DanThat'sCool!

 

 

No. For the millionth time, it’s not “Team Edward or Jacob.” It’s “Team Jacquie.”  Were you even listening to me?

 

 

 

 

And I didn’t text anything bad. Just a sideways kitty face and some LOLs, so back that thing up outta my face.

 

 

 

 

You know that every time Nora hears a cell phone beep she thinks it’s an Alien Mothership. You’re just being mean.

 

 

 

 

Seriously. Do we have enough pink sequins left to spell out “Team Shut The F*** Up, Bitch?”

 

 

 

 

I find that if you Biff ‘em in the Gob with a rolling pin, they shut up and go back to their crafting. It’s a Goombalicious good thing.

 

 

Hey, Baby.

Who’s yer Daddy?

Trust me on this one.  Those are words that you never want to hear spoken by any male cast member from The Jersey Shore, or by anyone employed at a maximum security penitentiary.  Both will send you back home feeling kind of dirty and bummed out.

This week Mob Wives: Chicago was all about Family Issues.

Daddy Issues.  Mommy Issues.  Brothers & Sisters who dump dead bodies off at a cemetery Issues.  The usual.

And the list went on and on.  Some of the issues were seriously raw and touching.

Some…not so much.  But regardless of the level of sensitivity, they were all handled in perfect ChiTown style.

First off, we headed to the local Bead & Sequin Emporium for something shiny.

As you will recall, Leah‘s Mom Jacquie had been diagnosed with cancer and just recently begun treatment.  So sad for anyone…no jokes allowed in this paragraph.  The girls were all going to participate in a Walk to raise awareness, so Leah and Christina were scooping up sparkly stuff to BeDazzle their pink team tee shirts.  Some of the most touching moments in any of those Walks are always the homemade signs and tee shirts proudly remembering both those who survived and those who lost their fight, so I was really hoping they would max out that credit card on Bling.

We love Jacquie and her sassy Golden Girls attitude.  If the rigatoni sauce ain’t spicy enough, just have Mom stick her finger in the pot and you won’t be able to feel your tongue in the morning.

And you don’t need to waste your time on a DNA test to prove she is Leah’s Mom, either.  All Jacquie has to do is open her mouth and you have proof that would probably hold up in any court.  So if anyone deserves a tee shirt that can be seen from Space, it’s Jacquie.  You go, girl.

Christina was going to host the Crafting Night at her house, so she and Leah needed to make sure there were plenty of supplies on hand, knowing full well that if all the girls were going to get together under one roof it was inevitable that at least one bowl of Swarovski crystals would get hurled at someone’s head, and those things are impossible to find in the carpet.

Leah had also decided to invite Nora to participate in the Walk and zazzle up her own tee shirt, more likely out of pity than with the outside chance that she would somehow suddenly become the life of the party.  Ever since Renee unleashed all that ‘Roid Rage Barbie on Nora’s face a few weeks back, Leah had been straddling the fence on the whole issue.  She doesn’t support most of Nora’s decisions, or even support Nora opening her mouth if at possible, but she also doesn’t support half of Chicago ganging up on a woman-child who still thinks hair extensions come from unicorn tails.

While Leah and Christina stocked up on enough epoxy and cubic zirconium to easily enter Nora into any Toddlers & Tiaras Glitz Pageant (…And how amazing would that episode be?  Ladies and Gentlemen–Noraaaaaaaaah.  She likes spinning in circles and seeing own her reflection in soup spoons… ) there was a different kind of family drama brewing down the road.

Renee’s daughter Giana was getting ready to go visit her incarcerated Dad and it was giving her some anxiety.  And we all know that nothing takes the edge off a stressful day like really soaping up your puppy.

(Whoa.  I know what you probably thought I just said since you were skimming this post.  Slow down and read the thing.  You might like it, and not jump to such racy conclusions.)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  I just don’t get these Take Your Dog To The DogWash Store places.  We’ve all seen Renee’s house.  She has a sink.  And a tub, I assume, to wash off all that lavender eye makeup and body bronzer.  The dog is a whole 5 pounds if that…even a quick toilet dunk would hose him off.  Granted, as we learned later on in the episode he can dump on a dining room floor like a St. Bernard that’s been holding it in all week, but he’s pretty much a big purse puppy.

