whatever. But NBC! C'mon, guys. You used to be respectable. You used to mean something. That peacock ain't looking too proud these days, is it? Think about it. Your biggest summer stars are Heidi and Spencer from the goddamned Hills. Shame.

Teresa and her tiny Italian bulldog of a husband both love Dancing with the Stars, so they decided to take fancy dance lessons and, this being how things work on this show, they invited some of the other housewives so everyone could embarrass themselves and we'd sort of cry/gurgle on the couch, wishing we had snacks. But we don't have snacks, or at least we didn't. So instead we watched dancing.

But let's rewind a bit and start, as Richard Marx and Donna Lewis would prefer it, at the beginning. When first we laid eyes on their bubbies, Teresa, wee little Jacqui, and blessed Garbanzo were eating at a retrofitted Olive Garden, trying to debate wine choices. "Do you want red or white?" Teresa mewed. "Nothing too heavy..." said Garbs, raising her already professionally raised eyebrows. I think because she didn't know what she meant. Which was funny! Because I pretend to sniff and swirl wine when I'm at fancy places like Applebee's and I don't know what I'm doing either. I should just start asking "Yes, good sir. I'm looking for a wine that will get me drunk. Do you have such a bottle?" Anyway, the reason Garbz had called this meeting of the Midnight Society was that she knew there were some rumahz floating around about how maybe she likes to steal husbands and do blow off their dead wives' bodies and maybe she once shot a guy and maybe she was in the Witness Protection Program dressed up as a gospel nun. All things that, yes, were maybe plausible, and all in good time she'd address them, Garbanzo said. In the meantime, there was no reason to think that she was unsuitable to be around. That was just single lady persecution. And she blamed the wicked bebubbied Dina for all of this.

Of course she should have blamed the producers, but that doesn't make good TV, does it? Speaking of Dina, she was busy sifting through a pile of brightly colored underpants trying to help her daughter Haley Joel Osment get ready for a trip to Cypress Gardens. Haley Joel was really excited because she'd get to watch the ski show and eat praline cookies. Dina was upset, though, because she'll miss her bespectacled daughter, plus she doesn't want her wearing skimpy bikini tops, lest any swarthy southern belles (who roam the grounds, this is a true fact) abscond with her. Haley Joel just chuckled softly at her silly top-heavy mother and they both stroked the hairless cat and we all dry heaved a few times because it looked like they were petting the fluke worm from that one episode of X-Files.

Then it was time for dancing! Everyone was there. Teresa and her husband, Bulldozer. Caroline and her two cherubic sons, Albie and Failure. Garbanzo and her... um... antennae. Everyone cooed and clapped when some old dude standing in the corner was introduced as the father of one of the guys on Dancing with the Stars. It's like when I met Megan Joy Corkrey's second cousin and I wet my pants. It was that big of a celebrity encounter. The music started and everyone got into first position and for the next forty two minutes we were treated to what Joan Acocella might call a fitful dreamscape of unresolved moments and unexpected, vaguely dissonant tableaux. The Housewives Dance Show will probably travel through the most important dance venues in the country before becoming a smash on the creaking stages of Paris and the floors polished by legends of deepest Russia. I had no idea what fluidity Caroline had in her arms. It was like watching a swan give birth to an angelic hairless cat made of gossamer. I wept openly and tore at my hair. Bill T. Jones saw it and immediately announced his retirement, because really what else was there to do? Somewhere in the murky parts of the immortal realm, a man named Balanchine did a sad, graceful bow of recognition and defeat. It was, to put it bluntly, nothing short of an artistic orgasm—prolonged and beauteous, like being slowly caressed by proud Terpsichore herself.

Actually what happened was that everyone just made jokey-jokes, doing the worm because that's still funny I guess, and then doing weird doggy butt slap dances (why, Jacqui, why?) because that's still funny I guess, and then snickering like the little immature brats they are when Garbanzo grand plied onto the linoleum and did a feverish series of punches and jabs, a crossover ballet if ever there was one. See, G. used to be a "professional dancer," which, yes, of course, yes yes yes, means that she went to l'ecole at the pole. So we all weep for her strange display, especially when she manhandled golden Albie, the rays of his perfection emanating from him like smell lines in a child's drawing of poop. But we also clap for Garbanzo for sticking up for the 'mos when Bulldozer started saying some nasty things about them. "This is the gayest thing I ever did," he told his Medusa-like bride. Actually, Bull, the gayest thing you ever did was watch Dancing with the Stars and get so excited about it that you told your wife you wanted to take dancing lessons and have it filmed for her hit Bravo show. So. Also, calling someone "gaylord" stopped being cute when you turned nine years old. But yes, kadooz to Garbanzo the Brave.

