If I Was a Rich Girl

I have been incredibly blessed in recent months to be surrounded by a wonderfully supportive group of friends and family as I try to work through my reality-TV addiction. But, of course, there will always be people who are more than willing to slip me a shot of Survivor or a snort of Top Chef and then I’m right back where I started. My most recent relapse occurred last week in the great state of Maryland, where I was introduced (by an enabling family member) to a new waste of time: Bachelor Pad. 

The Lawyer Barbies and Doctor Kens of Bachelor Pad

 

Have you seen this? I don’t watch The Bachelor or Bachelorette (I know, shocking that there are reality shows that I can’t actually tolerate) and therefore found no use for the aptly named Bachelor Pad. But what else is there to do on a rainy, cold Monday evening?

I actually kept my superior attitude -- holding fast to the belief that, although I’m more than happy to waste hours on the Housewives, I would never be so desperate as to give even a second of my time to the Bachelor or any of its shoot-offs -- for about 30 seconds. I don’t think they’d even finished recapping the previous week’s episode and I’d already thrown aside the project I’d been intending to work on, giving my full, awed attention to the whining and backstabbing in front of me.

There were two things that struck me most about this show: first, the overwhelming number of synthetically altered bodies all in one place. I had no idea the plethora of things that a woman (or man – I’m looking at you, Jake Pavelka) could have nipped, tucked, injected, plucked, shaved, implanted, waxed, plumped-up, or plumped down. This show really is an educational experience. Maybe they’ll start rerunning it on PBS, right after Sesame Street.

The second thing I noticed was that these people are idiots. I mean, it stands to reason that if you attempt to make yourself resemble Barbie in every possible way, your brain isn’t far to follow; and let’s be honest, Lawyer Barbie is more Elle Woods than Marcia Clark.

It could be argued that by simply allowing themselves to be filmed for the show, they’ve displayed a severe lack of intelligence – or, at the very least, judgment – but what struck me even more is how absolutely uninformed they were about how much (or how little) money they could potentially win.

They all had grand ideas of how to spend the prize money, pledging to buy their moms a house, their dads a car, and the entire country of Indonesia, all with their $15K winnings. (It was actually more like $125K, but still…) Note to the Barbies and Kens of Bachelor Pad: just because it sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t mean it actually is a lot of money – or that it will allow you to buy a multitude of high-priced items. It's not 1946. A hundred thousand dollars does not a millionaire make. 

Maybe if we’re lucky, they’ll take $10 of those winnings and buy themselves a clue.