But whatever.  Giana took dirty tiny Blue to the DogWash Store, accompanied by that kid Marco who we all assume by now is her token Whacky Sidekick, styling in his skinny jeans and Club Kid haircut.  Marco is nice enough, but he’s the one who always gets really pink cheeks when he’s flustered or faced with awkward situations.

So you can imagine what the combination of Giana’s impending prison visit did to his complexion when compounded by having to soap up some Blue nibblies.

(I couldn’t say it.  I was dying to say it, but it was just too easy.  You fill in the blank….Blue ____s …and let the hilarity ensue.)

The more Giana thought about the last few years, and the more she scrubbed on those little blue things, the more she realized that some pieces of Renee’s Daddy stories weren’t making sense.

Renee had always explained to Giana that her father never came to see her when she was young, and yet Dad’s story was a completely different version.  He claimed that Renee kept him from seeing his daughter.  Hmmm.

Giana just shook her head, Blue shook off his suds, and they all went home to pack for their trip.

Meanwhile, now that Nora had finally sorted out the phonetic differences between Resume and Exhume, she met with a lawyer to figure out her next step in resuming the exhuming of her Dad’s body.

As Lawyer Man Michael nervously spun his pen between his hands like an Amish furniture maker turning a full set of table legs, Nora rambled on about Frank “The German’s” ORTopsy and what steps needed to be taken in order that she could finally have his body dug up and then tossed back into the ocean.

Hopefully there will be a cremation somewhere in between those two scenarios, because otherwise I can just see him floating back up on shore and we’d have to go through this all over again next season.

After Michael had spun his pen into a toothpick, he sent Nora on her way to meet with a Funeral Director.

Then he changed the locks on his office door.

Since we all know that Mob Wives need to eat, next it was time for some munchies.

Pia had been invited to meet up with Leah and Golden Girl Jacquie.  Pia had never met Leah’s Mom, and since her own Mom was a Survivor, Leah thought it would be good for the three of them to get together to hear Pia’s insights on how to deal with what they were facing.

The scene itself was pretty heartfelt, interspersed with just enough Leah (bleeps) to keep it from being a Lifetime Movie.

Wearing basically the same over-sized spherical earrings that Chinese people hammer gong right before they go to war or do a Dragon Dance, Leah introduced the two women and then just sat back and watched the show.  It turned out that Pia’s Mom and Leah’s Mom knew a lot of the same Mob people in the neighborhood from back in the day, so the whole lunch turned into what I can only imagine it sounds like when two crazy women hang out of their windows in Little Italy flashing gang signs.

“I was with the Goombalotto family.  My Mom was with the Giambalugas. OMG you know Tony Pepperoni, too?  And Tony Bologna?  And how sexy was he when he chewed gum?”

I need to watch that scene again it was so endearing.  Jacquie’s totally gonna beat this thing, because the world needs more women hanging out the window.  Capisce?

Since Pia did so much talking at lunch, she was still hungry so she and daughter Bella hit up the yogurt shop.

Now that Mom’s stripping days were almost behind her, they needed to figure out their next step.  Mom wanted to make sure that Bella knew she would be taken care of and they would be just fine, even if they had to cut corners for awhile.

Bella just wanted to know how they were gonna buy stuff.  Period.  From the mouths of babes.  Gotta love 15 year old kids.  Before you unstraddle that pole, you better make sure I still have cable in my bedroom.  Facebook doesn’t update itself, lady.

But the kids actually get all the props this week.  Both Bella and Giana proved that they are pretty wise beyond their years, and extremely level headed for being raised in what some would consider a less than stable environment.  There seemed to be some underlying hurt that was undeniable, but they both seemed to have their shizzle together, all things considered.

As Giana, Marco and his skinny jeans all headed to Terre Haute for some quality prison time, Leah and Christina took it in a lighter direction and went for some ice cream.

Beyond just reaping the calcium benefits of Fudge Ripple, Christina also needed to fill Leah in on something that had gone down between herself and Renee and Pia.  Turned out that the other night she had met up with the girls, and somewhere along the line Pia had dragged Christina out of the room just long enough for Renee to text Nora.

From Christina’s phone.  Oh.  Hell.  No.  She.  Din’t.