Then it was back to Dina, who was absent from dancing because she has an exclusive contract with Merce. She was having a big going away party for little Haley Joel, because... going to Cypress Gardens for two weeks requires a catered affair in which gloopy bowls of cole slaw are unpackaged and stared at with mild horror. At one point beautiful Albie—his body like sculpted honeycomb, hair like Saints Cosmas and Damian themselves had used the Play-Doh spaghetti maker in heaven—ambled up to Haley Joel and asked her "So what's there to do in Greece?" I felt bad that no one said "No, no dear heart. It's in Florida." But no one did, so they just kept talking about these craaazy places called "Cyprus" and "Greece" and Haley Joel said that there was no drinking age and Albie said "You're not a party girl, right?" and I thought to myself... This girl is twelve years old. One hopes it wouldn't even be an option, not even a consideration, that she could be a party girl. But kids these days, who the hell knows. I saw a seven-year-old shooting smack in the flickering fluorescent light stairwell of my broken down tenement this morning. A sad state of affairs.

Then there was a sound like Shirley Temple getting her fingers stuck in the screen door or a family of marmots experiencing a hot air balloon accident. It was, of course, the clarion that Teresa and her daughters—Mortadella, Arrabbiata, e Lamborghini—had arrived. Caroline cooed over them and said that they were soooo cute, and I guess they are. If you think something wrapped in pink packaging and told to be pretty is cute. If you think children who are precocious and prissy are cute. Personally, I like my kids scruffy and messy, covered in a graham cracker and Juicy-Juice film, ragamuffins with wild, unkempt hair. But, that's just me. Dina took the arrival of the plasticine Hanes Sisters as an opportunity to say how sad she is that she can't dress Haley Joel up like that anymore and oh god, she's going to die of water poisoning at Cypress Gardens, isn't she?

Then everyone made fun of poor Garbanzo and her dancing disaster and the children in attendance learned a valuable lesson about how fun it is to talk shit about people when they're not around and how great it is to feel superior and sarcastically wicked. Circles of life, etc.

Finally it was time for Haley Joel to close her steamer trunk and bravely ascend the plank up into the Cunard steam liner she'd be taking down to Florida. Dina fretted and frizzled, and I sort of fell in love with her. She listed a series of horrible diseases that people can get when abroad. Someone she knew named Andrew went to a water park and got a "crazy ass disease." And that makes sense. Ass Disease affects 1 in 5 people who attend water parks in foreign countries. And what about Grandma Nina? She got Lyme Disease from Germany. I pictured an army of ticks sent out by the Nazis. Or a little old lady perusing a knickknackery souvenir shop saying "Ohh... this is pretty, isn't it Hal?" But when she brings it back home, it turns out to be Lyme Disease. "Dammit, Hal. It's Lyme Disease. It's like the time I had that foreign exchange student come stay at the house and it turned out to be potato bugs."

Over at poor Garby's house, she was making sad pizzapie dinner for her two best friend daughters. I felt bad for the lady, who is apparently no longer friends with Teresa. See what happened was that after Bulldozer called someone 'Little Lord Twinkledink' or whatever, Garbz got mad, and spoke up. Bulldozer got angry and Teresa was highly offended that G had dared insult her wonderful, stubby husband. "How dare she disrespect him while he's disrespecting an entire swath of the population!" Apparently G called to apologize to T, but T hung up on G, so now G is having sad pizzapie dinner and telling her girls that they are all alone in this world. While over at Dina's, Caroline and Teresa are gabbing about Garby and everyone's being mean and Teresa is wearing a backwards Kangol and suddenly it all makes sense—the headbands, the hats, the spills of hair. She knows.

Anyway, then of course the bombshell was dropped and The Book appeared. Garbanzo, nee Danielle, nee Beverly Merrill, is in a book called Coke Queens Through the Ages and it talks about how she kidnapped a millionaire and was a stripper assassin and single-handedly ran the Medellin cartel for six weeks while Pablo Escobar was on vacation at Cypress Gardens, and basically Trini, Gabriella, and the gang all think she's a menace. Teresa proved herself to be real foreheadless pit viper, hissing away about her one-time friend, calling her a prostitute, and what... all because Danielle told Bulldozer not to make gay slurs? Terrific, T. I hate you.

Poor little Jacqueline was being played like a chew toy, pulled between her wicked sisters-in-law and buggy Garbanzo. Being ever the clever diplomat, Jacqui went over to G's house to ask about the book, but also to not indicate her fambly. G told her side of the story: She'd been modeling, and came back to visit her boyfriend, and was busted federally. For kidnapping and beating up people and ransom and shooting people and stabbing babies right in the Rick Taylor and trying to kill the Queen of England at a Dodgers game and trying to capture the moon. G's thinking was, if I'm this horrible person, why haven't I been horrible? And Jacqui nodded her poor bobble head and continued on, asking about mugshots and other scary pictures. Jacqui frowned and furrowed her brow and evenly asked, "Danielle, are you the monster that lives under my bed?" Garby looked steely. A strange half smile inched across her face. "I'm not going to answer that." Then G. said "the written word is not the Bible" and I laughed and thought to myself, Well, yeah, but the Bible is the written word.

