What to do, what to do. Alias is in reruns, 24 has disappeared, and The Shield and The Sopranos will be on whenever. It's the slow time of year for sports, and both of the local baseball teams are falling out of contention. Oh well, only six days til the next episode of Who Wants to Marry My Dad?

Up until now, I've successfully avoided Reality TV, in all of its manifestations. I saw the final episode of Joe Millionaire, and most of the last episode of Survivor 2, but that's it. It's not that I'm a snob or anything, but I'm just not into middle-brow culture. If something's not good enough to bear repeated viewing, the way I could when I had seven different HBO channels during the first season of Six Feet Under, I don't bother.

Who Wants to Marry My Dad? is something different, a reality show without a smidgen of reality to it. The basic premise is that the children of this affluent resident of Glendale, California, have to judge a group of women, hand-picked by the producers, who are candidates to be their future step-mom. Each week, they eliminate one woman, usually after a series of highly personal questions are asked while she is hooked up to a lie detector. At the end, presumably, one woman will be left, and she and the dad will get married and go on a honeymoon.

In short, it's a car wreck waiting to happen. One of the women last night confirmed under polygraphic examination that she had fallen in love with Dad, who was forced to admit to his children that he felt nothing for her. Perhaps to avoid having the poor lass do something extreme, the children decided to keep her, and dump another hapless contestant, who was made to disappear by 80's-era magicians Penn and Teller. Almost everything about the show is cheesy and cringe-inducing, from the slow-mo reaction shots of the kids as they watch the polygraph examinations, to the voyeuristic scenes of them watching Dad make out with one of the ladies on a TV monitor.

But that's not the real reason I watch. Christy Fichtner is. Ms. Fichtner, in case you don't know, was the 1986 Miss U.S.A. winner, a contest particularly famous for its runner-up, a certain Miss Ohio named Halle Berry. According to this site, she is the most beautiful first runner-up in Miss Universe history, and may arguably be the most gorgeous Miss U.S.A. winner ever. Divorced for over five years, with three sons, competing against assorted thirty- and forty-somethings in this idiotic contest, she dominates the same way Randy Johnson would against a high school team. Ms. Berry deserved to lose then, and she would lose again now.

As I understand, though, she is not the favorite to win. That would be in keeping with her shock loss in the 1986 Miss Universe pageant, when she went in heavily favored, only to lose to Miss Venezuela, a result that still rankles objective observers of beauty pageants in the same way that Roy Jones Jr.'s loss in the 1988 Summer Olympics does to boxing fans. In fact, as the controversy over Miss Universe 2003 indicates, boxing is the most appropriate sports analogy to the world of beauty pageants: regional biases abound, and knowing who the promoters are will give a pretty good indication of who is most likely to win.

Whether her attitude rubbed people the wrong way back then may be a subject of speculation (she would hardly be the first contestant to fly to and from the pageant in her family's private jet, and at least she didn't spook one of her rivals by telling her how "fat and ugly" she looked in a swimsuit), but she is definitely having problems getting her potential step-daughters, who have made ominous complaints that she doesn't love their dad, she's just wants to win, yadda yadda yadda (that was after she dove into the family pool in a very elegant bikini to start their first date), to warm to her.


Christy Fichtner

Any way, her potential step-sons seem to like her. She has made the final three, and with two episodes to go (assuming that there isn't a "best-of" episode before the finale), America will hold its collective breath to see if she can finally win one. After that, I think I'll kiss off reality TV for good.

UPDATE: She made the Finals !!