America's Next Top Hoochie Mama

Having watched every season of ANTM to-date - and Tyra's endless parade of wigs - I was excited to tune in to the latest "cycle" of the show (which, appropriately, makes the show sound like it's focused on a bunch of women on the PMS-verge - and I'm not just talking about J. Alexander).

No surprises tonight - there is the Tyra look-alike, the J. Alexander pre-op tranny look-alike, the short-haired gamine wanna be Audrey Hepburn (a nod to judge Twiggy), an Eastern European import (something _____ova), a girl who would be better off going straight to soft-core porn (and who will, but only after she's gotten into at least one catfight and then is summarily eliminated during the "look classy" challenge), the "plus-size" model (the only one at a healthy weight) who will never win, but who they like to shame and mortify before eliminating, and, of course, the girl with some disorder-du-jour (lupus, ADD...ironically, it's never an eating disorder and they don't "count" sheer stupidity).

Lack of surprise twists notwithstanding, what tonight's show DID bring was:

1. A new word for our ANTM lexicon (William Safire take note);

and,

2. Another mind-blowingly bizarre challenge and the hilariously insane judging commentary to go with it.

We'll start with #1. A new noun for the OED, or at least the TGFD (Tyra Ghetto Fabulous Dictionary) - Hoochification.

Hoochification (hoo-chi-fih-kay-shun), noun
1. The state of acting or looking like a hoochie-mama, ie, slutty, cheap or whoreish, like a prostitute.
2. Verb form - Hoochify (hoo-chi-fie), to make oneself - or to render a situation or photo (in the case of a model) - whoreish, slutty or cheap. As in..."Girl, did you just HOOCHIFY that shot of you wearing a mini skirt sitting at the vanity?" "You need to de-HOOCHIFY yourself in the next photo shoot, or you will no longer be in the running to become America's Next Top Model."

Now...we move on to tonight's challenge and the post-mortem judging commentary. In tonight's show, the girls were asked to pose for a dualistic photo shoot - kind of a quasi-PSA for the American Lung Association and the stop smoking campaign. Each girl had to pose for a "high fashion glamour shot" of herself sucking down a tar stick, a nicotine time-bomb. Then, the girl had to pose for the "fallout" shot depicting the aftereffects/side effects of smoking. The girl who drew the short straw (or cigarillo, if you will) got to pose as a chemo patient - and then others ranged from the tumor-sticking-out-of-face-femme-fatal(e) to heinous-gingivitis-girl to "damn, I used to look good before I started smoking, but now my face is sunken in and I have huge bags under my eyes" woman.

After the girls were submitted to looking ugly for the first time in their lives (the only thing that maybe could have redeemed the challenge), the judges proceeded to comment on the photos. "Girl, you made that post-chemo hair look FIERCE," or "You worked that face tumor OUT, darlin," or "You just didn't rock the gum disease HARD ENOUGH, sister, I'm sorry to say that you have been eliminated."

After the challenge, Tyra made a distressing announcement - this "cycle" would be a smoke-free zone, because girls everywhere are looking up to these contestants as beacons of hope, upstanding citizens of the world (0r maybe it was humanity, like the jeans?), pillars of the community...you know, self-obesssed gals who have eating disorders and self-image issues. The girls looked at each other in terror as they realized that the staple of their diets - and the only thing they had in common - cigarettes, were being taken away. The horror!

Thank god Tyra didn't say it was a crack-free show this season, because I think she and the other judges need to keep smoking it to really take their jobs seriously.