"Milan, Italy," the introductory subtitle helpfully alerts us, as if we haven't been ensconced in Milan, Italy or its hilariously named double-entendred environs (but it sounds like Lake Homo, and it's funny if you're twelve or me) for the past three weeks. The three remaining girls who are to be congratulated for still being in the running toward becoming America's Top Model -- the cheater, the eater, and the drip-with- cyclophosphamide- and-in-extreme-cases- for-this-condition- the-dialysis-needer -- trudge slowly back to Il Zolofti. Physically spent as a result of the long walk home from the end of last week's episode, they amble back into the house to find a handwritten note from April sticking out of the refrigerator, which is the perfect place to place it if she wanted it found and subsequently read by Yoanna. Utilizing the exceedingly declarative font known to word-processing fans worldwide as I Am Woman Hear Me Capitalize (Sans Serif), the writer -- or should I say "scrawler" -- has scrawled, "Strong! Glorious!" Those two words are underlined -- twice -- and each punctuated by exclamation points. I guess the double underline is covering up the squiggly green lines indicating that this is a fragment and that whoever wrote this should consider revising. Thanks for having my back, Microsoft Word. Now I have to give dual recapping credit to "Djb & AutoCorrect." Below this clarion cry homage to words that would appropriately fill the "adjective" blank in a Mad Libs entitled "A Day At The Drag Queen's," there's more: "Woman kick ass for me!" "Woman kick ass for me"? I don't know exactly where to fault the collapsing grammar in that sentence, but I do know that, in its sheer, nonsensical totality, it makes me sic just looking at it. And after the word "woman," April's written something so egregious it wasn't even worthy of sharing paper-space with the rest of these linguistic pearls, so she crossed it our fourteen thousand times until it was little more than a smudge-y looking Rorschach drawing of April futiley attempting to smile or poo. Because the pained look on her face frequently suggested she was trying and failing at either or both. Oh, and more: "I am here in spirit for you all!" Wow. That was nice of her. Yoanna reads the note aloud with a self-satisfied smirk that says, "That's right. In spirit. A spirit that can't be photographed in designer sunglasses. Perhaps in her spiritual godliness, I can ask my clergy to anoint her The Patron Saint Of Being My Inferior and we can just fit me so the tiara already and go home." Anyway, that's what Yoanna was thinking.
"I wasn't expecting April to be eliminated," Yoanna tells us in a pink-scarf-clad (I know! I barely recognized her) confessional. "At any given time, someone could leave." Except for right now. And now. And whenever April is learning that the plural of "woman" isn't "woman."
“ I know our poor Colgate girl is trying to be more high- fashion, but the only 'high' locale in which that hat works is 'out of reach of human grasp, preferably in deep space or heaven.' Unless it's Jenascia reaching for it. And then it only needs to be on top of a matchbox. ”
Upstairs at Il Zolofti, Mercedes places a phone call to her mom, a somewhat low-voiced woman who pauses when she hears Mercedes's voice as if to say, "Am I on speaker-to-America phone? Take me off that thing." She sounds more familiar to us than Mercedes sounds to her, and at this late point in a very long season, I can't remember if we once met her or not. Oh, wait. We did. And we were all very moved. Trust me. Y Tu Mama Tambien asks her daughter how she's doing, and Mercedes -- bedecked in the finest hatwear that Hooray Beret Haberdashery has to offer -- says something in response that I can't give my undivided attention to on account of still being somewhat distracted by that hat. I know our poor Colgate girl is trying to be more high-fashion, but the only "high" locale in which that hat works is "out of reach of human grasp, preferably in deep space or heaven." Unless it's Jenascia reaching for it. And then it only needs to be on top of a matchbox. Mercedes tells her mom she's "feeling good," and then reminds us through the helpful advertising power of dizzying repetition why she might not have been feeling good: because ugly hats are the scourge of the well. Oh, and also because Mercedes has lupus. No. I know. Return your Dropped Chin Of Shock to its proper locale just under your Pursed Lips Of Incredulity. She's sorry she didn't tell you. She just didn't want to make a big deal out of it, is all. Because it's the final episode, the girls are speaking in broader, reflective terms, as if they all joined a recovery group and have to frame everything in terms of the higher power. Before Mercedes moves on to "Step Nine: Apologies For The Ways In Which My Hat Has Hurt The People I Love," she wants to share with us what she's learned about the so-called "three L's" we learn so much about growing up: life, love, and lupus. And here's what she says: "What I've learned the most from being in this competition and dealing with lupus is that it's about maintaining my disease." Once, I was in a pizza place in Brooklyn with my brother, and a guy walked into the place wearing that exact hat, and much more loudly than I had intended, I sarcastically barked the words, "Oh, la la! Un belle chapeau, monsieur!" And the guy turned around? And it was totally John Turturro. So the lesson I've learned this season is that if you're going to make fun of someone's gaylord hat, just make sure they're on TV where they can't hear you or hurt you.
Yoanna, meanwhile, is also on a cell phone, barking in a single breath to whoever it is on the other end: "Hey Mama I got a chance to call you I haven't talked to you in so looooooooooong!" Yoanna's mother hops upward to the conversational perch of "edgewise," discovering on her ascent that she still can't get a word in from that approach either, and we're right back to Yoanna chirping in a confessional, "I'm very close with my mom, so it's really been hard being away from her." She then utters those magical words all mothers long to hear, continuing on, "I miss you, but..." But?