Before we go any further, it should be noted that Leah has THE best Oprah Face when it comes to listening to all this nonsense.  For realz.  She squints and tilts and leans like she’s talking to the freakin’ President every time one of the women barfs up their drama.

Love.  Her.

Anyway.

Even though Renee had brushed the whole thing off as a joke, Christina had begun to feel that Pia and Renee are somehow in cahoots as they say in ChiTown, and she wasn’t liking it.

She promised to stay cool when they all got together for Craft Night, much the same way I promised to stop bringing up the whole Pia and the Kia incident every week.

…and you know how well that worked out, as witnessed by some delightfully misspelled hate mail stuck sideways up my inbox.  Conjunction Junction, What’s Your Function?

Schoolhouse Rock.  Google it, kids.

So the only way to see if Christina would keep her promise was to get right to the arts & crafts.  Bring on the BeDazzling.

Nora didn’t show up to play because she didn’t trust Renee with a hot glue gun, but everyone else was there and…try to act surprised…before they even got the word “TEAM” stuck to the front of their tee shirts Renee popped her cork.

Christina felt violated by anyone touching her phone.  Renee thought it was a hoot.  Rinse & Repeat.  About 32 times.

The whole thing turned into another round of screaming and (bleeping) and accusing and yelling and basically not glueing anything to tee shirts.

Raise your BeDazzler if you didn’t see that one coming.  Anyone?

Finally, Leah Winfrey got up and slapped everyone back into Sweat Shop mode and the tee shirt assembly line was back in bidnezz.

The Daddy issues hung on right up until the very end as Nora met up with a second Funeral Director who reminded her that Frank had been in the ground for quite some time now, and might not be in perfect factory condition if they ever get approval to open the lid again.  That one didn’t really seem to register with Schweihs Spice, even though she vowed to be there for the unveiling even if she was too medicated to operate heavy machinery.

Yeah.  Until all the other family members sign on the dotted line, the jury is still out on this one.

Just remember Geraldo Rivera‘s face when they finally opened the Titanic safe.

Since maximum security prisons are not big on VH1 cameras in the commissary, we didn’t actually get to witness Giana’s reunion with her Dad.  We did get a quick glimpse of his mug shot, which kind of looked like he could have been the Dad of one of those One Direction dudes, and a quick recap of his murder rap.

Convicted murderer or not, he was still Giana’s Dad, and she loved him and missed him.

Tag.  You’re it.  I’m not even going near that one.

Giana cried.  And then cried some more.  She also began to believe her Dad’s side of the story and not what Renee had led her to believe her entire life.  It might be time to confront her Mom.

Yeah.  Renee.

That realization made Marco’s cheeks as pink as those BeDazzled tee shirts.

Get well soon, Jacquie.

Seriously.

It’s enough to send you face down into a Mud Bog.

Honey Boo Boo Child is revving up her 4-wheeler and there’s no where to hide, people.  No where at all.

Call it the best thing to happen to Reality TV evah, or call it the end of civilization as we know it.  It’s your call.

But either way…she’s back.

Whether it’s online at home, or in line at Walmart, it seems as though everyone has an opinion on Alana Thompson and her Mom, June Shannon.

After capturing the country’s attention with her sassy attitude, and nearly shifting the earth’s rotation with those warp speed Go-Go Juice infused floor spins, the undisputed Toddlers & Tiaras breakout star is finally ready for another closeup.

And this time, she’s bringing her whole family along for the ride.

Seems that Casa de Boo Boo is filled with a lot more than just industrial-sized cardboard cases of toilet paper and Brawny towels.  It’s also well stocked with quirky siblings and a Dad with a penchant for belly slapping and the kind of laugh that usually ends with someone spitting their teeth out.

We’ll meet sisters Jessica (“Chubbs”), Lauryn (“Pumpkin”) and Anna (“Chickadee”) as well as get reintroduced to Alana’s scruffy faced Dad “Sugar Bear.”

The last time we saw Sugar Bear, he was taking a pretty good toilet paper roll blow to the head so it will be interesting to see if he suffered any long term effects from the Coupon Queen’s artillery.

Though the family has (…allegedly…) sworn off the potent Mountain Dew & Red Bull cocktail, it looks as though Alana is still just as wired for sound as she was the first time she splattered all over our television screens.  We’ll see her 4-wheeling, mud flopping, armpit tooting and participating in all those activities that make the Redneck Lifestyle so endearing.

