Surreality Television

Okay, let's get one thing out of the way first. Tom left the Garnier Nutrisse on about 5 minutes too long and that was NOT meant to be a Laura Bennett tribute; got it?

Honeys. What can we say? We'll tell you what we can say because we must have said it about 30 times to each other last night: "Ohmigod, this is so surreal." To watch the finale at the TRESemmé party with the final four - like a foot away from some of them - was just...so odd. We only started this blog a couple of weeks into the season, so to end the season sitting where we were...just, wow.

Give us a second to compose ourselves. Talk amongst yourselves.

...


Okay, we're back. Let's get to it. First off, with the exception of Michael who is exactly as good-looking as he appears on TV, the rest of the final four are surprisingly more attractive in real life. It hit us later that of course this would be the case, since 99% of the time we saw them onscreen they were exhausted and stressed out.


Laura. Like always, we have a lot to say about Laura and since it was she who invited us to the party and then invited us to spend a couple hours at her place with her sitcom-ready family, we're saving most of it for a later post. Or the Enquirer. She is EXACTLY who she appears to be on television in terms of her personality. Funny, intelligent, blunt, take-no-shit, unpretentious and fabulous. She's also more than that of course, but we'll get to that later. Love her more than ever and LOVE her husband, Peter. They both sat directly behind us.


Michael is exactly Michael. Cute and cool and poised and polite as polite gets. He sat a couple seats down from us with a fabulous and stylish posse, including his dropdead gorgeous date, who was also quite sweet to us when we complimented her on her outfit.


You will never meet a more adorable person than Uli. Ohmigod, what a sweetheart. And quite the Chatty Katerina. Just talkstalkstalks in that airy germanic English of hers. You ask her for a picture and she immediately wraps you in a full hug, tilts her head towards you and poses, spouting Uli-isms the whole time.

"Uli, we heard you don't have an email address."
"I have one, I just don't give it out to people."




Jeffrey is taller, cuter and nicer in person. He was downright sweet. We can't say we ever had more than a fleeting conversation with him because for obvious reasons he was the darling of the press all night and the only time we didn't see him talking to the press was when he was watching the episode. He sat right in front of us, next to Uli.


You know how you watch the show with friends and talk over it or comment on the action while it's happening? We all do that, right? How weird is it to sit there and listen to the final four do it? To hear Laura cheering on Michael or complaining about how long the judging took or talking about the beadwork on Camilla's dress. There was a lot of "oooohhh"ing and laughing during the "scandal" portions of the show, exactly the same as there would be watching it in your living room, except it was Laura, Jeffrey, Uli and Michael doing it. Surreal, right?


The absolute strangest part of the whole thing occurred after Michael and Laura got eliminated and it was down to Jeffrey and Uli. The entire front of the theater filled up with press, all with their cameras aimed at the two of them to get a shot when the winner would be announced. We could barely see the screen and forget about paying attention when you've got this wall of cameras staring back at you. The pic above doesn't do it justice.

It was thrilling, as Tim would say, when the room erupted into cheering and applause at the announcement of the winner.

We have much more to talk about in the days to come and a ton of pics to show y'all so don't worry, we're not going anywhere. We actually need to watch the episode again, because we probably saw only about 30% of it. Our necks are killing us from whipping our heads around and staring at everyone else in the room like an antsy kid in church. But darlings, it was so worth it. The one thing that echoes through our heads is what Tim said to us as we bid him goodnight. "You two are in the inner circle now!"