She may have gotten kicked out of school for being on the show, but they certainly weren't kicking her out of the Bogardus Mansion this weekend where she celebrated reaching the age of consent. Guest of a Guest was there for the flapper-themed bash and has plenty of pictures to share, including some of two young-uns getting hot and heavy in a booth.

The party didn't have any booze, because the high schoolers still aren't legal, but that doesn't mean they're too young for burlesque, as this tassel-clad hottie, who stripped for the group, can attest. While there were some bare naked ladies in attendance guess who wasn't there? Any of her castmates from NYC Prep. We're sure somewhere Rags McTattershanty is still crying because she didn't get to see a naked lady.

[Image via Guest of a Guest]

Nightingale-Bamford had previously aired its distaste with Hughes' participation in the historic documentary. After expressing its feelings, however, the school tolerated her presence through the Spring semester.

But in recent weeks, varying accounts have emerged about whether Hughes would be "welcome" back at the elite academy — her stepping stone to Harvard and then a job running America, which would lead directly to the Presidency of the United States. Those plans may have to be put on the shelf. According to a chilling report on Cityfile:

at some point over the summer, Hughes and her parents made alternate arrangements for her senior year. According to several Nightingale parents and students, Hughes was informed several weeks ago that she would "not be welcome" back when classes recommenced this fall. A school official, however, says that is not the case. Darrel Frost, Nightingale's director of communications, says the school was "expecting her back this fall" and had reserved a place for her, but that Hughes and her parents had made the decision to enroll at another school, so that "Camille could focus on a different educational route."

Hughes will be starting classes at the far less prestigousy, non-Harvard feeder Professional Children's School, which according to the school's website, offers a home to "students who are preparing for, or already pursuing, careers in the performing arts, entertainment or competitive sports, or who are drawn to a creative environment supportive of the arts." Which is to say, students who don't think they have to befriend Jesse so they can get on the Operation Smile committee so they can get into Harvard so they can be President.

And once again, we ask, where is the outrage? Once again, our society sits by while another brave hero who dared to show the world the reality of what it is like to be — in this case a rich girl in New York — is crushed by the prejudice of those who in the end, really are just jealous that they are not asked to be on TV shows themselves.

And they call it justice.

Guess they were all done making jokes about black people and fried chicken and Asians who can't drive. Thanks Perez, now we have to hate them.

Singing careers and fashion are, sadly, the only things that any kid wants anymore. Trade schools are left dusty and empty, doors creaking sadly in cold prairie breezes. Veterinarians stand stethoscope-draped and wondering and alone, no pupils to guide, sick dogs whimpering quietly, forgotten. No one studies history anymore! All the old stories are lost, there is only the bright, loud, metallic future. Mysteries of science will remain forever so, ignored and left to other, imaginary minds. Because singing and fashion! Singing and fashion and maybe acting too, they are all the kids dream of these days. We're a nation of wannas and very few bes.

Rich prep school kids are no exception. Well, OK, maybe they are a bit. Cockly Camille wants some sort of Career, sure. But she wants it for all the wrong reasons. Who knows what Sebastian wants. Probably just to minnow his way into as many girls' pants as he can before time marches away and leaves him behind. The other four—furtive PC, demanding Jessi, pointy Kelli, aching Rags—all they're concerned with are lights, bright lights shining only on them. They all want to be noticed, these kids, because the world has become both too small and too large. A terrible equation for this Goldilocks generation.

Rambling, is what I'm doing. What I mean to say is this: Last night's episode was all about reaching for things. About going about the work of becoming a grownup. About finding that label that we slap on our chests in this awkward professional conference called life. Let's start over there. Do you see where I'm pointing, to that pile of stones and broken harmonicas? Let's go over there. Follow me.

Whatever happened to the old hobo dances? Those lurching, primal, exuberant things that thundered down on the muddy expanses of sagging America? That sang you to sleep in railway hotels. That asked things of Hoover in an ancient, universal language. They're mostly gone now. Mostly. Old Rags McTattershanty, her heart stitched together from bits of cloth and wax paper, still carries a small flickering torch. Yes, she wants to dance. She wants to do gymnastics and date rich boys and maybe study philosophies or train elephants, but for now she's pretty focused on dance. And she seems good at it! Her brother, Mechanical Jim, and her road-mother, Dolores Gingerslacks, went to one of her dance recitals and we got to see some of her chops. Before she started, though, there was sort of an embarrassing incident. See, she was wearing some sort of dance frock, and oof, there was a hole in the crotchal region! Aieeee! How mortifying for an already worried teen. I mean, had she been true to hobo tradition a hole anywhere on a garment would be a badge of honor. A welcome place for worms and dust and curious blades of grass to work their way in, a patch kept open for commune with the natural world. But this is 2009 and those are the beliefs of the old-timers. So Rags requested another dress and then the performance began.