Despite the fact that they all have their own teeth, Sugar Bear insists that…yes…they are still Rednecks, much to the chagrin of at least one sister.

Oh.  And Anna is a 17 year old expectant Mom-To-Be.

Yup.  I think there’ll be enough to make you holla when Alana hits the airwaves again.

Holla.  Scream.  Whatever.

TLC’s latest spin-off show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is premiering  on August 8, and…hell yeah…my DVR is set.

 

 

Pardon me, Ma’am. I know you’re a bitch and all, but is that Go Go Juice that you’re not sharing?

 

 

 

 

 

He said there was some kinda tension between him and that lady. I’ll bite her myself if I have to.

 

 

 

 

 

Come with me back to my planet where everyone gets a crown and no one ever pulls out.

 

 

 

 

 

That’s oddly inappropriate. And yet captures the essence of what that pageant chick tried to do to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call Me Maybe?

 

 

 

 

I’m giving it all she’s got Captain.

Our Spray Tanning Shields are engaged, but compromised.  I don’t know how long we can keep them up against an enemy cloaked in sequins and glitter.

The Pixie Stix Phasers seem to have no effect on the aliens, and the Tiara Tractor Beam is just too damn strong.

Resistance is futile.  We will be assimilated, no matter how hard we fight back.

Toddlers & Tiaras has won.

And won big.  Like Mega Ultimate Supreme big.

All we can do now is Sparkle.  

…Baby.

………………………………………………………………..

Welcome to the Out Of This World Pageant.

This week the Toddlers & Tiaras rocket ship took us far, far away.

Like across the Georgia state line, almost, to a Space Age themed pageant that gave everyone a chance to explore uncharted corners of the Universe with the hopes of discovering new, and extremely glittery, alien life forms.

Life forms that could potentially share the same goals we all share of winning massive crowns and giant blow-up bouncy castles.

It was Cosmic, I tell you.

Director Chasity Saunders, decked out in some seriously red Clairol and one of those New Years Eve headbands with the boingy styrofoam antennae, explained the interstellar aspects of the competition.  It should also be duly noted that in the Glitz World, even Directors must use the Pageant Name Generating Machine.  If your birth certificate information isn’t worthy of at least a second place sash or plaque, you are required to remove a minimum of one letter from your name to make it pageant quirky.

In Space, they can’t hear you scream.  And you don’t win Ultimate Grand Supreme.

You win MEGA (…say it with an echo…) Ultimate Grand Supreme.  Way more cosmic.

You also win an inflatable blow-up bouncy tent, which Chasity felt required a slo-mo video demonstration just in case you’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese.  Glad she cleared that one up for me, because I would have been up all night searching online for an explanation of how it goes from flat to Macy’s parade float with just one cord.

Grab some snacks, because even this recap is mega.

The first pageant princess beamed down to us was 2 year old Bella and her Mom Juliet, who now holds the T&T record for wearing the tiniest hair clip ever seen on the show in five seasons.  The kind of micro clip you forget you have in your hair until you go to bed and then almost puncture the part of your brain that does long division.

That kind.

Teensy Bella was exactly what you would expect from any 2 year old human being or puppy dog:  Very little focus, a whole lot of falling down and some teething issues.

She was cute as a button whether she was wobbling around the house or face down on the floor.  But whereas a newborn puppy tends to gnaw on the day care furniture until you slap its nose, Bella’s teething ring of choice leaned a little more towards the other kids in her play group.

That’s right.  Much like her Twilight namesake, this Bella also now liked biting people.

So much so, in fact, that Mom nervously chuckled as she explained how her little vampire had already been kicked out of four different day care facilities for chewing on crayons and fingers.  It was the kind of nervous chuckle a Mom does when she explains that her kid only burned down 4 houses so far…so relax, people…and hand me my cocktail.

In her short career Bella had only lost one competition, and that was due to some nasty inner ear infection that had caused her ear drum to burst on stage.  Ouch.

Those judges will deduct points for anything nowadays.

When she wasn’t biting stuffed animals or human flesh, Bella also enjoyed swatting her Dad Kevin in the face with her crown collection.  Hopefully she doesn’t draw any blood, because I just watched Breaking Dawn Part 1 on HBO and it wasn’t pretty.