Garbanzo knew that Dina had been spreading these horrible words about her, telling everyone in the made-up town of Franklin Lakes. She brought it into Chateau and showed Vic and Brucie and Gina and Sandra Q. and Bonnie Leighton down at the ShopRite. Jacqui just Pound Puppied her face and was very confused. The poor dear needs a rest, everyone get out of the room, can't you see she's asleep on her feet? G. and J. clinked champagne glasses and worried about what her controlling family would say.

Over at the Alitalia airplane hangar that is Teresa's new granite mansion, the furniture was finally arriving. Out spilled a couch shaped like a carousel, an ottoman shaped like a pennyfarthing bicycle, the dessicated and headless corpse of Marie Antoinette that was to be propped up in the Great Room, yard upon yard of solid onyx curtains, and, the piece de resistance, a wrought-iron forehead to be hung on the wall. Teresa had the sunny blonde nanny bring over Citronella, Piedmont, and Extravirgin so they could squeal about their closets and jacuzzi tubs and everyone gets to be a princess in this glorious French chateau that's been paid for in cash. Bulldozer came by and said "The fuck do I care about furniture," and then pulled out his wad of hundos to pay the befuddled and amazed and slightly scared furniture movers. Later Teresa's actress daughter La Strada had to ask a mover to get her suitcase full of clothes, but she was worried because his name was Ernesto and she doesn't speak Spanish. "Mama, tu sai che non posso parlare la lingua dei contadini!"

After the clothes had been moved up by shabby old Ernesto, Bellini started on the work of being a weird little child-adult and saying strange things. When her agent/manager/lady who lives down the street and never had kids called, the offer was to be an extra on the Gossip Girl. So, I guess at one point, Milanese was on Gossip Girl. And I never did notice. Sigh.

Meanwhile at Chateau Sing Sing, Garbanzo had her old gay friend Tommy over and they had wine drinks and talked about the bitchy sadness of being in a crime book about women who murder nuns while naked. Garbs once again plead innocent and acted tough, until eventually she cried. She cried because why did Dina have to tell everyone and why did these bitches have to be this way and why did her life have to curl and wander in this direction, because we only get to do this once and now it's all ruin and sad pizzapie dinners. Old gay Tommy looked pitying, but then they laughed. They decided there should be a cage match, a rumble, a fisticuff fumble. So we'll get conflict next week. Oh goody woo hoos.

For a week though, a sweaty languid week of muggy early June, we'll just have to wonder what happens and wait. Dina will stand by the window, a white kerchief pressed to her reddening features. What mysteries, what perils might Cypress Gardens hold? Could there be a waterskiing accident, a topiary catastrophe? Why is a fortnight so terribly long? And why do we love people only so they can leave us?

Caroline will wonder why she doesn't dance. Maybe it's the haircut. Maybe she's Samson and she just didn't know it. She'll wait for Failure to stop herky-jerk dancing and mugging and aping and realize that he'll never be Albie, radiant, shining, dewdrop Albie. With his chin square and sharp like a bald eagle's buttocks. His arms tawny and thick like enormous drumsticks.

Jacqueline will just wait for a baby. Because yes she is pregnant and that is very nice for her. But she'll also lie awake at night, hearing the skitter skitter of the creature, the monster, the plastic-faced being that lurks under her bed. Why do these things always happen to her? First the Langoliers that called to her from the Poconos. And now this. This low cackling goblin, this thing threatening and teasing. What she doesn't know, not just yet, is that creature's name is Adulthood, and it's coming to eat her.

Teresa will wonder if one can actually eat marble. Marble and pasta, marble and pesto, marble and those little cocktail weiners she used to like to eat before Bulldozer came by and swept her off her feet. On summer nights she'd stand on the porch at her parents' house, the street lights buzzing, the can in hand, digging her little fingers in there, eating and chomping. Ugh, how low and base she had been! Hardly even knew what a chateau was then. And now she's the queen. Or a princess. A princess sounds younger. A princess can only go up. A queen is already there. There's something higher to get. She knows it. Diamonds she'll suddenly think. A house made of diamonds.

And Garby. Old Beverly Merrill. The ex-con. The grifter, the drifter. She'll just wait and wonder until the next terrible thing. Until the next shingle falls off the roof. Until a rumor is spread like Oleo over the stale bread of her life. What a mistake she'd made. What a mistake it had been. To try. To want. To run away.

