"Amazing Race" recap: I got GPS, OK?

??????????? OK, so maybe it wasn’t on the level of Frances Perkins (first woman on the U.S. Cabinet) or Sandra Day O’Connor (first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court) or Sally Ride (first American woman in space).? But in the corrupt precincts of reality TV, doesn’t being the first all-female team to win “Amazing Race” count for something?? Could even the most arrant male chauvinist have quelled his kvell as he watched Nat and Kat racing toward Phil Keoghan’s raised eyebrow and the $1-million payoff??

????????????Ladies, you did it.? You struck a blow for your gender and—dare I say it?—for collegiality.? Chad and Thomas and Nick fumed at their women, Claire whined at Brook, Kevin let us know time and again what a burden his father was.? With the exception of Jesus-take-the-wheel Mallory and her dad, you were the only two contestants who, on the evidence of edited footage, never turned on each other, whether through word, deed or eye roll.?

????????????You are surgeons, of course, which is why Phil made a point of mentioning your “surgical precision,” but you proved that even the dumbest pun can harbor a grain of truth.? You conquered the bungee jump at Long Beach (despite Nat’s well-documented fear of heights), you clambered straight into the nearest helicopter (ignoring the pervading Valkyrie chords on the soundtrack) and you sawed masterfully through the set of clues that began “I am Sancho Panza’s master” (ignoring a nation’s worth of underemployed lit majors screaming, “Don Quixote!”).? Even the task of chronologically arranging the faces of the?show's pit-stop greeters barely slowed you down.? You just whipped out your notes—who knew contestants kept notes?—and threw together your tableau and careered toward the finish line.? It was left to the show’s producers to gin up suspense by cutting ominously to the Sunset Boulevard street sign, as though any minute Norma Desmond might body-block your cab, and showing the two of you—in L.A., of all places—getting stuck in traffic.

????????????Nice guys don’t always finish first on “Amazing Race,” but character is almost always destiny.? Exhibit A: that proud Notre Dame alumnus Thomas, who, on the flight from Seoul (“a world capital of extreme significance,” says?Phil) announced he was looking?forward to “breaking out his Spanish skills” in California.? Little suspecting that, en el momento crítico, he would be reduced to screaming at his cabbie: “Can I please use your phone, sir?? I’m begging you to use your phone!? Sir, do you know what the Internet is?”? To all of these entreaties the cabbie had pretty much one reply: “I got GPS, OK?”? Which, for someone of my generation, has the virtue of recalling Gilda Radner’s implacable cleaning lady: “I clean up, OK?”

??????????? But where Thomas really came a-cropper was in assuming that the show’s climactic test would be a test of physical prowess.? When, in fact, it was a test of … decorating.? To wit, festooning three sections of the Rose Bowl float.? Heaven help you if your roses weren’t damp.? And lest you think the female fix was in, note that Nat approached the whole job as if she were removing fibroids.? The only one who embraced it—and were we in any way surprised?—was former beauty-queen Brook.? “I feel right at home in the float brigade,” she proclaimed.? “These are my people.”

??????????? Even more her people: game-show fossil Bob Eubanks, looking independent-living-y in a lemon-curd sweater.? I last saw him more than 20 years ago in Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me,” telling a joke that managed to be both homophobic and anti-Semitic.? This did not deter the home-shopping priestesses, who glommed on to him like bobby-soxers: “You’re, like, our idol!”? “Good,” he answered coolly.? “You’re mine, too.”? And if they ever stopped to wonder how that could be, their epiphany has been lost to posterity. ?

????????????Anyway, when it comes to Brook and Claire (who sported leopard pants for the final leg and who somehow managed to squeeze a season’s worth of matching outfits into two backpacks) the past doesn’t seem to register with particular force.? They are creatures of the future.? Small wonder, then, that their faces should crop up in the preview for next season, which turns out to be not a brand-new installment but a mosh-pit of previous also-rans.? The singing Princetonians!? Cowboy brothers Jet and Cord!? Boston police menschen Michael and Louie!? Who will win??

????????????For me, the premise will fly only if, as in all successful dinner parties, partners are divided.? Imagine Michael quickening to the touch of Maria the Poker Queen.? Imagine Mallory driving a wedge through Kynt and Vyxin.? And now please imagine Nick the Swine left to the mercies of Flight Time and Big Easy.

??????????? See you in February, Race-ers.?

-- Louis Bayard

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"Amazing Race" recap: Enter the draggin'

One mustn’t look to reality-show competitions to right the wrongs of an inherently amoral universe.? But even as I acknowledge this, a question surges up from the very depths of my soul:? Why?

