Kathy E-mail Watch: Nothing yet. But no hate mail from the Bears either, so we'll call it a wash.
This week's stand-up opener is about Oprah, and how Kathy wants to steal her thunder by opening a "Kathy Griffin Leadership Academy For Girls" in Mexico. "Para las niñas," of course. And as luck would have it, that's what's happening on the show this week. Back at the house, Kathy tells Team Griffin that they're taking a working vacation in Mexico, where they're going to fix up a school library in three days and call it a Leadership Academy. So the punch line to the joke is a shoddy, half-assed school in Mexico? Ha...ha? Just for that, I'm going to note that this week features a truly unfortunate array of wigs on Mrs. Kathy. (And by the way, when I say "wig," bear in mind that I have no concrete knowledge of the state of Kathy's follicles, but she's made wig and fake-hair jokes before, and somethin' in there is synthetic, so that's the word I'm goin' with.) Anyway, Kathy's also planning on hitting Woz up for some know-how and some free computers. Of course Woz, like Steadman, is being kept in the dark.
The day (or, you know, "" day), Kathy has her friend Michael McDonald from MadTV over. I don't watch that show, but I will always have a teeny space in my heart for McDonald as the voice of Gandhi on Clone High. So Kathy explains the deal with the escuela while Jessica and Tiffany giggle and make cookies. McDonald plays the incredulous asshole, with the sarcastic clapping and the annoyed sighing, very much like the guy he played on Scrubs that one time.
So Kathy decides to lay her idea out for someone who won't pretend to be so mean: her mom. Maggie's impressed, but also skeptical: "As far as Kathy becoming the red-headed Oprah," she interviews, "she's so far behind right now." Maggie then offers to contribute, instead of money, books. "Oh, lemme guess," says Kathy, "the Kitty Kelly Frank Sinatra biography..." Maggie thinks the girls could learn something from Frank. Maggie also offers a book she had on Hillary Clinton. "The Latinos like her!" Kathy interviews that maybe her mom isn't the best goodwill ambassador to Mexico. Maggie cautions Kathy to be careful that things don't turn out like they did for the real Oprah, with the corruption and all. Kathy: "Well, then I rename it 'The Maggie Griffin School for Girls'."
Later on, Kathy decides that in addition to buying stuff for the school, they're probably going to have to clean it, too. Lucky for Kathy, then, she has her cleaning lady (and BFF) Minerva to take along with them. Minerva's super-psyched to go, and she and Kathy seem genuinely close, but again: the joke is that the Latina cleaning lady is going to Mexico with them so she can clean?
So we're in Mexico with Kathy, Team Griffin, Minerva, and Woz's assistant, Julie. I'm just gonna keep waiting for the episode when Julie and Tom get drunk and end up making out. Oh, the regret! So the first order of business is how badly Kathy burned her face when she fell asleep in the sun. She totally owns it, but holy shitballs. And then there's more bad news, as Woz had to have an infected tooth pulled, so he won't be able to make it. Kathy interviews -- with a metric ton of pancake makeup on her poor red face -- that Woz sent a hot Mexican Apple employee named Patricio down in his stead. Yeah...that's an upgrade. Sorry, Woz.
After a bit of Kathy-trying-to-drive hilarity, Team Griffin rolls up upon the school. And by "school," I mean "three aluminum-walled warehouses that look like a stiff breeze could knock them over." Kathy interviews that this was a worse situation than she thought it'd be. She's starting to look like this is one stunt she probably should have reconsidered. Or at least planned better.
After the commercial, Kathy actually clears something up for me: the only thing she's responsible for renovating is the library, which she's still going to call the "Kathy Griffin Leadership Academy." Okay, that makes me feel better. I think they can pull off a library. Kathy, via her translator, Jennifer, introduces herself to the class. The reaction is tepid at best. The kids are totally not impressed by Kathy's meager celebrity. Kathy beats me to my own joke about the kids being scared of her "crazy, sunburned face." Though she doesn't mention the kids screaming "Mala roja!" and running away, so maybe she didn't entirely steal my thunder.
