The Amazing Race S05E13

One

Couch Baron and I agree to go to the party together, and about thirty seconds after he picks me up, I say this to him: "When it is 1:00 in the morning and I am cursing myself for wearing these shoes, you should feel free to remind me of this moment, which was my opportunity to go back to the hotel room and put on the perfectly sensible pair of black pumps that are under the edge of the bed right now."

"Got it," he says.

I finger my skirt. "I'm also concerned that I will take abuse about this." He looks down. "Ohhh," he says. "That's leather." "Mm," I agree. We wait for a cab. And we wait for a cab. And we wait for a cab. And we wait for a cab. "Uh, this is a theme with us," I finally say.

When we get to Madison Square Garden, we work our way through the throng of Gloria Estefan fans lining up outside, and we quickly realize we don't know exactly where we're going. "[Couch Baron]," I say in despair, "We are lost again. We are in last place again." "I know," he says.

Two

I go into the evening with a very specific theory about drinking. Following a visit to Tipsyville at TARcon 4 followed by a careening crash into the Town That Crazy-Ass Embarrassing Drunk Girl Totally Forgot (No, Really, I'm Saying Totally Forgot) at the premiere party in Las Vegas in July, I am determined to remain upright without assistance all evening, in spite of my impractically tall shoes. My theory is that I will alternate alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks. I will make myself drink a Diet Coke in between beers, essentially. Of course, when you're alternating drinks, it doesn't matter which goes first, right? So when the Couch Baron goes to the bar and brings back a beer, it seems fine to start with that.

When people begin to gather at the table, they are highly skeptical of my plan. Not skeptical in the "I don't think that would work" sense, but skeptical in the "I do not believe this will actually occur" sense. I spill the plan to Suga Wuga, and she looks at me like I have just revealed my secret intentions to enter the Miss Alabama pageant. At first, she is merely silently skeptical, but five minutes later, she is back at the table. She has a beer in one hand, and she has a Diet Coke in the other. She slides them onto the table in front of me, where the first beer is almost gone. "We'll just see which of these goes ," she says.

I drink the Diet Coke.

But it's the only one.

Three

I tuck myself into a corner full of partygoers I know, and recappers, and -- best of all -- my most excellent sister, SisterS, who makes the earlier of the two possible flights and shows up earlier than I'm thinking she's going to. I eat chicken nachos and drink beer, and when peacecat comes up and wants to give me a present, I straighten up a little. She gives me a red knit winter hat that says "Miss Alli" across the front. How cute is that? I ask her where she got it, and she said she got it "at the same place she got this," and she points to her yellow baseball cap. Which, unforgivably, I have failed to notice until this moment. Her hat says, "Certified Ox Repair." ["That hat is awesome, not least because it's in the same color scheme as the Tomato Nation 'Saucy.' Shirt, either." -- Sars] I tell her to remind me to have my picture taken with her later, and I also tell her I hope Colin shows up and signs it for her.

Four

Kevin and Drew show up early, with their crew for the Cold Pizza segment they're apparently shooting. They get the crowd's attention and tell us that when we're given the signal, we're supposed to "lose it." Like, with excitement, I guess. At some point, there appears to be some signal given, because a lot of losing it goes on. SisterS and I look at each other and wave our arms in the air. "We're losing it! We're looooosing it!" we say to each other. It all dies down, but then a couple of minutes later, they're back, and it starts up again. SisterS and I look at each other again. "We didn't lose it enough last time," she says. "We have to do it over. And lose it more."

Later, Kevin is kneeling in front of the TV, still during the show, when he looks over at me. He knows SisterS is supposed to be here. He points to her. "Your sister?" he mouths. I nod. He gets her attention. "Mr. Alli," he says, pointing to himself. "I'm the favorite." "Oh, really?" she says skeptically. I lean over to her. "He wishes."

