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OMG, we both have elbows. That’s so weird.
– How refreshing, in this post-Christmas episode of “The Real World: Denver,” that we finally get a reprieve from the drunken sex drama that dominated the previous weeks. OK, not really, but at least it shows a two-dimensional side of the roommates, as opposed to the cardboard cutouts we’ve seen before.
– As it opens we’re given some foreshadowing quotes from earlier episodes in which Brooke is seen walking through the terrifying cavern that is Denver International Airport, plus a line about Colie being a “kissing slut.” Will this lead to her being in the hospital? Will Brooke have a pointless freakout near Coors Field? Only time, and commercial breaks, will tell…
– Davis and Brooke start it out by walking around downtown, talking about how Brooke has depression and anxiety, which may explain why she randomly tries to cross the street on a red light. The boys are on the other side of town… er… three blocks away, theorizing on what the girls are doing. Which is, surprisingly, getting wasted.
– Unfortunately, after a night on the town Colie starts to feel like arse and returns home. Cut to the next day as she’s gently writhing in bed. Then some beautiful puking noises emanate from the bathroom. Thank god for those sensitive, omnipresent microphones. Alex comes down to check on her and, after asking what’s wrong, seems to recoil slightly. Colie calls her mom, who seems sympathetic to the fact that she’s apparently never been sick before, with the throat hurting and the pains and the mild fever.
– Colie calls one of her sorority sisters who has family in Denver, and — being the nice people that they are — they would “love to take her” to the hospital. They head over to ye olde isolation room at Rose Medical Center. Nurse Tony and Dr. Ryan inspect her and decide they need to give her a spinal tap. I mean… an IV. Either way, she reacts as if she’s having her jawbone removed. Somewhere in the neonatal ward, a newborn baby cries for her.
Mom… I never learned to read!
– And what should happen after the commercial break? There goes that screaming ambulance from the early season show previews, of course having nothing to do with the plot, even though the previews repeatedly implied it did. Colie’s friend Lindsay and her mom Mitzi (what a pair — they’re great at parties) are fretting in the waiting room while Dr. Ryan returns with a verdict: It’s mono! Colie can’t believe it. “Mono? You mean, kissing disease? I can’t believe this is really happening.”
– We get more interstitial shots of Denver’s glorious light rail and bike riders, then Alex talking to his mom about Colie’s virus. “There’s nothing that can really help her other than the comfort of her own home or her mom.” Yep. That and not making out with every human in a 20 foot radius for more than a day.
– Alex makes a sick couch for Colie, which Tyrie sensitively calls, “The lamest but nicest thing I’ve ever seen you do.” Agreed on both counts. It’s a center from which she can radiate her mono to the entire house. Efficient, yet pointless. Colie walks in, just back from the hospital, and proudly asks, “Guess who has mono?!”
Everybody in the house?
– Colie jokes that kissing Alex was the main reason she got it. But seriously folks, she’ll have to be really careful for the next five days if she wants to get better. That means not drinking from other people’s glasses and making out at bars with randoms — and then it’s all gravy. (Sorry, but unless you’ve just got a nasty head cold, mono lasts a bit longer than that. I had it in college and it f***ing sucked.)
– Brooke, inconvenienced by Colie’s sickness, hits the town for some “good food and makeup.” She tries to find a nail salon during this, her very first time alone in Denver (guess the camera crew and production assistants don’t count) and comes up short. She receives some lovely catcalls from creepy dudes in the Coors Field area, passing by Bar Bar and several other storied Mile High City dives. She returns to 1920 Market St. without getting her nails done, and according to her, the directions were either “wrong or too long.” She (rightly) takes offense to the people that yelled nice things like, “Hey baby, nice ass!”
One summer, one time, me and my dad built a log cabin with our BARE HANDS.
– After getting no love from her roommates, especially Tyrie, she tearfully exits to the phone room and shuts the door. A solo screaming bout leads to calling to her mom. I’m thinking that calling your mom is the theme here, as these regressive personalities are all too quick to lean on the teat that suckled them. Who can blame them? They’re mired in the dangerous, stressful ghetto that is Denver, Colorado. Keep your guns and crossbows close, people.
