This weekend it took me five hours to get ready to leave my house. Maybe this would be somewhere close to plausible if I had a Mariah Carey-sized closet and no helpful system for sorting through my clothes á la Cher in Clueless, but even then this is a stretch.
To be accurate, it took me thirty minutes to pull myself together and another four and a half finally to tear myself away from the latest America’s Next Top Model marathon on MTV.
Forget PSAs about crack being whack or marijuana making you way more likely to hit a girl on her bike while exiting a fast food drive-thru—we need to start talking about the dangers of turning on the TV during a repeated ANTM cycle. One minute I’m flipping through channels and next thing I know, I’ve given Tyra Banks eight hours of my life even though I only care about the last twenty minutes of the show where we get to see the models’ finished photos and listen to the judges rip them apart.
Not only that, but I will watch a whole season that I’ve already seen in repeats more than once and be completely wrong in my memory of who won. It’s like I want a reason to come back. I don’t even watch the new season anymore—I just wait for the marathon so I can binge on this guilty pleasure.
After 33,824 seasons aka “cycles” of the show, if you have enough modeling talent to score a spot before the panel (which was upgraded, in my opinion, by swapping Janice Dickinson for Twiggy), and you own a TV, then figuring out how to win ANTM should be a breeze. In case you haven’t been paying attention, here are a few helpful hints to stomping the competition with your stilettos.
In Tyra We Trust
Leave your Bible at home. While you are guaranteed some more screen time if you shove your religious beliefs in other models’ faces, like Robin did to Elyse on the first ANTM, the only thing you have to know is that Tyra is God. People didn’t know how to model until Tyra came on the scene.
Think of judges “Miss J.” Alexander and Jay Manuel as Tyra’s prophets. Every time one of the contestants screws up, they pull from their Book of Banks to give a sermon about how it’s done.
Tyra knows how to behave in every culture and situation. She knows how to smile with her eyes and be FIERCE! Tyra could lose an arm in a chainsaw accident and she would still make every bloodied frame of film fabulous! The sooner you get on board with this religion, the sooner you’ll be on your way to the top.
Catch My Disease
So you’ve figured out how to smile—use your eyes to connect with the camera. If you want to really stand out from your competition, the best thing you can do is fall ill and rise above adversity. Don’t believe me? Cycle One winner Adrianne Curry: food poisoning. Cycle Six winner Danielle Evans: dehydration.
These ladies showed they could get the job done no matter how sick they felt. Unfortunately, since they have already taken the above-mentioned sicknesses, you should try and find some new way to avoid the judges comparing you directly to those ladies. Might I recommend looking into consumption? Yes, that is the retro way to talk about tuberculosis, but don’t rule it out! Symptoms include weight loss, loss of appetite, and your cheeks take on a beautiful rosy hue right before you die. In literature and films, every woman with consumption beats out Time by dying while they are still young and beautiful. So maybe the death part won’t afford you a lucrative career. You can enjoy yourself but the rest of that fits right on in with what you need to become a top model!
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