Five

During the show, no one really believes that Chip and Kim are going to win. There are Colin and Christie fans, who are seeking each other out like the members of a disfavored secret society, but most of the people I talk to have a similar outlook: They dread and expect a Colin and Christie victory, and they are hoping for a Brandon and Nicole victory, which looks like the only plausible way to preempt it. While they would love to see a Chip and Kim victory, they know that the fourth-place curse of the Best-Liked Team, even if it is momentarily foiled, will certainly return in time to keep you from crossing the finish line successfully. The Chip and Kim team never wins.

The tense showdown at the wall between Linda and Karen and Colin and Christie at the end of the first hour brings moans of despair, and even after it is clear that Colin is going to beat her, there is a swell of applause for Karen that pushes her up the last few feet. The cheer for Colin and Christie being dumped into the drink is the one bright spot in this otherwise depressing sequence.

The tension near the end is just about intolerable. There is excitement when Chip and Kim get the better flightand when Colin and Christie don't. There is misery when Earl starts driving along the shoulder. But then they go to that shotthe one that seems like it takes ten minutes, where there is nothing in the frame but the empty road. Everybody knows Colin and Christie are in the town car, and everybody knows Chip and Kim are in the van. When the van glides into the picture, that's pretty much it for sound for the rest of the episode, because you can't hear anything over the screaming.

Six

When the show is over, much of the party moves, at least temporarily, out into the "overflow" area, because that's where the racers are making their entrances. I wind up out there as a result of going to find the bathroom and never making it back into the bar. Eventually, SisterS brings my purse out to me so I don't worry that it's lost. I see Ken and Gerard, and I sneak over to talk to them. I introduce them to SisterS, who only started watching this season. "They played in Season Three," I say to her. "Where they broke my heart by losing to Flo." "Broke my heart too, Miss Alli," Gerard says. Ken reports that he never used to think about the million dollars, but now he finds himself pondering it from time to time. "Damn, that million dollars," he says. Ken and I discuss how the only redeeming quality of the new Survivor is Brady the FBI guy, who we think should take his shirt off a lot.

Seven

Team Guido makes a great show of bowing down in front of me, which is very embarrassing, and not only because I have to open by telling them that I was not sure I was going to speak to anyone who was at the aforementioned Vegas premiere party ever again. Later, asked by someone else what happened exactly, Bill shrugs and says, "Oh, don't listen to her, she's exaggerating. It was nothing. It was no big deal. I just bought a couple of bottles of wine, andshe drank them." Which iskind of true.

They bring the dog, who is perfectly behaved, as usual.

Back when they were so very, very evil, who knew it would come to this?

Eight

I tap Zach on the arm. We say hi, and it turns out that we are doing this at the very moment that Brandon and Nicole are coming in. We note that Brandon, also, has very large hair. He might displace Zach for the most impressive final three hair ever, actually. We agree that while Brandon's hair is larger, it also uses more product, and it is necessary for its score to be reduced accordingly. I also tell him that I really liked the New York Times piece he wrote about racing. In addition to the fact that I am more comfortable with people who write than I am with anyone else, this is, as it happens, true. Zach is cool. It occurs to me again that of all the Racers I know, he is probably the most normal.

"Hey, Flo!" "Oh, hey, how are you?" "Oh, fiiiiine, how are you?" "Fiiiine!"

Nine

Lenny? Still hot. Still tall. "We've come a long way since the Manhattan Chili Company," he says. For some reason, I repeat my "guy throwing up out the window" line, which wasn't that good the first time. That is a poor showing on my part.

Ten

I miss Phil. First, I hear that he's there, and then, I hear that he's gone. I'm not sure Phil ever made it more than ten feet into the party. Hmph.

I miss Brandon and Nicole. I see his hair a few more times over the course of the party, but I do not talk to them.

I miss the Moms. I see them once or twice, and they look faboo, but I don't talk to them. It's the year of missed opportunities.

Eleven

Chip and Kim are working their way through the crowd when I sneak over to them. I start to pick up my name tag, but Chip says, "I know who you are!" You would think Chip would give a great hug, right? He does. He tells Kim who I am, and she acts excited too, whichalways surprises me. I tell her how incredibly excited everyone was to see them win, as people stand around and take our picture a lot. I tell her that among other things, it was wonderful to see people win who weren't a team of boys with big arms. "You know, the reason why we sometimes looked like we were out of shapeis that we were out of shape," she tells me with a laugh. They introduce me to their son -- so cute, seriously -- and point out some of the rest of the folks with them. They're utterly delightful, exactly as you would expect.