It was mostly limbs thrashing and teeth gnashing while a mournful ballad played on a hurdy-gurdy. Rags and her teen pals all splayed and wriggled on folding plastic chairs and Dolores and Mechanical Jim clapped in meek delight. How nice it is to see a youngster doing what they want, enjoying themselves, throwing away insecurity and caution for just a moment. A pretty picture. Though dark clouds gathered at the edges of this serene and hopeful tableau. You see, Rags has not been earning good marks at her hobo academy. She's failing soup science. D's in ambling arithmetic and hambone history. The only thing she got a 92 in was gym, seeing as her bindle handling skills are quite developed for a girl her age. Dolores Gingerslacks was not pleased with this. Not pleased at all. Rags is spending too much time on her hobo Spirit and not enough on her hobo Wits. The two must go hand-in-hand in a delicate and precarious balance. Too much of Spirit and she may end up like Nickels Jackson, who did a blind, feverish tramp tarantella right over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Too much of Wits (though that doesn't seem to be her problem right now) and she could suffer the same fate as Logs Lincoln, an intelligent yet soulless young vagabond who finally figured out the Boxcar Theorem and thusly winked out of existence. Plucked away to some other unseen realm. Rags has too much potential to go either of those ways. She must stay steadfast and true and safely in the middle, like railroad tracks beelining over vast expanses of West.

Kelli hears music. Kelli hears music when she's walking down the street and missing her parents. Kelli hears music when she stares at boys who are busy and wrapped up in other girls and she's just sitting there, stirring a pretend cocktail. Kelli hears music when her older brother lopes awkwardly into a room and tells her a strange off-color joke that sucks the room dry of anything but the sound of two bodies shifting, trying to maneuver the uncomfortable silence. Music all the time! She wants to sing! So it was time then to audition singing coaches. Singing coaches are people with weird, wild eyes who spend their time driving around in beat-up cars, or plastering telephone poles with fliers, or staring bleary until dawn at bootleg Broadway videos on YouTube—new, wicked technology—wishing it was them. These are sad and strange people for a young person like Kelli to be suddenly face-to-face with, alone in the room except for, you know, a whole damn camera crew. She interviewed a few people, none of whom really seemed to work out. There was Don, a heavy-breathing weirdo who smelled of gravy and Febreze and talked about his mother. There was Belinda, all pathetic and roomy in her flowing blouse and trembling, watery eyes. And there was Rick, intense and bug-eyed but also competent and able. But still he was kinda weird. Kelli needed someone fresher, someone hipper, someone not-ugly.

Eventually she settled on Diane, a Beverly D'Angelo sorta lookalike who sat in a big glass-walled aerie behind the enormous black gourd of her piano and got right down to business. She asked Kelli if Kelli knew stuff about theory and keys and pitch and all that and Kelli shook her head dumbly and said "No, I just..." and she made a motion with her hands to imply that her sonorous gifts just come tumbling out unaided, a white dove knowing when to release itself without trainer or cue. Diane raised an eyebrow and said "Mm hmmm," and got back to an exercise. Mee May Mai Mo Moooooo... Mee May MAI Mo Moooo... That kind of shit. Kelli mimicked it back and then it was time to sing the national anthem. All voice practices end with the national anthem right? So Kelli shook her belly to wake up the dove, opened her mouth, and out came the most mellifluous sound the world had ever heard. Sopranos the world over wept and tore at their clothing and reached into their ample bosoms and pulled out small pistols, because there was nothing to do but end it all. Crystal glassware shivered and shook and shattered gloriously. The Sydney Opera House groaned and trembled and sank into the sea, leaving only the gurgle of air bubbles and stray orchestra seats bobbing in the harbor. Diane clapped and cooed and knew that Kelli, this rich rube with unrealistic dreams of stardom (because her voice is good, but not Good), would probably pay for the summer house she'd been dreaming of. Barney's Joy, here I come..., she thought. Phil would just about shit himself when he saw her strolling down the beach. "Oh how funny," she'd say gaily. "I simply had no idea you summered here." And that bitch new wife of his would frown and pout and say "Let's go honey," pulling the dumbstruck, paunchy Phil along with her. Victory.

