Southern Belles Louisville: The Belles Toll a Toneless Farewell

So this uncomfortable little Real Housewives Lite knockoff has come and gone like the slightly queasy morning after a night spent consuming a surfeit of questionable seafood.

I did get a small chortle when one of them accidentally alluded to their not having known each other from Adam's old fox before the show.

Shea will, and should, end up marrying Joey from Real World Cancun.

I have known about 8 dozen versions of Shea over the years, and she always ends up marrying Joey from Real World Cancun.

Her obligatory post-emotional trauma drastic hair change is an object lesson for fair-complected brunettes everywhere: No matter what anybody tells you about how lightening your hair will make you look soft and youthful, do NOT do it without first experimenting with a wig to make sure that it does not totally ERASE you!

If we cared to dig deeply enough, which I don't, the "real dirt" we would probably uncover is that they were all recovering from unsuccessful attempts at modeling careers, or unsuccessful attempts at thinking about one, and that Julie is the only one who owns up to it. And will probably be the only Belle who, as a result of the show, achieves it.

I loved her nail polish at the dinner in the opening segment!

It was this really pretty dark burgundy color, which means that while it is perfect on cinnamon-dusted Julie, it probably wouldn't work on dirty mustard-dusted Weimeraner me. Burgundy clothes work fine, but every burgundy nail polish I have tried just makes my hands look sickly, especially now that both sun exposure and melanin production have been discontinued.

But I digress.

I also really liked Hadley's silver necklace at the going-away party, and I hate her for having a big ass enough head to be able to wear a wide headband like that, especially a tacky silver lace one. But I would do one that was silver lace all around, not lame elastic in the back. What was she thinking?

So captivated was I by that silver lace, that while Shea was strolling around Jeff's Dream House, I developed a love-hate relationship with that over-Bedazzled prostitution whore of a black and silver car coat.

I was glad to see that Kellie came to her senses, but I am still so annoyed by the very existence of that butt-fugly gray sweater of hers with that enormous turtleneck. Maybe it's supposed to be ironic. Come to think of it, that whole enveloped in giant folds of bulkachunk wool seems to be a sort of sartorial leitmotif for her. Is it that cold in Louisville?

If you can get past all that supersize knitting, Kellie is a sort of Modern Today version of a classical Dutch Baroque beauty, and it's a shame that at her age, she still doesn't know what to do with it.

Speaking of people standing around holding giant lumps of beauty, turning it over and over in their hands and looking puzzled, I would really like to get a hold of Hadley's mama. Although that haircut has become ubiquitous and tiresome, it's the only thing she's doing right. It also appears to be the only thing she's doing.

But she did make me spend several minutes wondering if I should ask my hair designer if she thinks I should add spiky bangs to my own copy of the ubiquitous and tiresome haircut.

I so miss the squillion different length layers hairdo that looked like it had been done with a Weed-Whacker. When is that one coming back in style? I didn't even have to comb it. Plus if you have very coarse, straight hair like I do, it will naturally stick out in all directions, giving the illusion of volume.

I would be very surprised if funding is found for a season 2 of this forlorn thing. The hamsters were spectacularly unremarkable, and failed to produce enough sensation or drama to compensate for that.

Southern Belles Louisville: Lord, this show makes me preachy!

Mercifully, subsequent episodes of this show have not been quite as "raw" as the "premiere," maybe it was just a learning curve thing, with the 1st couple of airings taking viewers along for the ride - an extra bonus layer of "reality" as the producers figure out just how much of that commodity viewers should be asked to stomach.

To atone for past sins, the last couple of episodes have featured some frankly comical overstaging - like the "slumber party," but it's Julie's "babysitting" sequence that, for all its hilarity, gives our suspension of disbelief a serious workout!

First, we are asked to accept the idea that Julie, in the 35 years she has been alive, has never spent so much as an hour or two alone with any children.

From there we glide into the idea that her first-ever conversation with her father on the subject of whether she might one day wish to be a parent occurred last week, and then it is just a hop-skip to Julie's grand Epiphany that in order to find out how becoming a mother would change her life, she should spend an afternoon babysitting - not one, not two, not even three - but FOUR small children!