Twelve

Late in the evening, Oswald slides up and gives me a hug. We chat a bit about this and that, and I tell him I've been having all kinds of interesting conversations with people about editing. "Eeediting," he says, a little dismissively. "I understand that, but...you know...it's not Pixar." From this point on, "It's not Pixar" may very well replace "Editing, Schmediting" as my dismissive retort of choice. Also, he has grown his hair out so that it is long and curly, and he is seriously the only guy I've ever met who can wear his hair literally any way at all and look equally good.

Thirteen

Brennan and I barely even talk at these things anymore. "Hey." "Hey." "Everything good?" "Yeah. You?" "Yeah." Him: "You know, the only things people ask me at this thing are where the leather pants are, and where's Rob." Me: "They ask me the same things." He tells me the leather pants are "retired," and it occurs to me later that I should have told him to say that's the answer to the other question, too.

Fourteen

I am actually working my way across an extremely crowded bar to talk to somebody else when I discover that I am about four feet away from Colin and Christie. I stop and think about whether to say anything.

Here's the internal conflict that goes on in a situation like this, and why I'm so bad at introducing myself to racers: I sit there and I think, "There's no particular reason why these people should know who I am. Many if not most of them do not read the recaps, so what the hell do they know? It's kind of presumptuous to go up and expect my name to mean something to them. On the other hand, if I talk to them in a situation like this, especially where I was a non-fan, and I don't acknowledge it and it turns out that they do know who I am, I risk looking and feeling like a complete dolt when they're like, 'Bitch.' Furthermore, if they don't know and I try to explain it, do I include the part about the 22 stages of the ox-related breakdown? Hmm." You can see why I sometimes drink too much at this party.

Anyway, I'm about halfway through this calculus problem when, blessedly, I run into designed. He's like, "Oooh, did you meet them?" I explain that I didn't, and I sort of go through a micro-version of the conflict that sounds like this: "I don't know, because...whatever, it's weird." He comes to my rescue thusly: He taps them on the shoulder and tells them he wants to take their picture with me. Ah, that works. So they turn around, and she definitely knows who I am, and he sort of does, maybe. As she explains it to me, he doesn't read stuff online (heh), but she reads a lot of it and tells him the funny parts. In fact, she specifically thanks me for giving them credit when it seems appropriate, even when I'm mostly being pissed at them. They're very friendly.

We plunge in. I don't even remember how it opens, but we get talking about editing and how you look and that sort of thing. "I would probably never do it," I say about going on such a show, using a standard line of mine, "because it's a very specific bargain that you make when you go on a show like this." "It's a gamble," Colin says. I go on to say that it's certainly true that if you were to tape me for a week and just use all the most unflattering --

Here, he stops me. "No, no -- it's not that. It's fabricated." That's the word he uses -- "fabricated." They offer me a couple of examples. She swears that she was not only goaded by the interviewer into giving her "the other teams suuuck" quote, but that she was basically kidding. Which, having seen it, I can completely believe. And which doesn't change my impression of it very much. ["Yeah, mine either. The Real World kids use that excuse all the time, all 'they just wouldn't stop asking until they got the answer they wanted,' but at this point in the evolution of the genre, you know that that's part of going on a show like this, and if you don't want to stay obnoxious shit, you should prepare yourself to resist doing so. In other words: whatev." -- Sars] He says that when he threw the money at the end of the police station thing in Tanzania, he went back and apologized and picked it up and gave it to the guy. Which, frankly, strikes me as more of a "trying not to get in even more trouble" gesture than an "I was legitimately regretful" gesture, but certainly, if I were Colin, I would feel like a more complete picture of me would be created if they included the apology. But does that make it "fabricated"? Considering how long that tirade went on and some of the things that he said, would going back and picking up the money and shaking the guy's hand undo very much of the impression people walked away with? Isn't it likely that the apology would have been blown off as self-serving? I'm just saying...not so much "fabricated."