Sebastian meanwhile, his ears ringing like the rest of the city's, was trying to bounce back from his terribly embarrassing Rags rejection. See he's still cool, brah! He's just keepin' on keepin' on, hair perfectly mussed and wavy, beady little bird eyes trained and focused on the next... bird. This bird's name was Thor or Victoria or Bramble or something equally authoritative. Which was fitting, because she's a senior! Sebastian's a lowly sophomore and here was this older lady, surely well-versed in the beautiful and erotic art of doin' it, who cast her porcelain gaze down upon him as if to say "my place or yours?" And the thing is... I kinda think Sebastian's a virgin. Does anyone get that same vibe? I think he talks a big game, but he's really just so nervous and wound up and obsessed with the idea of sex that he can never actually be smooth enough to close the deal. So that this advanced-age cougar was basically trying to take him by the ears and show him how it's done... well that was just too much. He bombed.

See the main problem is that she spoke French! Sebastian's French ability is what he lures the ladies with. They think it's just sooo sexy and interesting and cultured that this blonde haired non-surfing surfer boy can rattle off little Fancy Talk words. And, I mean, they're not wrong. People who can speak other languages are kind of sexy (unless it's something hard and guttural and then it's mostly just frightening). But Sebastian doesn't even do it well. He mumbles and swallows the beautiful French words. He also says things like "Yeah... I went... to the Louvre." Oh, stop it, Sebs! Too hot, too hot! You're killin' 'em! Turn it down or Antonio Banderas is gonna get a complex, motherfucka! You are one game-laden son of a bitch, you know that Sebastian? The Louvre?! The goddamned Moaner frickin' Lisa?! Boy you gotta be knee deep in tail since this episode aired! Phew. Excuse me. Needless to say, Anvil wasn't terribly impressed, and she basically told him so. Sebastian's little heart sank and he resigned himself to another lonely evening spent at the computer, wandering the Louvre all by himself.

Jessi and Camille talked about charity things. See Camille really wants to be part of Operation Smile, the one charity where you get to affect physical appearance rather than like, feed people and stuff. (I know this is not exactly true, but why the F are dim girls and celebrities always exclusively into Operation Smile? Doesn't it seem a tad shallow? Humph.) Camille is such a weird little hardtack biscuit, isn't she? All ambitious and strange and gangly. She wants so many things but possesses none of the skills to get any of them, because she's just so damn off-putting and brash. Jessi isn't friendly, let's be clear about that. Jessi is fun and Sassy and clever when she wants to be, but she knows it. So when she doesn't want to be fun she just turns it off like a helium tank at the end of a birthday party. Around Camille she's bored and unfriendly and skeptical, so it makes sense that Camille would be awkward. But Camille, babe. Why you gotta be all up in Jessi about her damn school? Like, Camille, do you really have NO filter whatsoever, that you must, simply MUST, brag about your stupid fucking school at every moment possible? It was just so dumb and annoying, this fight about whose school is harder or better or whatever. "They probably have Earth Day off," Camille said nerdily and haughtily and stupidly about Jessi's school, the New York Earth Day Academy.

Anyway, Camille might help out with Project Smile or whatever, or she might not. It's all up to Jessi. Jessi discussed the matter in her big sprawling kitchen, shoveling unknown food products into her face while PC and some other girl giggled and snarled across the island. Jessi's mom came in at one point too, and she's all fun in a Fun Mom kinda way and PC creepily flirts with her because he's learned recently that old ladies like to be flirted with by young, nonthreatening men. Of which PC is one! Jessi still hadn't made up her mind about crazy Camille, though Other Friend thinks that the school thing should be reason enough to ban her from the charity. Jessi will consider it. Jessi will consider it and then talk to the Bravo people who will consider it for her. That's how this math problem gets solved.