When she was younger, during that illegal summer when she was twenty and alive, she had this one thing she did, when she wasn't modeling or dancing or slung over some leather couch, feeling the cold pounding of love leaving the room. When she wasn't doing any of that, she'd get in her Chevy and drive over to Newark. There was a place, a hole in the fence that some teenagers had cut, drunk and daring one night, where you could sneak through and sit and watch very close, so so close, as the planes landed. She'd sit there for hours and hours, plane after plane after plane. Coming from Brussels or Bangkok or Boston. People escaping and fleeing and coming home in one piece. She loved it, the strange pull of it, the want that would canyon open inside of her when she thought about going. How people go, she would think, taking a pull from a bottle. Some fruity dumb drink. Some wild girl thing she'd long since lost the taste for.

And there was a moment, right as the front wheels whined and leaned down to the tarmac, where it was all light and noise. Everything around her, her entire world it would seem, was so bright and so loud, and she would get this feeling. That all the warm and wonderful things in this overused world were suddenly inside her, a part of her. She would feel, there on the grass, a girl all of twenty, almost inhuman, something else, something special and faraway.

And she realizes now, as she watches the grass and the trees and she hears the blue, ticking silence of her daughters away at school, she realizes that that moment, that near indescribable second—that sound, that fury, that feeling of lifting—that was the closest she had ever come to disappearing.

The clip at left should really tell you all you need to know about what had happened. Prepared to rule the roost of abysmally sad celebrities (Lou Diamond Phillips... why?), Spencer declared himself the "King of America" while his wife made weird jokes and said things about Jesus. Their antics, though, were met with either indifference or anger from the other contestants and, upon finding that living in the Costa Rican jungle is not very much like perching one's skinny, champagne-filled behind on a Les Deux banquette, the pair reportedly stormed off the set, never to return.

It's a shame, in a very very small way, because Heidi and Spence were really the only remotely interesting things about last night's premiere episode. As much as we do so love Stephen Baldwin and that one lady who used to wrestle once, we don't imagine we'll stick around to see what happens.

Update: Or, um... Maybe the reason they left the show, or why Spencer did at least, is because they're not actually reality stars. TMZ has an account from a person who was on the Costa Rican set and recounted the following story:

...just before quitting the show, Spencer screamed at producers, "If you give me a script, I'll do what you want. I'm not a reality star. I'm on 'The Hills.'"

Spencer clarified with the following: "I'm a TV producer and a character."

Hm. "I'm not a reality star. I'm on 'The Hills.'" Man oh man does that say it all about... it all.

Yes, Heidi and Fleshbeard finally, for realsies, tied the knot. But first there was much sloshing and murmuring and yelling to be done. Because that's what this show has become (and maybe always was): stretched and tired looking blonde people yelling in echoing rooms, their lives piles of gum and sawdust, fine bits of gems, like glittery mist, strewn across the top. Has an American family lurched toward ruination with as much ferocious celerity as the Montag clan, now that they're all on camera, all saying wretched things at the same time? What the ma's and pa's of Crested Butte, CO must think of these once-normalish folks. Went to Hollywood and got all fancy and ugly. Went to Hollywood and got all sad.

It all began with Heidi talking to Fleshbeard's terrible sister Handbags, her hair sticking up in odd places. She's like Salacious Crumb, old Handbags is, and I wish someone would come and zap her so she'll stop gnawing on our eyes. But no one has, yet. Though, when Handbags balefully asked Heidi who her bridesmaid would be, her face fell a bit, and maybe she did kinda get zapped, right in the feelings, when she heard the answer. It would not be Handbags, instead it would be Holly. Because, as Heidi put it, "You know... Holly's been my sister my whole life." Oh really? She's been your sister for your entire life? That's fucking amazing. My sister and I have been siblings for about, what is it Nel, six months? A year, tops. It's great, but I wish it could have been this way my whole life. Oh well. Heidi's so lucky. Heidi also wants a swan wedding full of actual swans and "dripping with diamonds." Handbags said "That sounds really nice." Yes, it does. If you're getting married inside of a Russian debutante's jewelry box.

For his part, Fleshbeard continued on his Good Will tour. He had lunch with Brody, who outright laughed in Fleshbeard's fleshy, bearded face. He thinks his turnaround is all fake. Which it probably is. But Spencer pressed on, arranging a little date with Belinda, Heidi's terrible mother, who has really settled with eerie ease into her new role in front of the cameras. She's learned terms like "hitting your mark" and "call time" and now she feels ready to get some real meaty roles in the future. Like Doting Mom of Pregnant Heidi or Consoling Mom of Divorcing Heidi. Or best yet, because it's such a juicy part, Grieving Mom of Dead Heidi. So she and Fleshbeard made a rickety peace with one another, their LED hearts flashing on and off, on and off, on and off forever. All was ready for the big day, they just needed to get one final dress rehearsal in. And what do you do after the rehearsal? Why, you go to the rehearsal dinner.