Our second puppy of the week was bouncy 3 year old Ava Layne and her Mom Ashley.

Styled up in a pair of Disney-ish hair bows with floppy dog ears attached, Ava was introduced while participating in some begging and rolling over kind of thing while Mom waved around a giant rawhide bone.

I’m going to assume that this was some kind of pageant rehearsal and not a daily Mother/Daughter bonding ritual, because it wasn’t really explained very well and we all know I’m not one to pass judgement on anyone else without all the deets.

Ava’s backstory is pretty amazing if you Google it.  She was basically brain dead and couldn’t walk, or talk or roll over when she was born.

(I mean the roll over in your crib kind of roll over.  Not another puppy joke…the dog story is finished.  Gimme a little credit for knowing when enough is enough, thank you.)

Then one day she just woke up, blinked at her Mom, looked around and decided to immediately start doing pageants.

Or something.  I skimmed it.

But she’s her Mom’s Miracle Baby, and I love stories like that.  Plus she’s another cute button and had hair that you know always looks like balloon static, so she got my vote.

When we moved on to the third and final princess, my television sound went out for a moment.  Or I thought it had, anyway.

But it was just 7 year old Jayla.  Dead silent 7 year old Jayla.

For a second I thought that maybe one of the Bellas had already gotten to her, but it turned out that she was just a quiet, shy little thang who only came alive on stage.

Mom Andrea seemed pretty accustomed to Jayla’s borderline comatose state, but if it was me I would always be carrying around a flip-top compact mirror just in case I had to test for breathing fog once in awhile.

It was like Weekend At Bernie’s: Toddler Edition.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t the third cutie in the pack.  She even boasted that she had a good personality.  Sometime.  And she wanted to be Miss America, even though she didn’t know who she was…or what she did or…how she…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

We’ll have to come back to Jayla later, I guess.

Since the whole shebang was going to be Out Of This World, the Outfit Of Choice portion was pretty much guaranteed to be something with a space ship or ET face.

Ava’s routine was a Men In Black number, but since Will Smith may or may not be going through a divorce right now her older brother Bubba was going to co-star to make sure that someone showed up on Pageant Day.

In retrospect, Mom or Dad probably should have done a quick run through of the pivotal scene with Ava before Bubba actually showed up in his Area 51 mask, because the poor little girl pretty much wet her pants when a martian strolled into the living room.

Bella’s pageant prep included a trip to Mom’s dental office to get her vampire fangs polished alongside her Care Bear Edward.  No, they didn’t actually say the Bear’s name, but c’mon…Edward?  I know you laughed.

Maybe not as much as when someone inflated a surgical glove until it looked like bloated cow udders and Bella ran around the office with pink cow teats in her mouth.

But you laughed.

(If anyone had told me that I would use the words ‘cow teats’ twice in less than 2 months on this site, I would have never believed it.  But now it’s happened.  If you don’t remember the last time I used them together in a sentence then I guess someone’s going to be killing some time on a rainy weekend scavenger hunt.  Maybe there’ll be a prize.)

A couple of dress fittings and Sassy Sisters rehearsal studio wind machines later, and it was finally Pageant Day!

And as if Pageant Day wasn’t exciting enough…the Pageant Mothership hovered over the gymnasium and beamed us down Talent Agent to the Universe Blake Woodruff.

Love.  This.  Dude.

Out of the hundreds of…well…100…10…whatever…tomato….tomaahto…pageant people I have met through this hot mess site, this guy is one of my favorites.

A hoot.

Probably two hoots.

Most people don’t know it, but Blake proudly, yet quietly, suffers from a rare disease known as Bad Girls Clubmydia which often causes uncontrollably sassy side to side head pops and makes him start or finish most of his sentences with OhNoSheDin’t! 

He also has a habit of wearing loosened up skinny ties that make him look like he’s about to break into one final ballad before Last Call at the Ramada Jersey Boys Tribute.

But whatever.  Woodruff shizzle was in the hizzle, so I knew this was gonna get good.

Chasity was also back for a second visit to give her Vegas Bookie take on how the girls looked coming into the horse race, and it wasn’t until right then that I realized how much she sounded like she was reading the commentary on my grade school film strips.