– Poor Brooke. She’s backed up a little bit. Perhaps some emotional Ex-Lax, as my friends David and Kathleen call it, is in order. Where’s that box o’ wine?
– Brooke tells her mom about going to the “ghetto area” and how Tyrie somehow interpreted that off-the-cuff description as a racial insult. She suddenly realizes that it’s not worth paying rent in California ($700 a month) while she lives in Denver with these drunken wastes of space. Her mom: “You’re not paying that much? Brooke: “Utilities, mom!” Her mom: “I’m paying that.” Brooke: “Whatever! Throw me a bone here!”
– Jenn, who somehow managed not to dance like stripper during the entire episode, has a heart-to-heart with Brooke about how she lives in the ghetto too, in a housing project, using food stamps to get by. So, you know, she’s not offended.
– Damn. She should be, because California’s ghettos are way more fabulous than Denver’s. Brooke theorizes that she must have gone through something in middle school that made her “like that.” Finally, a girl-to-girl moment: Jenn and Brooke head over to Two-Fisted Mario’s near Market and 16th for pizza and salads. I think we can all get behind pizza.
– Back at the house, Alex taunts Colie with the line, “Can I have a kiss?” Shockingly, it doesn’t lead to a tearful confrontation. Must be the sweet, sweet medication. Colie makes a joke about giving Tyrie oral sex and how he would get mono himself if he kissed her afterwards. C-L-A-S-S-Y.
– Brooke and Tyrie have their end-of-sitcom, very-special-episode moment in the kitchen while doing dishes. Brooke admits she overreacted, while a crappy song with the lyrics, “I am just a timebomb” plays in the background. And then we’re done.
–WOOF. I guess this episode had slightly more depth than the last few, but for the love of Christ, is this all “The Real World: Denver” has to offer? Are these people that unhinged? Is this town that boring? Perhaps it is through the eyes of MTV. I think that says more about them than us.
NEXT EPISODE: They get Jeeps and go rock climbing. Jenn decides Alex is on her sh**list. Someone gets drunk. We borderline don’t care anymore.
John, I have a question. Well, I have a couple of questions.
Was Brooke really in the “ghetto?” Maybe I’m biased because I live in the suburbs of Detroit, but the area she was walking in didn’t look like a ghetto at all. Were there really drunks, winos, and homeless people shouting at her? It looked like two black people sitting outside and neither looked homeless or like winos(perhaps they were drunk, but who knows). Does the area she was in even have homeless people and winos outside in the middle of the day? And how far is that area from their house, was she walking for a long time or just a few minutes?
Comment by Karen — December 27, 2006 @ 10:32 pm
this season is crap.
Comment by realworldfan — December 28, 2006 @ 12:22 am
Karen — Nope, that’s not really the ghetto. Denver doesn’t really have a ghetto. There are parts of town you wouldn’t want to be in after dark, but overall there are no run-down, blighted parts of town like there are in other cities (Cincinnati, for example, near where I grew up).
And that area where she got catcalled? That was near Coors Field, where the Rockies play, and about a minute walk from their house. My girlfriend used to live near there (22nd and Larimer) and while she sometimes got catcalled, she ever feared for her life.
Comment by John Wenzel — December 28, 2006 @ 10:38 am
Lol, I live in Cincinnati….it is run down in places but not a soul lives in Over-the-Rhine for example. I walk through there all the time to go to a Bengals game from UC.
Comment by Adam — December 28, 2006 @ 12:03 pm
John.
This was awesome:
‘Somewhere in the neonatal ward, a newborn baby cries for her.’
I noticed that, too, and thought the same thing.
Why didn’t Brooke just go to the salon at the Tabor Center? They seem to be passing it in every episode. Unless, the mall didn’t sign the filming contract thing.
That area isn’t ghetto, compared to a few blocks north, where the ‘Jesus Saves’ homeless shelter is. That would have been interesting TV.
It took me almost three months to get over mono completely. The first month was really bad.
Finally, Two Fisted Marios: Yum!
Comment by Brando — December 28, 2006 @ 12:07 pm
I know… I wonder if that baby’s cry was inserted in post-production? I wouldn’t be surprised. And yeah, the area over by the homeless shelter (and Snooze, where the cast went several times) can be pretty dicey.