Enter two of Julie's good friends - each with two daughters of about the same age - two sets of extremely telegenic sisters, one pair blonde, one pair brunette, all completely at ease with lights, crew and camera.

Of course we only see what makes it out of the editing room, but it does not appear that the two sets of sisters have ever played together before. All the interaction between the children that we are shown involves sister playing with sister. Kids who know each other would be much more likely to pair off according to age, kids who have never met will tend to interact with their respective sibling.

This show just might be a contender for the Mostest.Audrinage.Ever reality show tradition award - if some, even most, of the cast of the various Real Housewives shows were only glancingly acquainted with each other prior to the first day of shooting, the Belles' lack of shared "history" is glaring.

Nevertheless, as I continue to watch it, I find that it provides as much fodder for sober refection as for helpless giggling fits.

Kellie's situation, for example, is heart-rending, a grim reminder that whether it feels awkward, weird, even inappropriate, the time for the "Do You Want Kids?" talk (or more kids, if one of you has, like Kellie's Jeff, already obtained offspring) is preferably the second, but no later than the third date, BEFORE either party has had a chance to become "emotionally invested" enough to cause serious damage should there be a wide variance in their respective views on this subject.

It's a thought-provoking illustration that no matter how trashy the show, how stupid the script, or how inane the hamsters, even the lamest and most superficial television shows can educate, even illuminate, and this is something that every one of the "single ladies" - and their single brothers - who watch this show can "take away" from it, and receive the huge benefit of saving themselves from the kind of agony Kellie is suffering, an agony that would be even more emotionally eviscerating, even more causative of permanent harm, if Jeff were not such a tool.

At least when it is all over, she will have the comfort of relief that she did not make a permanent committment to a total asswipe.

Shea, who also has a Jeff, is confronting basically the same issue, at least in my view, since I don't make a large distinction on the basis of species.

Even if we lay aside their housing preferences - while Jeff dreams of mulching and mowing as proud handyman and householder, Shea's notion of the ideal home involves maid service and a spa on the premises - the real non-negotiable, potential deal-breaker is that Jeff comes with what is, for all practical purposes, a child.

The well-being of dependent family members who share one's home, whether human or not, can be neither relegated to the status of non-essential "extra," nor swept aside entirely, and anyone who would even consider such a thing is presenting empirical evidence that they are NOT husband material.

If they are capable of, much less willing, to renege on their committment to that being or beings, what could one expect who considers choosing such a person as life partner? And this goes both ways. If Shea can so easily dismiss the needs of Jeff's dog - well, in the case at hand, Shea has already been pretty upfront with Jeff about just what kind of living hell he could expect, and indeed the internet buzz is that he has wisely delivered himself - and his pupdog - from such a grisly fate, and empowered Shea to return to the garden to seek a more suitably crushable flower.

That this match was doomed was pretty much foretold in every frame of Shea-and-Jeff footage that made it to air, and in case there were any doubts, it was writ large in big red flags in the scene where Shea takes Jeff for a pre-marital counseling session with an gentleman who looks eeriely like Emily's creepy dad. Shea believes that the counseling will prevent her from ending up divorced like her parents.

"I have changed so much for you," Jeff blurts. Shea asserts that she has seen no change, but whether she has or not, whether it is even objectively true or not, if such a sentiment is in the heart of either party, that relationship is dead in the water.

Ideally, true love does change us, in that it makes us want to be, and become, better people, the best version of ourselves, but that's several galaxies away from Jeff's orbit.

As always, even as we keep in mind that the footage of each hamster is deliberately edited for the purpose of drawing a particular "character," we are also obliged to recognize the flip side of that: no matter what they leave out, no matter how they change or remove from context entirely - if the hamster doesn't say or do it, they won't have it to leave in.

Although it may be that Shea's footage is edited frame by frame in order to paint for us a portrait of a woman completely devoid of substance, if we assess the footage that she has given them to work with, we can come to no other conclusion that she is either a talented actress or that there really is no "there" there.