“Ava is a cute little diva, and coffee is the number one export of Columbia.”  Beep.

Go back and listen.  I swear.

Instead of the usual hotel room chaos though, all the hair and makeup was being done in the cafeteria of whatever school it was they were using for the competition.  There was a big school logo/letter graphic painted on the floor of the gymnasium which should have been a pretty good clue, but I was too busy trying to figure out how the castle inflated and missed the actual name.  My bad.

Being held off site, as they say in the biz, also meant that not only did we get to whiff a cloud of Aqua Net, spray tan mist and Red Bull, but there was also residual fish stick stank and whatever Friday’s Mystery Meat happened to be that week.  At least while the girls were getting their fake hair stapled on they could read up on the Food Pyramid.

The More You Know, kids.  The More You Know.

I’m not gonna lie.  Whenever my boy Blake came on screen I was hoping he would unleash some Clubmydia, but being the pageant emcee was cutting down on some of his sass.  I knew he still had it in him, and I knew we’d get at least one good one before it was over…but I’m not a very patient person when it comes to waiting for snark.

Which probably explains why my DVR is 90% Bravo TV.

Let’s hit the highlights of this shindig, shall we?

When it came time for Bella to do her Beauty thing, she was MIA.  Blake had just finished marveling at how the last contestant’s hobbies included pooping and power crawling (…whatever that is…) and then the stage went blank.

Some classic T&T kicked in as soon as Bella’s name was called for the tenth time.  Bella is never late for her shows, but somehow Dad had missed the announced line up or something.

Needless to say, after rushing Bella up on stage, picking her up and down like a marionette and then finding out that he had been holding her wrong the entire time, Kevin was cranky pants.

Storming out of the gymnasium, he tracked down…and then threw down…with Pageant Assistant Gem.

Now I have no clue what her name really is, but she had a big ol’ tee shirt on that said ’Gems Rock‘ and when I first saw her I thought it said ‘Gem’s Rack’…like she was proud of a new boob job or something.

Yes, I thought that was odd, but this is Toddlers & Tiaras.  Do the math.

So I named her Gem.

During their first encounter Gem walked off in a big dramatic soap opera diss, only to have it completely ruined mid-stream by two locked doors that she couldn’t open.  Not being able to open the door really takes the wind out of any drama queen’s exit.

When he stalked her a second time, Gem told Kevin to call her lawyers if he wanted to beat up on somebody.  (They know this whole argument is about getting a 2 year old into a gym to blow finger kisses, right?)

Kevin seemed to be the one on the right side of the law on this one from what I could tell, but regardless dude…if you’re gonna try and get all bad a** on somebody, take the pink sippy cup outta your back pocket first.

The rest of the pageant kind of paled in comparison, though there were a few other non-boob job gems.

Jayla proudly boasted that she had been practicing her facials a lot.  We’ll just let that one pass with no discussion.

Care Bear Edward made a return visit, held up in the air like a confetti colored glo-stick for inspiration.

The judges were all a stitch, but I don’t have time to mention any of them except for that overly tanned up Darrel who always seems to show up every few episodes.  He never blinks, and looks like he does the One for You, One for Me spray tan assist with all the kids out back.

Bella ended up being robbed of whatever title is was that Mom and Dad wanted for her, and you knew Gem and the Holograms were gonna get blamed for that one.  Personally I would be glad that I didn’t have to shlep a giant inflatable castle home on the roof of my van, but that’s just me.

For whatever reason, the score sheets were not going to be made available until midnight.

Seriously.  Midnight?  Now I don’t know about you, but the only people I know who hang around school gymnasium parking lots after midnight either work for Dateline, or end up sitting on a kitchen stool eating out of a bowl of chips on Dateline.

If you know what I mean.

Blake knows what I mean, because when he announced that bit of info, he finally got to unleash his Inner Moesha and told all them bitches to “…so, ahh…have fun with that.”

Head pop. Doo Wop.

Some other kids won some stuff, too.  Creep them on Facebook if you really need to know.

Right now, I just need to go into that decompression chamber they used to put the Apollo astronauts in after they splash landed back to Earth.

Like I said at the beginning…in Space, no one can hear you scream.

On TLC…I’m not so sure.

Beam me up, Blake.