There they all were—Holly and Mommy and Heidi and Fleshy and Handbags and Sky, the Brother Montag who is fresh-faced and seemed nice, what a shame that he'll probably soon be ruined as well—at some white restaurant for white people, and then Holly exploded. Holly caught herself up in some netting or she found a nick in the fabric of space time and began scratching at it like a scab or suddenly the magic of the Four Winds all struck her at the same time and she became sort of broken god. Whatever happened, she was slurry and drunk-seeming and decided to throw a potato at her poor brother Sky but instead she hit Heidi's brand new handbag and stained and ruined it forever. So there was much shrieking and hooting and braying and whining and Holly burst into tears while her mother Belinda comforted her and looked at the camera and tried to cheat out and she embraced this creature who had once come out of her body and was now basically a tall, weeping near-empty ATM machine. At the table Handbags shook her head, because she'd wanted to be maid of honor, because she hadn't been late to the thrown-together bridal shower that involved huge expensive champagne bottles and the soul-wrecking claim made by Heidi that she wanted four boys and no girls because she always wanted to be the "queen of the throne" and didn't want some little girl threatening her primacy. (Belinda just looked at her strangely, hungry suddenly with a curling familiarity. I know that feeling, she thought bitterly. I am that feeling.) But regardless of poor performance, Holly will always be MOH. Sorry, Handsy.

Anyway. There's always shrieking and crying at rehearsal dinners, right? There's always potato throwing. And someone named Holly always accidentally summons the Handbag Stain demon and someone named Sky always sneaks out behind the restaurant and lights a cigarette and cries a little. That's just wedding tradition, I'm pretty sure, so it's nothing to worry about.

Then the wedding day came. All of our friends were there, from Jayde Scorpion to Justin Bobby, in their stupid mini dresses, doing their stupid preening walks, on the grandest set ever built for The Hills. This was the big wham-bang close of Act V when we find out who the killer is and maybe the young ingenues fall in love. Or get married. Or whatever. Everyone was wondering what happened to Lauren. Would she show up? No one knew.

Meanwhile Lauren had been lost and confused in that giddy sort of way. That feeling of pull and tide, that the world is expanding and yawning and your feet are itchy to explore it. Basically, it's just time to move on. Unsure what to do, she talked to her mentor Kelly Cutrone. Kelly didn't have much to say to her, other than that maybe she should just be a jellyfish for a while, float aimlessly, see what sticks. Good advice for people who have the money to be jellyfish. The rest of us have to be sharks, never stopping lest we disappear forever into the murky depths.

She and Lo were moving out of their Beverly Hills manse, and so they had one last cookout party, where everyone was sentimental and said sweet things, and Handbags made up with Brody, and Handbags urged Lauren to come to the wedding, and Handbags felt as though some great weight was both lifting and settling. Would this be the end of her run on the show? What else is there for the unwed spinster sister of reality's royal couple to do? But Lauren just smiled at her and seemed sad and complete. The world is ending, and isn't it wonderful.

And, yes, of course Lauren showed up to the wedding and took a private audience with Heidi and they sniffled at each other and as long as Heidi was happy, that's all that ever really mattered. Were her jewels and enormous pancake dress too much? Yes, of course. But also, who cares. And yes, of course, Kristin Cavallari showed up, wearing basically the same dress as Lauren. Everyone pretended to be surprised and MTV began the oh-so-subtle (not subtle at all) work of giving us visual cues that the guard was changing. Spencer and Heidi exchanged their sad little vows and then the wedding was over and everyone clapped and spilled outside where they threw flower petals and Heidi threw the bouquet and—oop!—Kristin Cavallari caught it and it was as if Adam DiVello looked up to the stars and said "No... there is another."

And Lauren. Lauren off in the background, got into her black town car and disappeared into the afternoon. The last we saw of her, the last anyone saw of that old gal, was a Mona Lisa smile in the back of a car. Was she happy that she'd been her own Ben Braddock and saved herself at this wedding? Was she unsure of all that awaited her? Who knows.

I like to think that now she'll disappear from the spotlight and begin living her own real life. Because, you know, there's a whole lot in real life that can be swishy and swoony. There's a whole lot to be discussed in bars and beauty salons, in walks on the beach, in cars speeding on highways. There's a whole lot in looks, in expressions, in little huffs that no one notices, in blinks and smiles, in kisses and hellos. There's a whole lot to do in this short spin, and I think it's done better when it's honest and off-camera. When it is, finally finally finally, the way it's always supposed to have been:

Unscripted. Unplanned. Unfilmed. Unsold.

And, most of all, unwritten.

"I've decided to give an exclusive to Star," Maher said when we called him. "That comes out Tuesday, so I can't talk until then. But yes, I was married to her. She did a lot of things that I think will put her life in danger. She was involved with the drug cartels in Cali and Medellín." That much is already clear from the promos Bravo has been running for Tuesday night's episode and Cop Without a Badge, the 1995 book about Maher's life as an informant.

