Here’s the set-up of the scene:<\/p>\n
Time: Last night
\nWhere: My friend Allison’s apartment<\/p>\n
Curtain rises: Allison and Sheila watch television, lying in Allison’s bed, as Charlie the cat stalks about, his body flat, his eyes wide-open and terrifying.<\/p>\n
Allison and Sheila watch, in succession: “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance” (reality TV show #1) and then “Average Joe: Hawaii” (reality TV show #2).<\/p>\n
As regular readers of this blog know, Sheila has no television.<\/p>\n
So Sheila got completely sucked into the Roman coliseum of reality television.<\/p>\n
The first show, in particular, HORRIFIED the innocent eyes of Sheila, who had spent the entire day immersed in Presidential quotations and the colossal minds of our Founding Fathers.<\/p>\n
The show’s “plot” is out of a totalitarian society where the family unit becomes a property of the State. This girl has to convince her poor unsuspecting parents and siblings that she is actually going to marry this “big fat obnoxious guy”, who is actually an actor, hired to be as obnoxious as possible, hired to act like he is her fiance – and if she convinces all of them that this is not just an act and the real thing – she gets a million dollars.<\/p>\n
You literally could not pay Sheila enough money to trick her mother like that – to make her mother weep on national television – just so Sheila could pocket a million bucks.<\/p>\n
Sheila would do a lot of things for a million dollars – but she would never <\/i>betray her family, and set them up to look like dipshits for all the world to see. She would never ever be able to tolerate looking at her parents’ baffled hurt faces without screaming out immediately, “It’s all an act! It’s all an act!”<\/p>\n
It’s soulless. It’s awful. It’s disgusting.<\/p>\n
And yet …<\/p>\n
and yet …<\/p>\n
Sheila couldn’t look away.<\/p>\n
At one point, she exclaimed, in a rage, “This is HORRIBLE<\/b>!” Long pause. Then: “I kind of never want it to end, though.”<\/p>\n
Allison HOWLED.<\/p>\n
Sheila participated in the trend. Sheila felt dirty afterwards.<\/p>\n
And so, of course, Sheila invited herself over to Allison’s next Monday, for the season finale. So that Sheila can feel more dirty, and more ashamed, and more angry, and more disgusted …<\/p>\n
It’s sick, I tell ya, sick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s the set-up of the scene: Time: Last night Where: My friend Allison’s apartment Curtain rises: Allison and Sheila watch television, lying in Allison’s bed, as Charlie the cat stalks about, his body flat, his eyes wide-open and terrifying. Allison … Continue reading