George is in drag again. This is his third or fourth time at it. It's possible that his wife, Teresa, who grimly organized the greater Rockford, Ill., area in a phone-in campaign against the late and unlamented Brittany, has a girlyman on her hands.
How you going to keep him down on the farm, after he's discovered Victoria's Secret?
This time Jamie puts on the eye shadow and lipstick. She wraps a sheet around him as a dress. Then she makes him put on a weird pink bra. He looks like a crazed, drunk dowager.
It's the Saturday wrap-up show. The first half hour is supposed to be recap and the second new material, but the "Big Brother" producers are increasingly mixing the two together, which is irritating.
There's a charming sequence near the beginning, in which Eddie talks about how some people respond uncomfortably to his having only one leg. (The other was amputated because of cancer when he was a boy.) In a supermarket, say, parents will pull their kids away when they see him coming. "I'm like, 'Hey, man, I'm not going to step on your kid,'" he says.
We see Brittany, pre banishment, in bed with Josh, with Eddie on another bed. Is there anything more boring than a potty-mouthed virgin droning on endlessly about sex in front of two boys? "What if I'm not good at it?" she frets.
We think Jane Austen would not have liked Brittany.
We're reminded again how Brittany had an unceasing belief that her utterly conventional thoughts were shockingly unconventional.
So the next scene, a collage of people mourning her -- Eddie holding Jamie's hand, George patting Josh's shoulder, everyone looking stricken -- cracks us up.
The group fails miserably at its weekly challenge, doing a big jigsaw puzzle. No one in the house was into it, apparently. They wagered half their weekly food budget.
Thank god it wasn't Jumble, that scrambled word game. The six would be starving.
Outside, Jamie tells the group she might be in trouble with her pageant. (She's Miss Washington for some minor pageant -- not Miss America.) She's living in a house with men and there are cameras in every room including the bathroom and shower. "That's the big one," she says. "Anytime you're a title holder you're a role model."
She speculates she's had her title taken away and that the runner-up is currently reigning.
Jamie delivers one of her classic catty backhanded compliments: "Which in all honesty? My first runner-up competed every year from 18 to 26; she's way too competitive for her own good, but there's big part of me that would be happy for her 'cause she'll never have that chance again."
Whenever Jamie says she's happy for someone, watch out.
The group speculates that perhaps the mock beauty pageant they were told to perform the previous week had something to do with Jamie. "Maybe my title did get taken away and it's in the news that much and that's why they did it," Jamie says.
The residents don't know that the words "Big Brother" and "in the news" are at this point mutually exclusive.
George, in drag, wakes Josh up -- he's sleeping on the couch -- and everyone laughs gaily at Josh's surprise.
Eddie pokes his fingers at George's bra-covered nipples.
George and Cassadra have a heart-to-heart about college. He doesn't think his family has enough money to send his daughter to the state university for four years.
George reflects that being in the house "really makes a guy start thing about many different things. You really start thinking about what you maybe should have done."
Josh is still trying to cultivate his image as a strong silent guy who spends a lot of time alone.
He doesn't ever say what he does when he's alone, though. All he does on "Big Brother" is sleep and try to horndog the girls.
Anyway, he tried the line last night with Eddie, but Eddie wasn't buying what he was selling.
Tonight he tries Jamie. The routine is reminiscent of a Woody Allen shtick in "Play It Again, Sam."
"You know what my biggest fear is about leaving here? It's 'cause I don't want to spend that much time alone any more."
He stares at Jamie intently, sorrow in his eyes.
We remember a scene of Josh from the first episode, bragging that he was bringing a big box of condoms along on the show.
"You dont have to, though, do you?" Jamie asks blandly. "Can't you make time?"
"I didn't have time before, and I hate that," Josh says. "It drives me nuts. Like, I do have to spend that much time alone. It drives me crazy. [In the 'Big Brother' house] there's people in there and it's nice. I love it."
You'll be out in a month, Jamie points out. "You're going to have millions of women knocking on your door after this show."
Hahahahaha.
"I want someone who understands me," Josh says. "That's it. Ninety-eight percent of the battle's won."
We don't think Jamie understands him.
There follows a muddled sequence: It's a game of some sort that involves the house hamsters guessing whether certain tales are true or false about each other: Whether Josh was once chased by a bull, or George once played his opposing high school's marching band.
The weirdest is whether Jamie had ever been kissed by Donald Trump. Things are thrown into confusion because, just as Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton had odd ideas about what "having sex" means, Jamie insists it wasn't a real kiss at all -- it was an air kiss, or a "blow kiss" as she puts it.
We think the "Big Brother" producers weren't being this technical about the question. But the house launches into an epistomological inquiry about what a kiss is.
The most interesting thing is that Josh comes in, saying that Big Brother had said the scoring was wrong. There are hoots, 'cause Josh was the scorer.
"No, either way I win," he says flatly. He's wrong, of course. Jamie did. But the ensuing explanation is so uninteresting that we stop paying attention.
(B.W.)
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