MRSA Is the New Black

Remember HIV and how people used to be scared of it? Those were the days, running around being terrified of something that might possibly kill you some day in the vague near or not-so-near future. But then, weirdly enough, maybe you’d live. Like for a LONG time. Like Larry Kramer. He’s the author of the mind-blowing ’70s novel Faggots, a book where all the gays in it are never not engaging in anal sex with about 37 people at once. And in the rare moments when they’re not doing that, they’re scheming disco-y ways to self-destruct. Anyway, that book and that guy are both amazing. And Kramer more or less invented not-dying-of-AIDS. He also invented AIDS activism, which is why people get to not-die-from-AIDS for much lengthier periods of time now. He even continues to not-die-of-AIDS as we speak. But I’m off track. I should be talking about Jack, the HIV-positive contestant who’s been that way for 17 years. He’s not dying of AIDS right now, but on this week’s episode he gets the new thing that people are totally dying of left and right, the superbug staph, a.k.a. MRSA, which stands for…um…multiple resistance staph…uh…amoebas. Or something. Anyway, it’s serious shit, and if you get it, you can die pretty quickly, which freaks me out heartily, I must say. The other crazy thing is that it seems to be everywhere and easy to get. You don’t even have to be having gay sex to get it. So I’ve decided never to leave my house again now. Thanks, Project Runway. You feed my extreme hypochondria the big stylish spoonfuls of panic and paranoia that it needs to keep going. And failing a plastic-bubble existence in my own home, I'm going off to New Mexico to wherever that place is that Julianne Moore ended up at the end of Safe, living in a ceramic yurt that’s hosed down with rubbing alcohol on an hourly basis. I’ll adapt.

But before we get to Jack’s swelling and departure, I have to examine another snippet of the opening credits. This season’s really do seem designed to instill disdain and hatred in the viewer, presenting even the nicest, most talented, coolest contestants in the worst imaginable light. Like the shot where Jillian is curtseying like a doofussy 6-year-old while Ricky and one of his most rotten hats walks up behind her. His walk is either his impersonation of John Travolta in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever or it’s his attempt to come off “street,” or how he’d teach the girls on America’s Next Top Model to walk if only Miss Jay would just go ahead and ask for his opinion already about the way things ought to be done.

The sun rises on Gotham apartments, where Sweet P is busy fiddling with something in a box and Jillian is grooving on a croissandwich of some sort, squeezing a packet of gloopy whatever onto it. Which reminds me of a recent Chick-Fil-A experience. I ordered one of their breakfast sausage-on-a-biscuit things, and the teenage counter girl asked me if I wanted grape jelly with it. She held out the packet of grape jelly for me as I stared blankly back at her; she was all ready to let it drop into my waiting palm like it was going to be the most natural and obvious thing ever to just say yes to that, even though I’d never thought about putting grape jelly on a sausage biscuit before. I paused for maybe two seconds and then did, in fact, say “yes” back to her, because in those two seconds I thought about delicious bacon swimming in deliciouser syrup on a plate of pancakes and also about how I’m already in the habit of piling the fried chicken on top of waffles when I’m at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles over on Pico here in Los Angeles. And then I pour the syrup right on top of the fried chicken and eat it all at once like that. So the step to grape jelly on a sausage biscuit was really just a lateral one. I hope that’s what Jillian just squeezed on her croissandwich, some grape jelly. Everyone should know how nice that tastes.

Cut to Jack holding a wet compress-y thing up to his face and Kevin sort of half-grinning at his misfortune. On interview cam, Jack talks about what he thought was a pimple on the inside of his nose, only it got worse. And now we see his entire top lip swollen up bigger than when Goldie Hawn got collagen pillow lips as a bit in The First Wives' Club. It’s pretty intense. The swelling that is, not TheFirst Wives' Club. Or Goldie Hawn. He explains that he’s had skin staph infections before and he hopes that’s not what this is. Oh, and now he’s also actually joking about getting his collagen. So he and I are on the same page.

The next thing we see, all the designers are seated at the runway. Heidi walks out in her best PTA outfit: black-and-white houndstooth skirt, black top. Like a smart field-trip chaperone mom who backs out at the last moment and sends the nanny in her place. Then come the models, a bunch of middle-aged women wearing outfits that are way too big for them. Also gross. Nearly every single one of them is wearing something bland in a stupid buttercup yellow color or some swirly patterned puke-fest. Oh good, it’s another round of “design for the ‘everyday’ woman,” like they did last year when Jeffrey made Angela’s mom cry. I especially like watching them make the designers try to make stuff for women who are bigger than models, because you get to see them flailing. In the end you also get to see who talks a good game about “making all women feel beautiful” and who really means it. Of course, I also like it when they just flat-out say, “I don’t do plus-size,” or something equivalently moronic.

It turns out that all the women on stage have lost, in Heidi’s words, “a significant amount of weight” and that the shit-ugly outfits they’re wearing were their favorites from before they were skinnier. I think this is a lie. I think their favorite outfits were the ones they had six sizes ago that they can finally fit back into now. These tents were just tenty enough to cover them and minimize the shame. The great thing now is that they’ve all lost between 40 and 160 pounds -- each one of them delivering their pound-lossage announcement in a very host–of–Bronx Beat way. Even better, all of them have these excited looks on their faces, like, “Get the fuck out of my way! I’m going to go have sex!”

The challenge is to create a new outfit from the old, baggy, shapeless, ugly one. Christian, on interview cam, says, AGAIN, “Ohmuhgodumgonnadie.” So that one’s gaining on “fierce” as his favorite thing to say. But you know what happened to the boy who cried wolf, Christian? He got wolfed in the end. What if Jack decided to rub his MRSA all over you? Where would you be then? Possibly almost gonnadie for real, wouldn’t you? And speaking of Jack, why isn’t he already running off to the doctor? I’m having actual worried feelings for him. He’s nice, and I don’t want his face to fall off. He should be calling in the favor and making Christian carry him in a tote bag off to the ER, stat. That’s a medical word, by the way,“stat.” I don’t know what it means. But it’s what they say on Grey’s Anatomy when they’re not all busy calling each other “faggot.”

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