Why, “Amazing Race” producers, didn’t you get rid of Nick the Swine when you had the chance?? Was it too much to ask that he be sent back to the sty that spawned him?? Did you really have to grant him a reprieve for the second freakin’ time?? Were you afraid that Thomas, with his healthy sense of competition and his unhealthy attachment to Notre Dame, wouldn’t rise to quite the same level of maleficence?

Oh, yes, producers, I hear your legalistic nattering: “Non-elimination rounds are determined in advance of the competition.? We have no say over who will benefit.? We do not intentionally privilege any competitor over anyone else.”? Et cetera post habeas corpus facto, and guess what, guys?? I ain’t buying it.? I think you watched the early rushes of Nick in Hong Kong, saw him scorching every last article of adjacent humanity, and decided that, divine justice notwithstanding, there was no way you could kick this creep to the curb.

Not when he’s screaming at his asthmatic girlfriend Vicki for making him miss the ferry.? (“I’m sick of your being sorry. ... I’m not stopping next time.? You better step it up.? Quit crying!”)? Not when he’s oscillating so dependably between ugly one-upmanship and prostrations of self-pity.? (“This is ridiculous.? God, I just want to choke somebody. ... I just want to quit.? I’m tired. ... I haven’t got any food today, I haven’t got any sleep in the last two days...”)? Oh, I get it, producers.? It’s been a long time since you’ve had a villain quite so un-Machiavellian, so nasty and ineffectual in the same breath.? Even the normally enabling Vicki was moved to say: “You didn’t deal with anything today good.”

What Vicki and the producers may have failed to realize is that Nick wants to be kicked off this show every bit as much as we want him to be.? “Get me outta this place,” he moaned.? “It’s 4 in the morning.? Get me outta here.? Can’t wait to be home.”? Yes, dreams of 12-hour sleep cycles and uninterrupted bong hits teem inside that doo-ragged head, and my suspicion is that Nick will put his six-hour delay and his speed bump to strategic use in the next episode and get the release he so devoutly wants.

Because, as he himself pointed out with uncharacteristic wisdom: “You can’t keep throwing up all night.? You have to draw the line somewhere.”? He was referring to the latest gustatory ordeal: a massive Chinese buffet -- “both lavish and sumptuous,” promised Host Phil -- that harbored five cunningly disguised items of faux food.? Pick the wrong one, and you had to eat it.? My dim-sum-loving son was salivating at the prospect, but the prospect of binge-eating in front of raucous Hong Kong diners and karaoke singers wasn’t quite so pleasing to the American girlz, and Claire’s face quickly assumed the pallor associated with raw tuna.? “She’s supposed to be on a diet for her wedding,” noted pal Brook.? Never fear.? Involuntary bulimia has now ensured that Claire will fit into (I’m imagining here) that three-quarter-sleeve Alencon lace gown with the silk satin waist sash.? And if she doesn’t, well, she need only recall the advice of Brook, home shopping priestess and cultural historian: “Just keep puking.? That’s what they did in Renaissance times."

And with that, I believe, the whole mystery behind Mona Lisa’s smile has been cleared up.? Puke, puke, me hardies!? But do keep a vomit bag handy.? You don’t want to walk that long Trail of Shame to the nearest bathroom.? Which brings up another point: Wasn’t Episode 10 a tad sadistic, even by “Race” norms?? Jill and Thomas’s needle-in-a-haystack tram-ride quest, with the camera gloatingly picking out the three signs that no one in a million years would have seen?? The lantern-lit, parakeet-laden sampan crawl through the Hong Kong harbor, with contestants squinting out registration numbers in blackest night?? It all had the feel of a not very edifying dream, presided over by the statue of Bruce Lee.

-- Louis Bayard

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'Amazing Race' recap: Stay calm, and everything will be good

??????????? Greetings, “Race”-ers!? So sorry I couldn’t be here last week.? I was on a quasi-sorta-amazing race of my own across Paris, the highlights of which included presenting a French literary award — in French — to an Argentinian writer who owns a Madrid bar called Le Bukowski and who showed up for the occasion in a doo rag.? And ignored my outstretched hand.? And smelled like feet.? French TV being what it is, I was unable to check in last Sunday to watch: our contestants, in a profound confusion of lore, carrying frankincense to Ali Baba (no myrrh?); Stephanie consenting to a long life of manipulation and emotional chaos with Chad; and Mallory being “called home,” though not in the way this teary, persistently Christ-invoking gal might interpret the term.