She has Patricio ask who has computers at home (no one) and who knows what the internet does (also no one). Kathy laments an entire classroom ignorant of internet porn. The kids are completely uninterested in Kathy but want to see how the cameras work. So Kathy's remarkably attractive camera crew gives a few demonstrations and the kids are happy -- but still not into Kathy in the slightest -- and it's all a very good start. Until they move on to the library.
Which: not a library. It's an empty storeroom with some desks piled up, broken windows and a falling-down ceiling. Kathy looks genuinely horrified, particularly when discussing the scorpions. Because, sure, there are some scorpions. How to fix this? How about a trip to "Los Costco"?
The trip to Los Costco is typically chaotic, with Jess riding in the shopping cart like she's five, Kathy hauling around big metal chairs, and all of Team Griffin kind of flailing to pick up some things the kids will like. Then it's back to the biblioteca for a monster cleaning session. Everybody's pitching in, including all of Team Griffin, Minerva, and a school kid named Cristián, who Kathy manufactures a burgeoning love affair with, not that he would know since he doesn't speak English and just wants Mala Roja to get out of his face already. Kathy interviews that this is effing hard and she shouldn't have made fun of Oprah. Though she doesn't recall seeing Oprah doing the cleaning herself, but she assumed she at least had Gail do it.
The day, to Kathy's great relief, Woz shows up. She gives him a giant hug and almost immediately starts briefing him on the sorry state of the biblioteca. He's going to be donating four desktop computers to the room, and Kathy asks him if he feels a little like Steadman. Woz, predictably, asks who Steadman is. Kathy interviews that Woz should know who Steadman is. She knows who Louis Pasteur is! Same thing!
Teams Griffin and Woz head out to the school, and Kathy has Patricio ask some of the kids if they'd like to work with computers. It's more of the same aloof reactions, though Kathy picks out one girl who she thinks wants to speak up but is getting mean-girled. Kathy sees this girl as the quiet, picked-upon one who, say, grows up to become a vicious comedian and live in a mansion and make the rest of those girls pay. In case you didn't get the connection, the show superimposes Kathy's face on this poor girl's. Thank god none of these kids will ever watch Kathy's show. Kathy's boyfriend, Cristián comes by, and Kathy tells Woz he might have some competition. Of course, Woz knows enough Spanish to get Cristián to say that's not true. Woz, incidentally, calls Kathy his "amiga," which just reminds me that this is something of a TV relationship, and I generally don't like the fantasyland of My Life on the D-List punctured like that.
So the Costco guys are setting up shelves in the biblioteca, but the whole room still looks chaotic and messy. Kathy interviews that Oprah would have just clapped her hands and gotten Gail to fix it. She does her Oprah impersonation, where "Gail, fix the biblioteca" sounds like when Oprah says "John Travolta!" Well Kathy doesn't have Gail. She does have Jessica, though, and we see that when she's given an organizational mission, "Señorita Hessica" is not one to be messed with. She directs the Costco people where to put the shelves while Kathy cowers in fear of her bossy assistant.
Tom arrives with a car full of books, and Kathy and the children start carrying them in. As we see Kathy getting slight chatty with the kids, she interviews that it seems they hate her less today than yesterday. Aw, I know that song! She says she could be in the U.N., not missing an opportunity to tell Angelina Jolie to suck it in the process. So Team Griffin starts organizing the bookshelves -- as the nerdy former library employee in me starts freaking out that they might put the books on shelves without properly cataloging them. A mis-shelved book might as well not be there at all! Meanwhile, Team Woz is having a ball showing the kids how to use the computers. The kids are literally climbing all over each other to use the new machines, and it's kind of awesome to see the heretofore bored schoolchildren light up like this. Kathy interviews how awesome it was that the kids were actually sneaking into the training session to learn. Or look at porn? No, no, to learn.