Speaking of which, copies of the out-of-print title are currently going for upwards of $100 on Ebay, and Maher says negotiations are underway for a new paperback edition. And Maher's exclusive interview with Star comes out on Tuesday, the day of the next episode of Housewives. Everybody wins!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.A representative for Bravo did not immediately return phone calls and e-mails asking for a comment as to why a television network would gleefully (and profitably!) air details of the woman's life under the pretense of a "reality" show when those details may piss off some of the violent people Staub used to run with. On the other hand, it's likely that all those details have already been aired, by Maher himself, in Cop Without a Badge (we haven't seen a full copy yet).

Bravo's bio on Staub says "she prides herself on being one of the first women in New Jersey (and 14th person in the country) to have a Black American Express Card and her history of celebrity hook-ups is one for the record books." She was also the millionth woman in New Jersey to be a stripper and get involved in the cocaine business. Other details of Staub's past are set to be revealed on the show next week.

UPDATE: A Bravo rep got back to us with their stock response to the Staub controversy, the most delightfully absurd work of flack lunacy we've encountered in a long, long time: "Bravo does not comment on the personal lives of our talent." Eleven words, three lies: Guess what they are!

I don't even know where to start. So, using a fair and balanced deciding method, I'll just see who gets the short straw. And by "straw" I mean forehead, and by short I mean "has none."

Teresa. I'm talking about Teresa. May God Himself strike me down where I sit if I tell a lie. Teresa does not have a forehead. Teresa's forehead went out for a pack of cigarettes one summer day in 1986 and never came home. Teresa's forehead ran away with the circus while its Georgia onion farmer parents watched, all dusty and sad. Teresa's forehead went to Hamilton, maybe? Or was it Middlebury? Anyway, I don't know. They just lost touch. You know, time. Years. These things happen. Teresa and her forehead will probably see each other somewhere random—that's how those things work. On the street or something. Teresa's forehead. We all miss it.

I am being cruel about something a person can't help! Which is not nice. But if only Teresa didn't drag her daughter, Basilica, around everywhere making her be a pretty pretty model and actress, it would be a lot easier to be nice about her. Teresa and Maserati got in their enormous Jerseymobile and clunked it over into Manhattan so the littlest bitsywitsy could be yelled at by an old lady named Wilhelmina. No, this isn't another episode of Professor Fagtime's Fairy Hour for Lamegays Ugly Betty. Wilhelmina is a modeling agency that represents pretty people who'd like to stand in front of a camera and call it a career. Teresa is so jaundiced about her own daughter's only-sorta-cute-but-whooboy-fifteen's-gonna-be-awkward looks that she just barnstroms through and doesn't listen to the Wilhelmina ladies, except when they say "these photos are too pageant." More photos she can do. That she knows how to do. (She doesn't, incidentally, know how to pronounce her own last name. Her last name is Giudice. Which is pronounced "jew-DEE-chay", not "joodeese", T.)

Dina, the one who looks like an attractive and well-timed fart, went to a big bright furniture showroom with her gay brother, Paulette. Paulette simmers Fancy Feast on a hot plate for "celebrities" (one time he touched Marilu Henner, for serious) and calls himself a chef, and also Paulette wears a fancy apron and an artist's floppy hat and calls himself a designer. He does everything! So the two of them, from a big big family of eleven, seem close, which is nice. Dina, y'see, is a bigtime interior decorator, just like the Wakefields' mom, while Ned is off being a lawyer. Dina has eyes that are the color of the Pacific ocean and their brother Stephen plays basketball. Enid Rollins is probably a lesbo, Lois Waller is fat, and Bruce Patman may try to sex you in a pool in book number 3, Playing with Fire. So watch out, Dina! Anyway. Dina is designing a home for some huuuuge celebrity, so call in the gay cavalry and get some approval is what she did. It was a nice scene in which Dina didn't kill anyone, so that was good. Though, in the end, Regina Morrow died of a cocaines overdosage. Which was sad. Charlie Cashman cried at the funeral. Jerry "Crunch" McAllister did not.

Dina worries that her job is getting in the way of rearing her one child, which is a sad worry to have. I think you can do both. You can have it all! Just like Lila Fowler. That bitch is rich and pretty. I mean, c'mon. Who do I look like, Amy Sutton? I'm no fool. You can do both, Deenz.