??????????? Mallory, bless her, remained convinced to the bitter end that the Virgin Mary was closely following the proceedings, and if that’s the case, let’s hope Our Blessed Mother hasn’t abandoned the other women in the hunt.? Host Phil keeps reminding us that no team composed entirely of X chromosomes has ever won this thing — a failure rate that becomes all the more remarkable when you see how fiercely women have been kicking butt all season.? Episode 9, for example, presented us with the grrl power of Brook, lofting edifices of brick atop her unsullied blond head; Vicki the Tattooed Lady, hauling 30 containers of fecal-smelling “snacks” across the brown-green, trash-laden waters of Dakha harbor with her characteristic lack of self-pity; and Jill, slapping together a rickshaw bike faster than you can say “Phil Keoghan’s mysteriously elusive accent.”?

????????????Now a churl might note that Jill, by her own description, drew from an arsenal of “nuts and bullets” in building said rickshaw and that she wasn’t exactly sure what Thomas meant when he told her to keep her extremities inside the cab.? And let’s be honest, Claire doesn’t seem to be reading from the same feminist manifesto as the others.? “Brook, wait!” she moaned.? “I’m not going to be a very good teammate if I’m passed out…. I have been digging deep…. I don’t run marathons like you.”? For the first time, cracks have materialized in the stucco of the home-shopping priestesses’ bravado.? We can blame it on the pressure of competition, or we can attribute it to the G-forces of Brook’s competitive zeal, which draws equally from Eros, Thanatos and Los Alamos.?

???????????? Nevertheless, as any longtime “Race” viewer knows, the greatest obstacle/speed bump/detour faced by any woman on the show is not heat or cold or cramps or cholera but the fragility of the male ego, which reduces chesty specimens like Chad to standing in the middle of a thronged street and bellowing, “Where’s Lalbagh Fort?”? Safe, I guess, in the assumption that the sheer weight of his need will snap an entire nation to attention.?

????????????In the face of such deeply hard-wired frailty, two management strategies have emerged.? First, pediatric praise, as ladled on by Vicki: “Good job, babe…. Just stay calm, and everything will be good…. Yay, I’m so proud of you.”? Second, the rather tougher love practiced by Stephanie — “Shut the hell up” — which can be ameliorated, as necessary, with more positive assurances: “I love you, Chad.”? Theirs will be a marriage, and a divorce, for the ages.?

???????????? For the time being, let us draw pleasure from Chad, after declaring he didn’t want to “lose to a pair of girls,” being tossed from the competition by a pair of ... doctors.? Without a backward glance or a trace of regret, Kat and Nat sent the newly engaged pair into U-turn limbo, thereby ceding the moral high ground to Vicki, who forbore to turn the same mean trick and who, upon reaching a best-ever second place, crowed: “So being nice does pay off!” To which her swinish consort, Nick, replied: “Yeah.”? And if you think Nick meant yeah, I have a Bangladeshi bottled-water start-up you might be interested in.? And a sugar cane juice franchise, just itching to go global.?

— Louis Bayard

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The Sapphire Diamond Ring Has An Amazing Magnificence

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"The Amazing Race" recap: This is cow poop!

??????????? If we’re to be honest, the most daunting and terrifying challenge on “The Amazing Race” is undertaken not by any of the show’s contestants but by the show’s editors.? Those squinting, unseen wretches who have to sift through hundreds of hours of raw footage and then shape it all into a coherent melodrama, complete with story arcs and heroes and villains and, of course, those breathless climactic dashes, so artfully cross-cut that teams an hour apart look as though they’re hip to hip, clawing and elbowing and gouging to the finish.?

??????????? By now it’s clear that the job of assembling “The Amazing Race” is not for sissies.? And so I couldn’t help but welcome that meta-moment in Episode 6 when the contestants were set to work in St. Petersburg’s Lenfilm Studio (and if any of them knew who “Len” was, they weren’t telling) sifting through a mountain of celluloid to find images that would match the film they were watching.? The film, appropriately, was “October,” directed by that master of montage, Sergei Eisenstein.? I swear I could almost hear the “Amazing Race” producers snarling: “You think competing in this show is tough?? Try putting it together.”?

??????????? Still, that particular challenge was nothing next to the task of isolating three classical ditties amidst a roomful of clanging Russian pianists.? Somewhere, I think, John Cage was smiling.? One by one, our plucky Americans bent their ears to the pianos, like Indians listening for the next train, and each time, they came away more befuddled?than before.? “It’s Mussorgsky.? It’s Tchaikovsky.? Never mind, let’s go see about Len and his film.”

