By Sobell
Oh, my God, Becky! Look at her butt. It is so big.
Las Vegas likes big butts and it cannot lie / You other networks can deny / that when a girl lies there in an itty-bitty suit / the ratings go up, right up through the roof.
Or at least that's what NBC hopes now that Skin is on FOX and the people who are too cheap to pay for nudity on cable will be trying to decide who gets their penny-pinching, prurient attentions. Joan Jett's "Do You Wanna Touch?" plays as we see a row of callipygian lovelies getting hosed down by the Montecito poolside staff. Then it's on to gratuitous tit shots. Then another shot of people lying on their stomachs as frumpy little poolside attendants water their asses. The rows are so perfect, the watering so careful, I can only come to one conclusion: the Montecito is growing these tushies for harvest. You know, Laura Ingalls Wilder never mentioned the booty crop in any of her homespun pioneer memoirs. Why has this proud chapter of our nation's agrarian heritage not been documented before Las Vegas came along?
Anyway, there's some more flesh flaunted and it's all very boring after a while. We get a shot of a man passed out on a lounge chair with his little yellow bikini riding up. It's worth noting that the woman behind him really doesn't need a bikini so much as she needs an industrial back brace and an appointment with a good plastic surgeon.
On and on the flesh parade drags, and over time, we see people leaving the beach, no doubt to put on something equally obvious and therefore unalluring in a deluded attempt at convincing others that they're sexy 24/7. Also, with Joan Jett screaming instructions as to what to touch where, I'm all cued to expect leather and bad-assed attitude, as opposed to pneumatic vapidity. Cognitive dissonance doesn't really rev the engines, you know?
Anyway, the sun goes down, and the guy in the banana-colored banana sling is still one with the chaise lounge. As the nocturnal beach party commences, Danny VOs, "Groundhog Summer. For everyone else, summer's over after Labor Day, but in Vegas, we get an extra six weeks." Good news for anyone with a lot of white shoes, I guess. Danny continues in the world's most rushed VO, "And on that last weekend before we close all the pools for the season, Vegas throws the biggest pool party of the year." It's also filled with the lamest dancers of the year. When I was in middle school, back when the Brat Pack ruled supreme and pin-striped jeans roamed the hallways unchecked, we'd go to school dances and the more kinesthetically backward among us would do this weird head-bob thing combined with a sort of shuffle and hip-throw movement. It was like watching a marionette trying to do the lambada. Now imagine that multiplied by 200 and shrink-wrapped in synthetic fabric; there's your "biggest pool party of the year." Motivated to skip the FOX flesh-peddlers yet?