Jessi also had a meeting for fashion. She really wants to do PR or maybe marketing. Whatever it is, she wants it to be fashion. She and Fun Mom had a couch conversation about Fashion, which designers were in, which were out. Pretty much everyone was In. So they sent off some sort of pretend resume in an envelope addressed to "Fashion, ATTN: Teen Job Division, Nice Places In New York, Their Zipcodes." Remarkably, remarkably!, one company agreed to have Bravo cameras come and film their beautiful products while they pretended to interview Jessi for a Teen Job. Teen Jobs are mostly like putting files away incorrectly and hanging up on calls when trying to put them on hold, so they are very important. All of the girls auditioning applying were ready to go, but none more than Jessi, who threw her blintz-like features around the room and demanded recognition. We'll see if she gets it! She probably will! Because she's on TV!

Speaking of being on camera, we end, of course, with Preston Carter Pickles Corporation Peterson. The landed scion of a great and powerful family of slick willies (who's maybe dating another such fellow?) PC was, as he has been all season, feeling a little blue. Well, maybe not blue exactly, but certainly wonderful. Full of wonder, that is. What's in the future? What's coming around the bend? How many wonders can one cavern hold? PC is teetering on the brink of something, but he isn't sure what! He's got a feeling there's a miracle due, gonna come through. He just doesn't want to wait for it! He's anxious and ready and worried and all the tight clothes aren't helping. He feels vacuum sealed.

His therapist, who lives in the showroom at the weirdest Pier One there is, listened knowingly and noddingly as PC griped about sex and drugs and "rock 'n roll." Ugh, that line was just so... ugh. Wasn't it? Stop pretending Peter Carey! Just be yaself. It looked like the therapist wanted to shake him by the shoulders and yell in his mewling face just that sentiment, but she's a professional, and plus there're all those cameras there and stuff, so. You know.

PC went suit shopping, usually his favorite thing, but even that didn't make him feel better. I mean, he bought a beautiful skinny suit, sure, but still... That gnawing. That aching, clawing, creeping feeling like something is there, just beyond the periphery, a monster or an angel or a black, diseased blot. Something. He had earlier joked to Jessi and Other Girl that his biggest problem is that a tuxedo wasn't tight enough. Everything else was bowls of peaches and cherries! It was a sad little lie. An obvious feint. So now he wandered the hard stony streets of old New York and waited for something to break or snap. For clouds to part and a chorus of beautiful voices (Kellis maybe?) to sing him the answer.

That didn't happen, though. Instead he went to a photoshoot for Social Life magazine, the made-up magazine run by Devorah Rose, who seems to have a very tight balls-hold on Andy Cohen, because he keeps putting the damn publication in his shows. The photoshoot was in some sort of dark room full of flames (and flamers! ha ha ha!) and PC was really inept at everything. It's funny to see people who are soooooo into themselves in certain contexts and then soooo awkward in others. He was all fumbly with his words and didn't like Devorah and Co. teasing him mercilessly about boobs and girls and boys and stuff. Then he almost broke a really expensive camera. Things were not going well.

Things were not going well until they were going more than well, which is how life works sometimes. Sometimes the tides just shift suddenly, mid-swim, and you are swept away to somewhere magical. Once the pouty girl model was done with her business for the day, Devorah was feeling saucy and prodded by Bravo types, so she said she wanted a boy photoshoot. A boy photoshoot involving PC. The skinny photographer got up there all shirtless and then was joined by an all-too-eager PC. No one would notice if it was in the name of fashion and photo, right? No one would notice as PC's blood quickened and his knees knobbled excitedly and something in his eyes burned with desire and the brief fleeting fulfillment of a person recognizing, suddenly in full, as if standing across the room and observing a life in bloom. PC felt queasy and hungry and parched and sated and glad and scared and terrific as he nuzzled up against this shirtless other man and the world tilted towards meaning. And then it was over.

Then the cameras stopped flashing and the modelman got down and so too did PC. Some weirdo assistant kept hitting on PC creepily and he chuckled and indulged him (kissed his hand!) but mostly PC's insides were still reeling with the fever dance of having been so close to that which one wants most. So close to happiness he could touch it, did touch it. And just as quickly as it came it was gone, and the lights were turned off and PC was dumped out on those cold streets again, left to remember what had been however briefly. What had climbed into him and taken hold. A dream, preferred.