As Teams Griffin and Woz are sent home for the day, Kathy interviews that she doesn't know how they're going to be able to finish this by tomorrow. So she calls her mom for a pep talk, which: bad idea. Maggie says the difference here is that everything Oprah does turns out "like roses," while Kathy's projects all seem to fall flat. Then, like every Irish-Catholic older person I know would do, Maggie suggests that Kathy build a library in Ireland instead. She bids Kathy "addy-ose," much to Kathy's amusement, and Kathy interviews she's going to prove that old bat wrong.
So it's the day of the library opening and dedication. Kathy pretends like she's preparing for this elaborate press conference, but of course Tom tells her it's one paper, so Kathy's dreams of a Cannes-like international press event are dashed. Jessica and Tiffany, meanwhile, are keeping the sign for the building under a sheet so Kathy can't see it, but they assure her it was well and truly cribbed from the Oprah website. At the biblioteca, there are still shelves to be finished and ceilings to be repaired. Teams Griffin and Woz kick it into high gear as Kathy frets that if this thing isn't finished on time, she doesn't think she's going to be able to pass it off as Kathy Lee Gifford's, which was her Plan B. But things seem to be moving along, and Team Griffin even has some spare time at the end to fill a Kathy Griffin piñata up with candy.
So it turns out Tom's prediction of one newspaper showing up was grossly underestimated. There are three. Kathy, all pancaked out so as not to frighten the press, answers questions through an interpreter without a whole lot of grandstanding, actually. One reporter asks her if she had picked out any children as being special, and Kathy says she has: the shy girl. Oh, so she's just gonna drop Cristián like that? That's cold, Griffin. Anyway, the reporters seem to find Kathy very funny. Unlike, say, the crowd of schoolchildren who, while they may have stopped hating her so much, still don't get a whole lot out of her Oprah jokes. Via Patricio, Kathy learns that none of the kids have ever heard of Oprah (which Kathy says makes this town something of a paradise), which of course gives her free reign to talk about how Oprah is a powerful lady who tortures Mrs. Kathy. "She's a bad, bad lady who hurts people," Kathy says, and instead of translating that part, Patricio just turns to her and goes "WHAT??" Hee. I love Patricio.
So the sign is unveiled and the kids get to run around the biblioteca, which really does look much improved. Kathy's happy that the kids appear to be psyched about the books as well as the computers. And all the kids get a new backpack, too (Cristián's has a photo of Kathy in it). Then there's this six-year-old who shows up. Kathy tells us he's some kind of break-dancer, "...or one of Oprah's spies sent to steal my thunder." So the kid starts breaking it down, and he and Kathy end up in a dance battle -- one in which Kathy and her running man hold their own -- but once he starts kicking his feet up over his head it's over. Kathy also notices that it seems to be just the boys on the computer -- they apparently made a video yesterday and it's already on YouTube... the corruption begins -- so she tries to get some of the niñas to use the machines. Particularly the shy girls. The shy girls aren't biting, though, but she gets them to promise that they'll at least try the computers out in the future.
Kathy interviews that while this whole thing did start out as something of a joke at Oprah's expense, the kids really got to her, and she's super-happy to have helped build what is now the cool place for these kids to be. Like Hyde in L.A., or Pure in Vegas. And at this one, Kathy's the one holding the velvet rope, saying who's in and who's ocho. Oh, Mrs. Kathy. We see the kids take photos with Teams Griffin and Woz on their fancy new Macs, and damned if I'm not a little touched. Where are all the ugly Mexican children? These ones are all so cute!
After the break, Team Griffin presents Kathy with their piñata, which the kids proceed to break open with, like, one shot. Not to be robbed of their catharsis, Team Griffin proceeds to pummel the effigy with their fists. The kids start throwing the candy around, but just when it looks like it's going bad down on the ground, they start a cheer for Kathy that goes "Kathy-Kathy-Kathy, ra-ra-ra!" Aw. Kathy interviews that she hopes they'll remember her as "the odd lady with the burnt face who gave them books and introduced them to Señor Wozniak. And let them beat the shit out of a piñata that looked like her. Did Oprah do that?" My guess is probably not.
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Joe R hopes those books eventually get cataloged according to the Library of Congress and not the inferior Dewey Decimal system. Kathy can discuss the pros and cons of this with him via email.