Last night, Bravo once again broadcast a world it calls "Miami." A place where becoming a "fashion designer" is as easy as hiring a kid fresh out of design school to create a line for you. A place where a manipulative, lying, borderline sociopathic lady is worth holding on to. A place where up is down, and all reason is lost. A place that -- even though I live and work no more than a 15-minute drive (plus 10 for parking; sorry, I don't valet) from where this all was shot -- I don't really recognize.
I'll save the ongoing ballad of George and Lina for later, so let's pick a random cast member out of a hat to kick this off. Oh, look, Katrina!
Oh, Kat-Kat. Michael and Maria invite her out for a night of clubbing and decide they need to bring out Katrina's "inner whore," which isn't hard to find considering she's wearing a leather miniskirt and a bra. So off they go to what I think is Element Ultralounge. That's the name being projected on the walls, anyway (classy). Wait, isn't that...gasp ... in Brickell? So the "hottest social circle" in South Beach goes clubbing in some downtown place that's not even open anymore. Was Karu & Y busy that night?
Anyway, Mike and Maria try to sacrifice some unsuspecting guy to Katrina's inner whore. Michael says to him he wants him to meet his "girlfriend," which the guy takes literally. I guess he was down with swinging. Unfortunately, his hopes are dashed when he finds out Michael is also Katrina's "girlfriend," and Katrina tells him she's married. Which technically she is, even though they're getting divorced. She's been with the same guy for 16 years, in case you've missed that line, even though she pulls it out twice every episode.
Michael, meanwhile, finally gets some action. He meets up with a guy named Diego at Sushi Samba, because it's one of the five places on South Beach that seemingly agreed to be involved with this wonderful show. It goes well, I'm assuming, because it ends with two 30-something men tickling each other in public, but it's only a temporary happiness.
When Bravo sent us the press material for the season, the blurb for Episode 5 said the burgeoning relationship would be undone by Facebook pictures. So these many, many weeks I've been eagerly wondering what kind of horrible Facebook pictures they could be.
You might want to continue reading this after you've had your lunch, and get all children out of the room.
You see, Michael finds pictures of Diego, oh God the horror, wearing a tank top at a cheesy gay bar! I'm surprised they were even allowed to show that on television.
Michael, as you can tell, doesn't simply connect with the shallowness of the mainstream gay world. He exists on a much higher, much more refined cultural plane of starring in reality TV and writing for tabloids. He has no need for these muscle shirts and crappy Madonna remixes and the men who love them.
He has seen Diego's inner whore, and it is not a pretty thing.
Hardy and his girlfriend Princess Lucky Charms host a fundraiser for Operation Smile at Set, which was nice and I really can't make fun of. So instead, I'd just like to direct a few words at Operation Smile.
I don't know how many of you watch Miami Social's lead-in program, NYC Prep (well, I really don't know how many of you watch Miami Social), but that delightful little program just ended not an hour beforehand with a giant fashion show all in the name of Operation Smile. In fact, the majority of the time I hear about Operation Smile is on reality TV. Now, what they do is great and all (and I'd totally be happy to donate the proceeds I get from this post, or $10, whichever is more), but Operation Smile is starting to come of as a bigger reality whore than Kim Kardashian and Devorah Rose combined.
And really, charities shouldn't flaunt their inner whore.
Moving on to Ariel, who has decided to make his dream of becoming a fashion designer a reality by hiring some girl to design a line in his name. He generously loans his "vision" to his young ward by chewing it up and spitting it in her mouth like a mama bird to a baby bird.
So Ariel enlists Katrina to host his first fashion show and decks her out in a rather fetching Hefty bag adorned with zippers and bat wings. I guess some of these things were cute; others were not. Still more was perfect attire in which to dress your inner whore. But as I've been told by the friends and admirers of another Bravo reality "star," I really have no business judging fashion. I wear things from the Gap clearance rack. Though the runway did open with Ariel's magnificent "Wearable Towel," which unfortunately has had precious little screen time so far.
Oh, so here we are again, back to the wonderful little love fest of George and Lina. George is still upset about that abortion text message he received last week, but despite that, he decides to stick with Lina because she's "like a drug," or because he thinks only with his penis, or because the producers wanted him to stick it out a little longer to complete the season-wide story arch. They fight, they fuck, they fight some more, break up, fuck a little more, and fight.
That's the nice thing about George and Lina, though. They've made no attempt to hide their inner whores.
Enter Sorah! Finally she has an interesting story line. See, technically when George and Sorah got divorced, she kept ownership of the condo George lives in, and Lina keeps destroying said apartment in fits of rage, so Sorah wants to cut ties with George and sell the thing. George says, "No, no, you are not going to do any such thing."
OK, I guess the story line wasn't that interesting after all.
Anyway, we have only one more week of this thing!