Later than night he lay in bed and when he closed his eyes he saw that warmth emanating from the other fellow. Felt the champagne tingle of sensational sensations rising up his spine. It would be a fitful night of thinking. Of dreaming. The funny, sad, wonderful, tough thing about youth is that it's so many firsts. So much of everything is the first time. And it's great, because you get to feel new every day! But it's scary, because so much of the world seems to loom over you, to know so much more than you. And you wish yourself into the future, into that faraway time when you're settled and able. How dumb that is. How dumb it is to not want the first blush forever. PC is already miles away in his head. Already domestic and coupled and safe and open. Enjoy this, PC! Enjoy that fretful, fanatic night when you put your head on a pillow and felt like an entirely different being all of a sudden. Someone who knew something small, who'd found a golden kernel of knowledge and taken it, joyously.

And the others. Well, they dream too. Sebastian sits in the glow of the screen, hand typing away, taking him to other bits of art. He dreams about women. Fields of them, stretched out over acres and acres, all reaching for him as if he were the sun. Camille sits at her desk, little lamp buzzing hotly, and dreams herself into the model she's created. This part fits here, this snaps in there. And there she will be, when you step back and look, done with your task. A complete human being. Little does she know that nothing, not one thing ever, goes exactly as planned, that things trip you up, or carry you wonderfully off to unknown adventures. ("Try it! Just try it!" Camille will always remember, until the day she slips away. She is standing in skis, leaning dangerously over a black diamond course, while Ruth waits, poles in the snow, down the hill. Ruth is calling to her to just plunge and do it. They'd been looking for the blue square, but took a wrong turn after the lift. "Try it! It'll be fun! I promise. You'll be fine. I'm here." And seeing Ruth's face there, all red and flushed from the lively cold, waiting for her lover, Camille feels ready. She takes a deep breath. She smiles bravely. She pushes off and disappears into the white.)

Rags will sit by the fire and look out over the crabgrassed expanse of the lot and she'll feel a pull in her bones. She'll feel the need for dance. And though she is sore, though she still hurts from falling when she and Soots had strapped dull razorblades to their shoes and gone ice skating, she gets up and dances. She's joined by beautiful, lilting music. Wandering Kelli, out for a lonely parentless stroll, calling into the night. The pair sings and dances together, united briefly by dreams and desires.

And Jessi waits. Jessi waits to hear from Fashion. She waits to hear from PC. Fun Mom is snoring softly on the couch, Real Housewives glowing blue and quiet on the television. In the future, she won't remember much of these moments. These moments before the gate opened up and she went racing off into life. These quiet spells of peace and protection. This blue, womb-like world.

Do babies dream, I wonder. Before they are born? Or is their breathing and beating dream enough? Is the mere fact of their possibility enough?

Potential and Progress are two different things. But they are both good things, I promise. I promise you that, young Prep kids. They're both good.

Everything's good.

• Oh, christ. They're here: Jon and Kate's Spawn Of 8 have landed in New York City for some kind of TLC marketing event. While Jon sets up his gangsta-ass bachelor pad of Ed Hardy shirts and Malboro Reds and probably a Foosball table or something, Kate - who I genuinely feel bad for, now, if only because we're all learning exactly what kind of douchebag was hiding in that repressed manchild of a human being she was married to - was taking questions from her kids in the vein of "are we there yet" and "when will we officially be able to call our existence tortured?." Meanwhile, what the hell is TLC doing dragging them to New York for a marketing thing? Also, the midgets from TLC's midget show (not it's actual name) were there and so were some other people. Anyway, if you happen to see them above ground or below ground, I don't know, keep the kids away from the tunnels and don't let them go to Mansion with Dad. In fact, they should all probably be rounded up and kept in a glass case at Mars 2112 so we can show tourists what we think of them despite stimulating our economy: yes, we look at you, especially when your kids are screaming about getting a bottle of Vitamin Water, because we want to beat you with one. Truth. Oh, and apparently, the paparazzi and security guards surrounding this nonsense got into a fight and Jon was nowhere to be seen because he was probably trying to (unsuccessfully) get into Minetta Tavern. Sorry, man, but it ain't happening. [People and People]
  
  
• Robert Pattinson's sucking the blood out of New York's service industry: he's a shitty, shitty tipper. He closed the place out and went just short of 15%; kid, you've got a lot of learning to do. Everyone in this town tips 20 or gives blow jobs to make up for it. Amirite? Anyone? Well, it's how I learned the hard way. [Celebrity Spy]
  
  
• White rapper Asher Roth was called out by fans after telling a crowd of celebrities (including Stephanie Pratt, "celebrity") that he'd just graduated from Cornell. They all toasted him and his fans were like, dude, you went to some shitty junior college and he went into his next song. Ha. White rappers are silly. [NYP]
  