She also tells me that she was talking about a production car, not pedestrians, when she was all, "Run them over!" And again, I totally agree that if that's the case, which it probably is, then she has a point that it was presented in a way that made that moment look worse than that moment was. But did it misrepresent the overall situation, as far as her losing her shit? Once she's in the car and she's leaning over to honk the horn and she's in the driver's face...I mean, certainly, it's different, but really, "run them over" isn't an especially sane thing to say about a production car, either. I had a hard time taking that comment very literally to begin with, and even he was telling her to chill out -- Mr. Intensity -- so...I don't know.

Here's the most interesting part. Colin warms up for one of his biggest points when he says, "Okay, let me ask you this. Who was I talking to, when I said, 'I hate you'?" "Her," I say immediately, pointing to Christie. "Aha, see?" he says, certain that the point is made now. "She was nowhere near me when I said that. I was talking to the ox."

This is a problem. And the reason it's a problem is that the video of that moment is on the CBS site. And quite honestly, it's clear as day that he says it to Christie. Couldn't be much clearer. He actually stops in the middle of an word while he's repeating back something she just said, and he goes with, "Oh my God, I hate you." Go ahead; go to the site. Find your way to the "I Hate You" clip. Watch it for yourself. "You've been in very limited places," she says in frustration as they bicker over whether he's searched the mud field thoroughly enough. Incredulously, he says, "'Very li --' oh, my God, I hate you." He ain't talkin' to the ox. And she certainly isn't "nowhere near" when he says it. They're in the middle of a conversation. The interesting thing is that there were people who watched the episode as it aired and emailed me to lecture me that he had obviously been talking to the ox and not her. The editing actually did him a favor in that situation, because the uncut version makes it impossible to miss the fact that he's talking to her, where in fact, the audience left the broadcast version at least somewhat divided.

But here's the thing: When we talked about it, even though I had already seen that clip, I believed that he believed what he was telling me. I don't think he had looked at it. He was obviously surprised when I told him that I had seen it, and that it had certainly looked to me like he was talking to Christie. "You've seen unedited tape of it?" he said. I nodded. I suspect if he looked at it now, he would be very surprised. Because it was my impression that he really believed it had been presented unfairly, that he would never speak to her that way, and that whoever made it look like he did was viciously trying to destroy his reputation, because she was nowhere around at the time, and therefore it could only have been patently obvious that he was talking to the ox. And it's just...not true. I mean, really. Watch that clip and tell me he's not talking to her. It doesn't mean he hates her, it just means...that's what he said to her at that particular moment.

Look, I've fucked up. A lot. In a lot of situations, in a lot of different ways, some of which have been a lot worse than muttering "I hate you" when I'm incredibly frustrated and sleep-deprived. Mercifully, none of them are on video. And I think what I took away from this conversation is that people aren't wired to go back and fondle, over and over again, all the times that they've fucked up. You're really not supposed to. It's unnatural. You'd never get up off the floor if you did. And so some way or another of handling it emerges, out of necessity. Either you embrace your bad moments as high comedy, or you decide that anyone who cares about your bad moments is a loser with no life, or...you conclude that it wasn't really as bad as it looked, and it was fabricated.

Don't misunderstand -- I didn't dislike them in person. I liked them. I would have gladly talked to them for another hour, and it probably would have been interesting. They were friendly, and they were very good-natured with everybody at the party, and they showed up in spite of being villains, and they were gracious to me when they didn't have to be. And to their credit, they didn't take my least favorite approach, which is the "all of you people have no lives" one. (They may take that one in private, but at least they didn't take it in talking to me.) They don't blame the people who watched the show. Colin said he would have hated himself on TV also. They blame the show. And again, it's very obvious to me that their feelings of having been mistreated and wronged and betrayed by the show -- of having put themselves at the mercy of people who ultimately set out to screw them -- are largely genuine. I just don't think it happened that way.

P.S. Dear Mirna, I apologize for entirely dismissing your Napoleon complex theory based on my belief that he was not short enough to have one. Kisses, Miss A.