Internet personality aklein has called Emily "painful to watch." She has, aiklen remarks sadly, "emotional maturity of a 12 year old."

It's hard to come up with a credible rebuttal to that.

I am so not the appropriate person to defend any of these hamsters, but in fairness, there was a scene where Emily's Xtreme Cage Match Creepy dad was ragging on her about her hair, while Mama just sits there and says nothing, and there was something about it that looked like it was one of the more natural and effortless bits of footage we are likely to see on any reality show. I got the distinct feeling Emily heard that song with dismal regularity, just another number in CreepyDaddy's extensive repertoire of Pick on Emily showstoppers.

Whether Emily's dad is "for real" or not is a tough call. On the one hand, we have all known people with the misfortune of having parents like that. If it's a role and he is an actor, he has certainly "committed" to the character. He has it down, down to the teensiest creepy nuance.

This is probably born more of wishful thinking for Emily's sake than concrete perception, but a couple of times he has appeared to be mugging for the camera in an almost SpencerPrattian cartoon villain face mode.

I would be willing to bet that there is a connection between Emily's emotional development issues and having grown up with a father who considers his daughter having physically "matured too early" as a sort of inexpiable indiscretion, an unforgivable transgression for which he is still reprimanding her even as her thirtieth (or 30-something) birthday approaches.

Emily is presented to us as the classic damaged bird, her plumage dulled by a lifetime of stern reproaches for having ever had any plumage, without an ally, reviled in the nest which should have nurtured her, and which she now fears to leave, torn between what remaining shreds she has of natural, healthy instincts to go forth and be a person, pitted against the sheer terror of displeasing the father she has never, can never please, who has devoted himself to steadily and relentlessly breaking her down, convincing her that she is essentially incapable of personhood, and her female role model appears to conform to that ideal. Emily's mother is painted as a non-entity, an empty cipher who silently accepts Ogre Dad's condemnation of her daughter.

Her determination to move to Las Vegas may not be the shrewdest move, nor her aspirations of becoming a high profile broadcast journalist the best match for her aptitudes and abilities, but that she has enough "oomph" left into her to recognize and follow the self-preservation instinct to get the hell away from her toxic Daddy is a positive and hopeful sign.

Ironically, while it is Emily who dreams of becoming a TV star, it is Hadley the Flounderer who has the face for it, though she, too, appears to suffer from an extreme case of arrested emotional development, in some ways even more fundamental and deep-seated. So much so that if I were obliged to bet on which of the two would "succeed," in terms of growing into a whole and functional person, I would put my money on Emily.

The character of Hadley is as materially empty and vacuous as Shea, at least as she is presented to us, and as always with the understanding that she could be acting, playing a role that was assigned to her.

Lord, this show makes me preachy!

Southern Belles Louisville - Not Suitable for Sensitive Viewers

May all applicable deities, djinns and spirits be invoked, and my household instructed to inform visitors, in hushed tones, that I am laid upon the bed!

I have watched the "Real Housewives," in all its various ghastly iterations. I have squee!ed and shuddered in delighted disgust with the best of them in the unspeakably lurid parade of the majestic oeuvre of Chris Abrego, each more grandiloquently repellent than the last.

So what is it about the seemingly innocuous-by-comparison Southern Belles Louisville that makes my flesh crawl?

It took me a while to figure it out, but I think, to put it as politely as possible, that it is the diminished suspension of disbelief requirement.

With all due respect to DiVello, Abrego, et al, their creations give the senses an "out." The much-decried obviously scripted and totally UN-real nature of the reality shows to which we have become accustomed permit us to emerge from our viewing experience comforted, even if subconsciously, by the knowledge that it is "just a show," a work of fiction no different from Ong Bak or Original Recipe Exorcist.

But somehow, Southern Belles Louisville, whether due to artistic intent on the part of the director or exceptional dramatic talent on the part of the cast, fails to provide that cooling spray of reassurance.

These hamsters, this reality show, cranks the realness up a couple of notches past my viewing pleasure center.