  
• David Arquette apologized for calling Latin women "nuts;" this sounds silly, but really, takes one to know one, right? As far as being crazy goes, however, David has no experience in that. Am I suggesting he's secretly a Latin woman? Yes. Yes I am. [US]
  
  
• Gangsta-ass Lindsay Lohan is getting back at her stalkerazzi with a squirt gun. I used to do this to my overzealous cats. I'd pretend they'd be trying to take pictures of me and I'd be like, NO, BACK OFF and squirt them and run in heels. More fun than it sounds, especially when you have a New York-sized apartment and too much vodka lying around. [PITNB]
  
  
• A billionaire whose kid is in NYC Prep is mortified at the behavior of his kids, but secretly thinks Richard's recaps are the BEST THING EV-AR. Maybe? [Page Six]
  
  
• Other terrible item: Michael Jackson was apparently kicked really hard in the balls by Joe Jackson at one point, so much so that he was unable to reproduce later in life. Basically, Joe Jackson is the worst human being ever, or something. Question: would we have Michael Jackson if Joe didn't abuse him? Answer: no. [WWTDD]
  
  
• Latest victim of the housing crisis: 50 Cent. Our friend Fitty neglected to ask "21 Questions" about how much his 19 bedroom, 37 bathroom Hartford house was going to be worth a few years after he bought it, but he just had to cut the price down from $14.5M to $10M. He says he's tired of the commute into New York - heh - and wants to downsize. But Fitty! Where will you take a shit when you're home now that you will not have a bathroom every two feet? This is dangerous business, we're talkin'. Oh, also, the house used to be owned by Mike Tyson, so, not that it's cursed, or anything. [NYP]
  
  
• Remember Limp Bizkit, the band that defined a generation of high school freshman for life? Frontman Fred Durst got married, and then played a reunion concert in Vegas last night for the first time in nine years. Somewhere, someone in a Von Dutch hat is screaming about his rain dance working. [People]
  
  
• Sigh. This is genuinely sad: Mischa Barton's on suicide watch after being institutionalized by friends after a three day coke binge. She was going nuts and going to kill herself. On a separate note, I think when the producers of The O.C. killed Marissa Cooper, they killed a part of Mischa Barton. If you watched the show all the way through to the end of the third season, you would understand this. Not that I did. Just sayin'. Get better, Coop. [NYP]
  
  
• Ha, yeah: that "salt solution" Octomom-Lady's kid was taken to the hospital for in yesterday's roundup? It was from one of those "make your own volcano" kits. Which, like, what was a two year old doing around that? Then again, it's nice to see she's got high standards for them. Anyway. Public opinion still has her going in a volcano, so, yeah, maybe she's just starting her own intelligence agency and research arm made up of her children. Nice. [Daily News]
  
  
• Aw, shit: French President (say it with me) SAHER-KOZE-EE! went running in Central Park and even his bodyguards are great looking. Anyway, he stopped to say hello to admirers who let him know how much they'd like to do his wife. He smiled and said thank you and I know, isn't she great? [Daily News]
  
  
• Ultimate Blind Item: Rush and Malloy's big 'scoop 'o the week is a callgirl who says she's got yet another fuckhead-y governor who took her out on three hot dates. Who is it?! As a proud former citizen of the great state of Nevada, I'd like to nominate wackadoo asshole Jim Gibbons. Jim, I'm rooting for you. Anybody else? Oh, also in hooker trivia, Bernie Madoff apparently paid Spitzer's madam's girls to give him back rubs. Just back rubs. Evil's so weird. [R & M]

The funniest thing about this show is kind of what's universally funny about teenagers: that they like to pretend they're a lot older than they are. That the experiences of short days and fleeting months compounds for them into years' worth of torturous drama. Their newly formed, Bambi-legged personalities are given such weight and consideration. Kelli is This, PC is That. These kids don't seem to realize that basically everything in them is malleable at this point, that they'll be entirely different people—aside from a few core things—by the time they wake up tomorrow morning. So watching them be so steadfast and sure of Who and What they are, with all these things that they've done, is both silly and sad. Just like being young!

