I finally got a chance to watch last week’s episode of Top Chef, starring high school pal and fellow Shakespeare enthusiast Ash. They made a nice comment about his food, so that was pleasing, and kind of made me wish I hadn’t gone around vehemently contradicting the story that he and I had kissed back in my freshman year of high school.
As exciting as it is to see Ash on the TV, the show itself is weird. It seems odd, for example, that people are so disgusted by that sexist Mike guy when the real villains are obviously the producers, judges, hosts and whoever chooses the relentlessly manipulative soundtrack. I mean, here are all these awesome professional chefs and they’re forced to live in a giant house with each other, with roommates, blech, and undergo idiotic challenges concocted by people with no respect for food, and occasionally get dissed by a skeletal woman who is obviously subsisting on hairspray and the three bites of dinner she has in each episode. And then people are astonished that sometimes one of them says something kind of dumb? If it were me, I’d be reduced to making stuttery vowel sounds on camera and dribbling.
What I need is for Ash to get a show on the Food Network, where he can just come into a TV kitchen and talk to the camera in a nice calming way for half an hour and at the end of it I know how to make something Southern or French. But until that happens, I will go on watching this and gnawing my fingernails to bits.
Mind you, I’m sure he will win. It’s just that the goddamn soundtrack makes me nervous.