But seriously, Denver is not that bad. I’ve been to Detroit, Cincinnati, Queens — you name it — and the worst part of Denver doesn’t even compare.
Comment by John Wenzel — December 28, 2006 @ 1:01 pm
I guess the definition of “ghetto” is in the eyes of the beholder. Every town has one…give the kid a break. She had a lot of positive things to say about Denver.
Comment by Marlow — December 28, 2006 @ 5:11 pm
hahahah. simply hilarious..
perhaps if she was gonna walk around in the “ghetto” and didn’t want guys to give her attention, that psycho ass whiny chick shouldn’t have worn hoochie mamma shorts
Comment by tmoney — December 28, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
hey to alexis
Comment by shantavia — December 29, 2006 @ 10:16 am
brooke you need to just calm down some and get over your axiety problems and things like that your such a cool girl though i like watchin you every wedensday nights and Brooke your a very awesome person too.
Comment by michelle say's — December 31, 2006 @ 11:04 am
perhaps if she was gonna walk around in the “ghetto� and didn’t want guys to give her attention, that psycho ass whiny chick shouldn’t have worn hoochie mamma shorts
Comment by michelle say's — December 31, 2006 @ 11:06 am
of course guys were hooting and hollering at her, she was wearing almost nothing.
Comment by Alamedaman — January 1, 2007 @ 1:56 pm
Really, Brooke needs to get a quip on what is really happening. She can’t remember what she has said. Drama,
drama, drama, oh my g’ all about nails. Why doesn’t she get a real job; not call mommy and lie to her too, try to make someone feel sorry for her. How transparent can someone be. No one really cares about you till you care for someone else.
Comment by sue — January 1, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
I love Brooke….but you can’t dress like she did walking around in the middle of a city, because prostitues dress like that when they stand on corners looking for “customers.”
Comment by Adam — January 2, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Reading some of these comments, I felt compelled to say something. If Brooke was harassed by men(which I doubt), she has a right to be upset no matter what she was wearing. Men will act that way regardless of what a woman is wearing. Plus, Brooke has a right to wear whatever she wants. Saying that Brooke deserved being harassed for what she was wearing excuses the behavior of those men. It is not right to harass random women on the street, no matter what they are wearing. People should be treated with respect. And the way someone chooses to dress does not give anyone else license to treat them badly.
Comment by Karen — January 3, 2007 @ 11:12 am
karen, she was dressed like a two bit whore. i would probably even ask her how much with that outfit. stuff your feminazi crap.
Comment by Alamedaman — January 3, 2007 @ 11:57 pm
Alamedaman, with that hostile attitude toward women, “two bit whores” are the only ones you have much experience with.
Comment by barrimore — January 4, 2007 @ 1:31 pm
Alamedaman,
You have obviously not seen any “two-bit whores” if you think that’s how she was dressed..she was dressed appropriately and tastefully for someone her age in that setting.
Comment by marlow — January 5, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
really? short ass skirt that barely covers her ass? if she came through my block there for sure would have been cats callin her out
Comment by Alamedaman — January 6, 2007 @ 12:35 am
She had on shorts, not a skirt. My point is that she does not deserve to be called a “whore” for what she was wearing.
Comment by marlow — January 6, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
Brooke should be able to wear Whatever she damn well pleases….You guys don’t see Every second that goes on & she needed a freakin break ok…just little time to for herself. Wasn’t it even a little bit obvious when she mentions of how “hard on her & not fun for her to deal with right now” due to her anxiety and think
Comment by london — January 11, 2007 @ 11:07 pm
(didn’t finish my last sentence)…..
Brooke even mentions how hard & “not fun” it is for her to deal w/Colie’s mono…It’s harder for someone with anxiety such as Brooke to deal with issues than others
Comment by london — January 11, 2007 @ 11:14 pm
I dont think that alot of people have been to Denver here! Everyone says its not ghetto, but you people havnt been to South Feds, Federal Heights, West Denver, Swansia, Globeville, or Commerse city, south Westminster. Dont say stuff when you dont know what your talken about!
Comment by Brian — May 24, 2008 @ 12:04 pm