??????????? All in all, this was an unusually high level of sophistication for “The Amazing Race,” so we can’t blame the producers for leavening things with transvestitism and dung jokes.? To wit, a “drag race,” in which the women—and, wait for it, the men, too—don peasant dresses and plant a row of 50 potatoes with the help of—God, it’s killing me—manure.? “My Lord have mercy!” cried Mallory.? “This is cow poop!”? The Kentucky beauty queen has never been one to sidestep ugly truths, but she seemed a bit foggy as to why two Russian geezers would want her to come inside “for a little vodka.”? Eisenstein would have played the scene for all it was worth, but Mallory didn’t have time for that.? “Where is Duck’s End?” she wailed up and down the alleys of Alexandrovskaya.? Where indeed, Mallory?? Where indeed?

????????????If only she could have followed the example of home-shopping priestess Brook, who, more and more, seems to come with her own soundtrack. “I’m a babushka!? That’s some stinky manure!? Augghh, I just stepped in poo!”? It raises the question of whether she actually goes through life like this.? “Wow, that’s some granola!? Here I am, walking out the door!? Yikes, the bus is here!”?

???????????After placing a decisive last—and no amount of editing could make that outcome suspenseful—Nick the Swine and Vicki the Tattooed Lady won a reprieve, which, although it constitutes an offense against goodness, does leave the Alpha Male Futility Sprint wide open.? Last week, I thought Thomas had edged in front by continuing to lord his Notre Dame education over his cosmetician girlfriend.? But this time, the baton was seized by pink-cheeked Chad the Jock for badgering Stephanie to the brink of despair during their Name that Tune ordeal.? In the post-mortem interview, Chad confessed how difficult it was “sitting back and letting someone take the lead, especially my girlfriend.? I’m going to try very hard to remember these lessons.”? “Don’t worry,” cut in Stephanie, her voice as cold as a St. Petersburg winter.? “I’ll make sure you do.”? As Mallory would say: Jesus, please help us.

?-- Louis Bayard

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"The Amazing race" Let's recap: it tastes like money

"Two large COD and a chainsaw.? If that sounds like a life of Monty Python, then welcome in episode 5, somewhat surreal world which, among other oddities, bodies swinging on a fjord fish dragged a hill, a medieval knight right of "The seventh seal" and for good measure, a decapitated farm animal.

? This last element form a sort of Passover of doctor Kat, whose attempts to eat head sheep (as part of what the land of the midnight sun loves call "a traditional ritual of Christmas") ran against three serious obstacles.? (1) Kat has not eaten meat to 22 years.? (2) Meals was fixing it all the time.? (3) The ghost of Bernard Herrmann was Starter until the music that accompanies it to "Psycho" - like levels of distress.? But Kat remained cool.? "Crisp romaine lettuce," she whispered these into a trance of denial.? "Squid." Cucumbers. "Until finally she was struck on the winning formula:" it tastes like money. "??

? Or at least victory.Gustatory valor, Kat and colleague doc Nat arch to the finish line where probably some vomit network waiting just outside écran.Pas less fortunate were beach-volley, Amazon that have been eliminated, as I began to tell each other.??While it is undeniably beautiful, Katie and Rachel remained stubbornly not developed characters, and in the final output, they were reduced to utter Lombardi-ISMS like "we will lose" and "is not"Amazing Friend,"it's"Amazing Race,""that has served to highlight just how surprisingly far behind were.""?

? You will find, probably in any candidate at the briefing, but "The Amazing Race" is actually two races: one for deer, one for the hearts and minds.? And it is the latter which is most certainly heating competition.? Nutcracker mouth and fractured English grew more winner with each passing week.? (After being informed that one of the challenges would require "strength, endurance and intestines", he cackled proudly: "I have none!" not)? Brook, with its verve and resourcefulness, accomplished the extraordinary me to revise my feelings on the Home Shopping network feat.? I have not yet properly when it invoked relations dead lifting Claire as rope of doom. "Pray to your grandmother!" shouted Brook. "It will get you by this biais.Imaginez your grandmother and how strong that it was."Would you encourage the whole path.? "Personally, I think Grandma would say:" why the hell are you to hundreds of feet in a Norwegian fjord. "", but the only thing that my grandmother never won sale was his martini.

And now, please, a moment of celebration for Vicki the Tattooed Lady, who is slowly exposing friend Nick bluster bag it.Despite "competitive dirt bikes riding" since he was 12, Nick left breath in the wake of Vicki as she pedaled into the next indice.Et was just after she herself had hoisted up and down a line of abseiling with nary a vinegar or grimace.Comme Vicki itself explained: "I am the one who has the guts in this relation.témoigner, s?ur.Et if you finish ever in female penitentiary – as sometimes seems possible - the it cell block H is your own decision."

-Louis Bayard

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