Maybe it is just the unavoidable damning by faint praise of calling these characters "better drawn" than the typical Rock of Love skank, a sort of superficial pseudo-documentary version of Arendt's banality of evil.

Or maybe it's because that banality hits a little too close to home in ways that at least for most of us, Bikini Corrie and Heidi Montag do not.

While relatively few of us can make such a claim about Saaphyri or Brittanya, if we are to be brutally honest, and leaving aside any and all distinctions of geographical or cultural context, most of us have, at some point in our lives, known these Belles.

And even more poignantly, most of us will have, at some point in our lives, faced the sad task of comforting their hapless Beaux.

The Belles' grisly payload of skeeve is not about just another gaggle of bimbos "suckin back" on the glorified screwdriver whose current popularity has no doubt caused the descendants of that crafty old imperialist Lauchlin Rose to ceaselessly bless his crusty old opportunistic soul, nor is it yet another stream of glittering scenes of yet another charity event where the total sum of funds raised is slightly less than price paid by most of the attendees for their gowns.

If we are tempted to gasp at the incogitant cruelty of Hadley, as she describes her dream wedding standing two feet from the man who has just declared himself and been spurned, what really gets us is the look on his face. That's just a smoosh realer than I like my reality, thanks just the same.

Hadley actually breaks two hearts in the course of the first episode. Her best friend, who, though presented to us as a "ladies man," has the words "quintessential nice guy" painted all over his every word and gesture, is also in love with her, and meets the same sad fate as his rival.

If we can manage to move past the cringeworthy pathos of those sorry little scenes, we are obliged to acknowledge that it would be disingenuous, not to mention impossible, to completely divorce the show's zeitgeist from cultural context.

On the contrary, we are hit in the face with the social costs of a culture in which some of the children remain children until they are well into their thirties.

If Hadley displays the emotional nescience of a teenaged girl, Emily seems similarly oblivious to the gilded cage from which she acts out "her dream."

Thanks to parents depicted as annoying salt of the earth folksy folks who dine at a card table adorned with a bottle of supermarket salad dressing, whose down-home working class ethos belies their inherited millions, in return for some relatively mild belittling of her unremarkable hairstyle choices, Emily receives the safety net that permits her to eschew a seat in the family boardroom in favor of a low-wage fun job at the local TV station.

The Belles' blondetourage is rounded out by Kellie, the obligatory divorcee "waiting for her settlement," currently obliged to live in a modest home that she petulantly boasts would have fit into the garage of the residence provided by her erstwhile spouse. The poor thing has even been reduced to using one of the bedrooms as a closet, to accomodate the designer spoils of her late marriage. At 32, Kellie declares she wants to have her own money now. She wants her settlement, dammit!

Of all the Belles, Julie is the least fleshed out, at least in the first episode, where her role seems to be primarily that of Culture Victim. A low-end fashion model in her mid-thirties, she is now subjected to the indignity of being told she could get work in ad campaigns looking for "soccer mom types." As the camera moves from the decade-old glamour shots in her book to her face upon hearing this verdict from a smug-faced agent, the narrator doesn't have to say a word. The strains of the leitmotif of heartbreak swell as clearly as if sounded by a score of violins. Julie's story is trite but true. The Youth Culture really does destroy lives and souls. Well, duh.

Speaking of narration, apparently Shea does need some. We hear her background described as "nouveaux riche," against a montage that screams "Ya think?" If ever reality show has shown us a stereotype, Shea is it. Her shallowness and vapidity soar to cartoonish near-Hills quality heights. She has captured, it would seem, the heart of a suitor, but pouts that she has no ring. She takes him shopping for one. He would, he says, need to sell both kidneys in order to afford one that she would wear.

Shea is the creepiest of all because if you have known only one Belle in your lifetime, whether you knew her in Louisville, Lagos or Lhasa, in the 20s, the 60s, the 80s, she's the one you knew.

Maybe you know her today. And even if you missed it, you just know she had a really amazing Super Sweet Sixteen.