Kenley Doesn't Give an EFF

 Kenley and the cat clock dress

I have a new favorite show. Destroyed in Seconds. It’s on Discovery. The whole show is about stuff getting wrecked and smashed and obliterated: cars, buildings, planes, towns; all the things a person can think about destroying get thoroughly decimated. In the episode I just watched, this one guy in Colorado got himself a bulldozer and then armored it with layers of steel and poured concrete, and then he went on a town-destroying rampage. His real-life Killdozer was, luckily, caught on tape while doing its thing. He even won a game of chicken with this other giant construction vehicle, and he just shoved the whole thing out of his way. I spent all three viewings of this footage -- twice for me, one to share with special friends -- fantasizing about having my own steel-reinforced battering ram and just driving down Wilshire, letting valet guys have fun parking it, crushing the vehicles of celebrities I find annoying. Like…well, dang, I had this whole rant written naming names of famous people’s cars I’d like to see compacted and then I realized that if someone actually went and played out my Killdozer fantasies by proxy that I’d get sued for it like Judas Priest by those suicide kids' parents. 

Why couldn’t this entire season of Project Runway have been more like Destroyed in Seconds? Why no challenges that involved ejecting from a burning air-show plane and sewing a chic parachute before hitting the ground? Why not more fireballs in the Parsons workroom? Why no Tim Gunn careening through Diane von Furstenberg’s showroom in an out-of-control Saturn? Why, oh Runway, was this your least awesome season ever? WHY NO REUNION SHOW?! (And by the way, the blog called Project Rungay did its own pretty darn funny reunion show composed of still photos and captions, and I recommend it. I have no idea who does that blog. I’m not part of its "street team" or anything. But I like to help out fellow obsessives where I can. You’re welcome, PRgay; it’s a near-certainty that tens of readers will now check you out.) 

I’m watching tonight’s finale with the usuals: Xtreem Aaron, his ex-BF Gary, and our friend Job (rhymes with “strobe”). The husband-partner-whatever lugs himself into the living room too and announces, “I can say it now: I have lost whatever give-a-shit-ness I had for this show. I no longer care.” 

“I care,” I whisper earnestly. “I care a lot.” And just then, neighbor Jill walks in the front door unannounced, needing the Pyrex dish she brought over a couple days before. It used to be filled with a homemade meat pie. Now it contains the memory of meat pie. She knows I still like Kenley, in spite of it all -- because I enjoy chaos when it’s safely contained inside a TV -- and asks, “Who do you want to win, Dave?” 

“Terri,” I say. Everyone in our house agrees that Terri was the raddest. But the past is past and it ain’t coming back. We have to pick up the pieces of our lives and move on. Gary wants snacks. We have Rice Krispie treats and Cheez-Its. Also beers. “Don’t eat all my Cheez-Its,” Xtreem Aaron says to Gary. “That box is part of my earthquake-readiness kit. How did they even get opened? Who’s been eating all my Cheez-Its?” 

I’m about to unpause the TiVo and start the show, and now Job wants a retraction for something I wrote about him in an earlier recap. His beef is that, by omission, by stating that only XA and I were pro-Kenley, that I had painted Job as a Kenley-hater when in reality he’s actually Kenley-ambivalent, Kenley-unconcerned. His favorite is Leanne, and she has been his Cat Power-y choice since the first episode. There. Record set straight. 

Opening caption on bottom of screen as I finally unpause TiVo: 3 DAYS UNTIL RUNWAY SHOW 

The final three ladies enter the Bluefly workroom and Tim Gunn hurries in behind them. Somewhere, off-camera, lurk Jerell, Suede, and Joe. They showed at Fashion Week too because Runway hadn’t finished kicking them off yet by the time the big event rolled around. I wish we could see where they were the whole time. Did they just have to set up their work space in the alley outside somewhere? Did the producers make the guys give the ladies piggyback rides to different places? Did they get a worse craft services table? These are questions I have. No one ever answers them. So many secrets in TV production. 

Tim Gunn tells them that it’s time to pick models. Leanne goes straight to the highly desirable subset of big-buggy-eyed Close Encounters-headed Eastern European models. For several years now those girls -- Leanne calls them the alien-looking ones -- have been all over the place. I notice shit like this. War-haunted faces = hot hot hot. During the casting Korto, Leanne, and Kenley josh around like old pals, all playing nice, getting jokey about swiping each other’s girls. Oh, us. We’re so fun. Meanwhile, Jerell, Joe, and Suede are down the block at the check cashing/pay-your-electric-bill-here place begging random strangers to walk in their shows. 

Then Tim Gunn comes back to the workroom to get a first look at their completed collections. He starts with Kenley, who has, against reason, decided not to remove those black ropes from anything she affixed them to on the previous episode. Tim tells her that the ropes are not “organic” and that they “strangle” the pieces. And then? Kenley says, “I have to disagree with that. I’m sorry.” 

Whoa! Someone’s been going to finishing school in her months away from the show, maybe even the one Mary J. Blige went to. Tim responds courteously in return and backs off. “Well,” says Gary, “What you didn’t see was her giving him the double bird when his back was turned. And then she called him a faggot.” 

But we get back a little of Old Kenley when he asks her if she’s going to send the Alexander McQueen-y wedding dress down the runway with the same model wearing it, reinviting the judges to dislike it for its similarity (read: near-exact copy) of the earlier, more famous dress. Kenley adopts her buffalo stance and tells Tim Gunn that she’s not going to let the judges boss her around and that they tell her that her pieces look knocked-off frequently and that “I’m sick of it. It’s insulting.” She fails to get inside her armored, concrete-reinforced Kenleydozer and crush the life out of Tim Gunn, but in her mind I think it’s happening. As Tim Gunn walks away he makes a “I just got told, but by a crazy young woman, so it kind of doesn’t count, yet watch me as I back away slowly all the same” kind of face. That’s a shot I need to look at a few times.

Finally, though, Kenley concedes that Tim Gunn might have a point and makes the decision to take her lead model Topacio (I think that’s how you spell her name) out of the wedding dress so that…what? The dress suddenly becomes magically different? I’m not sure what the logic is here. But whatever. I’ve paused the TiVo because Job’s telling us all about the time he unsuccessfully burgled a post office once when he was 18. Totally got arrested for it. It’s exciting to have actual crime-makers in my home. Then he says, “There’s something Kermit-y about Tim Gunn,” which leads to a discussion of how it would be awesome to see Tim Gunn singing “Rainbow Connection” in a No on Prop. 8 ad. For you non-Californians, Prop. 8 is the asshole christian-right constitutional amendment that would ban marriage for people of the same sex. You know they think that if it doesn’t pass then the next thing would be frogs marrying pigs. KILLDOZE!