But let’s turn our minds to higher things, to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, in New Mexico, where five secular and lumpily various dudes (an alcoholic, a Marine, an ex-con, etc.) are getting to grips with the spiritual life in TLC’s The Monastery. For 40 days and 40 nights these men are living and praying alongside their hosts, a community of 30 Benedictines. Huge tranches of solitude and silence, advanced states of boredom, mental attrition; four hours of psalm-chanting every day — to quote D Boon, this ain’t no picnic. Last week Alex the Marine bumped heads with chiseled ascetic Brother Joseph Gabriel, the monastery’s enforcer/terminator, when he slumped sullen in his pew instead of standing up like all the other brothers; this week he raided the community’s larder for beer and slurped it defiantly in his cell. Notes on Alex: 23 years old, lost his leg in Fallujah, pale eyebrows and ginger sideburns (the difference in color suggestive of some interior process of combustion, hotter at the core), narrowed eyes and a Halloween grin. Reminiscent in manner of Metallica’s James Hetfield. Can the monks crack him? Jon the firefighter, meanwhile, finds the God of the Psalms to be a “bi-polar egomaniac” and worries that putting his trust in his fellow man will reduce him to the state of a “hillbilly moron.” It appears that next week the men will be compelled to shave their heads. I look forward in particular to seeing the well-tended locks of Warren, the sci-fi buff and ex-druid, falling in glossy coils around his feet.
They’re still weeding ’em out over at CMT’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. Perusing photos of the girls in their uniforms, DCC director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammell were characteristically merciless. “She looks short and heavy,” murmured Finglass, an ex-cheerleader herself, her face blowtorched into a mask of disdain by decades of Texas UV. Trammell happily agreed, “You don’t want to see it, but you do!” Last week, you may remember, bumbling rookie Meaghan Flaherty was ordered to school herself in graciousness by reading a biography of Jackie O. This week her humiliation was completed when she was forced to give a book report before the whole squad. “Posture! Tuck your bottom in!” hissed Judy Trammell as Meaghan lurched blinking to her feet.
Her speech, sadly, was a brief vortex of illiteracy ending in pure enigmatic Bushspeak: “Jackie Onassis . . . She made an effect on the things that she did.” All right!
Next time: more randy meerkats, disconsolate Ultimate Fighters, and the nightmare life-in-death that is the Celebrity Paranormal Project, in which a distinguished company of supermodels, Survivor winners, and fitness gurus spend the night in an abandoned insane asylum. Stay tuned.