Oh God, and then calamity struck. The poor childlike empress that is Jacqueline fell down a well and no one could get her out. "It's... It's OK," her watery, echoed cries came up. "I can get comfortable down here..." She was trying to be brave, but everyone knew that she was sad. Because being stuck down in a well, especially on your birthday!, is no fun at all. Poor Jacqueline. While she was down there, she had a conversation with her daughter, who looks like what would happen if Christian Siriano and Zak Orth had a gay buttbaby. The daughter, whose name I believe is Hippilotta Longstocking, doesn't ever go to school and when she does she's dumb, so she's failing Maths, Readings, and Histories. Which means she has to go to summry school, a fate worse than death, lemme tell you. When I was a boy, wearing shortpants and a jaunty newsman's cap, I had to go to two summers of summerschool not because I had to, but because my mother wanted me to. Yep! I took Latin! In the summer. And a typing class, which I oddly loved. Plus, we did plays and there was tennis. So I guess it wasn't so bad. But Hippilotta! You're going to poor Jersey private school summerschool! You're fucked like Tuck Everlasting! You're gonna be sitting on that boring old Ferris wheel alllll summer long. Sucks to be you! Guess you shouldn't have figured you were better than school because you're young and you've, um, got your looks (?). Life moves, girlie. And it ain't gonna wait while you get your shit together. Pretty soon you'll be 30 damn years old and working at the Lancome booth at the mall is going to start to feel like prison. Trust me, I know. One summer my mom made me work at the Lancome booth at the Chestnut Hill Filene's.

Speaking of dumb people and makeup, Caroline Manzo took time from her busy murdering people for opening their dumb stupid stoolie mouths schedule and yelled at her daughter about jobs. See, Dr. Giggles wants to do makeups, but wants to halfass it. And Carrie Manzo will not tolerate halfassery. If her beautiful daughter Dr. Giggles wants to do makeups, she's going to own her own Makeup Spa. A primping station for all the lawds and ladeez of Jersey to get in their finest before hobbling up to play courtiers at Versailles. "Let them eat funnel cake!", Caroline is often heard yelling on balconies, brandishing a pistol. And if there's one thing that spa owners have to do, it's do waxing. Because there are no young, impressionable Chinese ladies with families back home to feed who are willing to do that for you. There is no such thing in America as that. Dr. Giggles can't stand the idea of waxing, but if she attends the prestigious Madam Bovary's Refining Makeup School for Ladies (and Bartending Academy), as her mother wants her to, then she has to do waxing. Life is all about hard choices. Life is about doing things we don't want to do, because they'll help us in the long run. For some, that means joining the military to pay for a college degree. For others, that means working two or three jobs so the kids will have dinner on the table. And for some, for the bravest and most humble of all, it means putting hot wax on people's giners and then pulling it off.

That sound of olive oil sluicing through cheesecloth isn't being made by Wendy from accounting making one of her trademark healthy salads in the breakroom. (No, Wendy died in a car accident this morning. I'm sorry.) That sound is actually coming from last night, when Teresa the Pest took her daughter, Puttanesca, to a new photoshoot so her big modeling pictures wouldn't look pageanty so Wilhelmina won't get mad again. Basically it was a horrorshow in which America's youth all fell over dead and then Wendy drove by and while she was gawping at the heinousness she plowed into a tree and now she's dead and who will send out those cute Christmas e-cards this year? Will anyone??? I can't really talk more about the fashionshoot because at one point little Fiat struck a pose in a doorway that could only be described as "come-hither" and it makes me sad to think about it. So please let's just move on.

Ohhh holy Toledo. Gabaranzo had a party. Garbanzo had a party and everyone came. Why someone would voluntarily look like an insect is beyond me. But Garbanzo wants to look like an insect, features wise, and so she does. A bug. Bzzt bzzt bzzt. That's Garbanzo. Garbz had a party that was basically like being invited to the filming of a snuff movie. Everyone—even archnemesis Dina!—came over to sit in a circle and watch in abject terror as a crazed Marathon Men-esque doctor performed bizarre procedures on Garbanzo's face. Dina kept making bitchy quips about how she could never, ever get Botox. And, um, either her face naturally looks like a Fruit Roll-Up or her husband is sneakily injecting her face with horse disease while she sleeps. Because, um, dag. But whatever, Dina bitched anyway. "It just looks so weird," she remarked as Dr. Mengele lowered the circular saw onto Garbanzo's mug. The creepiest thing of all was that Garby's daughters were there, watching in curious horror as their mother had an Eyeball Dampening and a "face tuck," which involved six orderlies, a pneumatic nail gun, and a reading of the Magna Carta.

Later everyone heard a whimpering coming from under the porch and we all realized that poor Jacqueline had gotten herself stuck under there, the dear creature. "Someone get a broom or call the fire department," Caroline huffed, bending over and peering into the narrow space, barely able to make out a bit of Jacqueline's dirt-covered face. "Goddammit, who left the screen door open? I told you this would happen. It happens every time." After the fire trucks left and Caroline gave her a stiff hug and said "Yeah, let's get you some water, huh? It's scary under there, isn't it?", Jacqueline chirped the tale of Despereaux, her daughter Hippilotta. See Hippy just shouldn't get anything new because her grades and all and—oh holy cats, what is that driving up in the front driveway? A fucking white Jeep Grand Cherokee. For Hippy. See, papa Jacqui bought it because you're only an eclair-faced youngster but once in this ultimately-fatal merry-go-round ride, so why not have an unearned automobile. Just steer clear of where Wendy drives when she's been drinking. Poor Jacqueline got sad so she tried to run to Caroline's master bedroom and pee in the same corner of the walk-in closet that she always pees in when she's upset or startled by lightning, but Caroline grabbed her by the collar and swatted her behind and said "No! No! You do your business outside." Later Caroline felt bad so she let her have a piece of porkchop, having her eat it in the mud room. "It's good, huh?" she cooed, stroking happy Jacqui's glossy hair. "Yeah, it's good. And you're good."

