Tip Your Hats to the Hottest and Most Helpless

Tip Your Hats to the Hottest and Most Helpless of “Survivor: China” by Roxanne McDonald

Don’t we love that the most deserving got the popularity prize…, and do we care that the poorest and yet the next most deserving weaseled 50k out of Mark Burnett?

Yes, I am fussing after the fact (having just done my own personal version of “Survivor”: having finally re-settled after a 3,000 mile move of thirty years’ worth of living away from

home and having been away from my TV and TiVo to set up, get dentistry work done, and learn to shovel storms of snow again). But I have to add my illustrious opinions regarding two events, if you will—1) James Clement getting the 100k popularity prize and 2) Denise Martin getting the pity prize…a donation of 50k from Mark Burnett himself.
Okay, so first, James. Ohhhh, yeahhh. He was THE HOTTEST “Survivor” contestant ever. What a delight it was to watch even physical competitions that may have been getting stale for “Survivor” fanatics (if that’s possible). Even my sister, an artist who works twenty hours a day and has NO interest in television (which she doesn’t own and requests I keep my set out of seeing and hearing distance), happened to pop in to ask me something and catching a glimpse of that ebony demi-god issued an “oomph, baby, is he gorgeous).

Anyway, not that James should win big bucks for being a babe…, but should definitely win the popularity vote for being unassuming, gentle in his approach (no cheating, back-stabbing, or poor-me-ing, as Peih-Gee so endlessly bullshitted us with), and tricked into losing.

Sure, Todd, et.al. and their scheming was a clever and well-done coup and all, but oh how we Jamesians wanted someone wholesome and deserving to take that title in the end…, if only to break the cycle of reputation of such shows glorifying not out-wit, outlast, outplay but out-connive, out-lie, out-cheat. Of all of the players, James could do with a financial boost.

That is, he was most needful besides Denise. She said it in the final episode before the finale, how the cutesy or the cool would get extended gigs modeling, acting, etc., but she would be going back to her seven-dollar-an-hour job as a lunch lady if she didn’t place in the final three/didn’t win.

Now, again, pitiable states do not a deserving winner make, necessarily. But look how far Denise DID make it, with her under-the-radar, non-confrontational, but enduring strategy (akin to previous season winner Sandra Diaz Twine’s).

So when she tells Jeff Probst and us during the reunion how she is not only still poor because of the work she did as a school lunch lady but was let go because she was too much of a distraction, and when Probst announces that word just arrived from THE Mark Burnett that Denise would receive 50k to help her family while she worked now as a janitor cleaning our toilets, we are touched.
Or, okay, tickled that Burnett is making a continued good name for himself and for “Survivor” (which we are reminded is the most-watched Thursday night show in the country). Or, we are, maybe, righteous for Denise and all the everywomen who get the short end of the stick as common plebes who are “too much of a distraction” when they return…, righteous over how absurd it is that kids in a lunch line (we’re not talking MATH CLASS, here, but lunch…, LUNCH) are “too distracted” by Denise’s new fame, which is all it was, acclaim, not fortune, until Burnett gave her a deserving income. Or, maybe we questioned Denise’s interpretation of why she had to changed from one working class station in life to another, questioned that maybe, just maybe, the Douglas (?) school system principle/administrators did not fire her for fame but for having been away so long that she had to be replaced so the little brats could still get fed that institutional wonder they call food?

Because then AGAIN…, word is now that Denise Martin fabricated her loss(es) and got the sympathy handout from the CBS tycoon.

K, that just means, well, means Denise, while she may not have outplayed or outlasted, did indeed outwit. Grin.

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