It was mealtime then, and so most people grabbed their S.O.'s and trotted off to Varka, a fancy Greek restaurant, to have dinner with friends. Like something Donald Margulies would write when drunk and trying to make Naomi Iizuka laugh (they hang out, I'm sure of it), the conversation eventually devolved into Garbanzo being weird about her boyfriend, Bergdorf, who was sitting right next to her. And... OK. Bergdorf is supposed to be 26-years-old. And, my birthday is on Sunday and I'm turning 26 and I don't care that he's balding or what have you, but fool is NOT 26. Fool is like 34 on a good day. Everybody's all pretending that "ohhh, Garby got herself a younger man" and whatnot. And, yes, he's younger. Garby is a 68 years young, and Bergdorf is 41, so there is an age difference. But if one more person tries to tell me that that asshat is 26-years-old, well then I'm just going to kill myself the day before my birthday. Because I don't want to look like that come Sunday.

But the point is: Garbz is having trouble with the boytoy, mostly because he's not very nice to her. That he doesn't squish her underfoot like most people would do to a bug that shows up uninvited for dinner is, in my book, generous enough. But I guess the G wants more, but more she shall not shan't get, nay. So a day or two after dinner, in a fitful teary state, she called up Teresa and Jacqueline because she needed to talk about breakups. When to do 'em, how to do 'em, etsetrah. No one in the whole world understood why she felt it necessary to bring her kids to Jacqueline's gigantic house, but she did, so they were sent off to dig for old coins in the backyard while the grownups had a young adult conversation. Teresa tried to offer some advice, but Garbs just struck her down, because really she just wanted to hear herself talk, nothing else. Teresa took this as an opportunity to tell us, the people playing at home, that G's 48-year-old boyfriend Bergdorf is only in it for the BJ's. No, Garbanzo is not a member of an economy-sized foodclub. I'm talking about fellatio. No, not that restaurant in Ho-Ho-Kus (although that place is fabulous). I mean that David Crosby likes to go over to Garbanzo's house, unzip his trousers, sit in a chair in the foyer so the girls can see, and then Garbanzo walks in, puts on some Vitamin E lip balm, opens her leathery mouth, and... They all sing a song! That's what happens! La la la. That is it. Nothing else. Ohhh for the love of Trudy Styler, that's all that happens. I'm shivering right now. I'm so very, very cold.

So the world died and dried and shriveled up when Teresa said that thing that she said, but then it brightened a bit and bloomed a little when T went back to Wilhelmina and Old Lady Looks was nice and called the terrible new photos not pageanty and so everyone was thrilled. On the way home, Teresa said "we just have one more stop..." and she pulled up to a dilapidated building where a weathered sign hung in the window, saying "Private Investigator." Teresa sat down at the PI's desk and opened her purse. She smiled sadly, politely. She took a manila envelope out and slid it across the desk. "I need you to find this," she said softly. The PI opened the envelope and saw that it contained one photograph. He looked at it. It was a picture, taken some years ago, of a forehead. He leaned back. This case was gonna be a doozy of a dingle. "OK," he said finally. "I can do that. But it's gonna cost you." Teresa looked hopeful. "I'll pay cash."

At the end of the episode, everyone started to figure out that Garbanzo is a weirdo and a liar and that maybe there is something awful and wicked that she's keeping secret. Caroline, being the feistiest and craftiest and most-connected of the group, decided that she would get to the bottom of this thing. She might not like what she finds, but at least she'll know. Maybe Garbs is a Colombian drug cartel's moll. Maybe she's an informant. Maybe she's just emerged from her pupal state and we should all cut her a little slack. Maybes upon maybes! If wishes were maybes, we'd all be at Rocky Point Park. But wishes aren't maybes. Maybes are other things. They're small and flat and brown. You could skip a maybe across a lake forever.

For now we'll just have to wait, while the sun curls around the Jersey pines and our hearts fill with the particular knowledge that— Hey. Hey! Hold on a sec, it's that damn Jacqueline. Hey! Get outta there. That is my garden and I will not tolerate. Hey! Hey! I swear to God, hold on I have to go over there. Hey! Stop that! Shoo! Hon, call Mr. Laurita and tell him Jacqui's back. Shit, c'mon, get outta there! Goddammit. Goddamn Jacqui.. Hey! Hey you! Why don't you cut that out...