Part I: Feelings Are the Farts of the Mind

We'll begin our recounting with a rustle of sticks and a clinking of soda can tabs. Of course I'm speaking of kiwi-faced Rags McTattershanty, a public school hobo who was discovered by young Lord Sebastian and rescued from the heap of milk cartons and broken wheelchairs that is her life. For a brief spell (an eon in Teen Time!) the pair was flourishing. They shared wet, snowy kisses. They met cute at parties and fancy French dinners. They stared at each other with dewy, innocent gazes that belied the strange hormonal churning going on down below their necks, all the furtive fumbling awkwardness covered up and kept in by expensive clothes and artful rich kid slouches. But as all of these stories must end—even My Fair Lady comes to an end, eventually—Rags and Sebastian danced their last worried waltz last night, torn asunder by the gaping chasm between their two lives. He's a landed lad of Mustiques and Rossignols, floppy fancy feathered hair and million dollar sneakers. She's a creature of soiled footie pajamas, bum cover open and flapping in the breeze. Of mostly-broken Wurlitzers played forlornly in windswept junkyards. While one can, for a time, find romance in the other, it's just too wide a breach to build a lasting bridge.

Mostly the end came about because Rags was being re-enchanted by her old hobo husband Soots McKenzie. Soots, who sells fish bones to gypsies down by the loading docks, makes her feel special. He attends her gymnastics meets and weaves shells into her hair and scrubs her calloused feet with discarded steel wool he finds behind restaurants. Really, he just speaks her language. Still, though, she tried with Lord Sebastian. She puttered her leather and tin jalopy up to a music concert that he'd invited her to, excited and scared. Sebastian, for his part, had discussed the matter of Rags with his closest confidant, Fauntleroy. Fauntleroy believed Rags to be an endearing lass, worthy of hooking up with, the kind of big-chested pauper in need of a rodgering from one of the riches. But he wasn't quite sure that this concert—at which a host of private school bands would play, so a pretty hot goddamned ticket—was really the right place for her. Would she get it? I mean, would she really get it? Sebastian figured she would, so they went on with the plan.

Of course, she didn't get it. She didn't get that when Sebastian "danced"—lurching and pivoting, his tongue sticking out, trying to look silly like he didn't care but of course in the process appearing to care so very much—that was how the rich kids dance. She didn't get why he was being rude and dismissive. She didn't get that when a rich boy invites a poor girl to a rich kids' concert, the poor girl should be impressed and awed, quiet and easily dismissed. But instead Rags clutched tight the hobo talisman her mother, Bricksy, had given her just before she she was killed in the second Hobo-Drifter War, and stayed true to herself. She wasn't having any of Sebastian's ridiculousness, so when they left the awful concert (whining private school kids being shrieked at and adored by their whining peers) and walked toward... what? where are they always parting ways? it's so arbitrary, she wouldn't let him kiss her. Rags turned her head and Sebastian muddily smeared her cheek with his chapped lips and because this is high school, one awkward evening can kill a whole thing, can snuff a thing out of life so quickly the normal human eye can't even detect its leaving. It's like a light particle or a roadrunner, a firefly flashing briefly in a dark, empty room.

Sebastian went and discussed the matter once more with Fauntleroy, as the two louche gentlemen tried on various clothes and purred over each other's fabrics. Sebastian was all "whatever, sucks to be rejected, but whatever," and the sad thing was that all of a sudden, now that his once pristine fuselage was dented with a failure, Sebastian just seemed really unattractive. You just saw so much of his ruddy, turnip-shaped father in him at that moment. Has Sebastian already peaked? Who knows. Anyway, he went on to say dumb boy things about how he doesn't ever have feelings, icky gooey feelings, for girls. He just wants to pop 'em and drop 'em, or whatever kids are saying these days. So he's just gonna forget it with Rags, it's done, over, been done, been over. Fauntleroy, clearly not as practiced a rake as Sebs, was just cowed and awed by this gleaming, bewigged god. If Sebastian told Fauntleroy to jump naked off a bridge, Fauntleroy would go play bridge with a bunch of old ladies, naked. Because he hears Sebastian's instructions and advice, but he just doesn't know how to follow it quite right. It's sad. It's funny. It's high school.

Part II: Mrs. Camille Said She Would Have Someone Buy the Flowers Herself

Camille had a party. Camille had a party and everyone came. But, rewind, Camille also had a date. Camille had a date with a boy named Augustus Gloop, who has slimmed down since his chocolate factory adventures but is still just as gloopy. The date was set up by TV because Camille.... I'm sorry. My mom thinks she's beautiful! That's all I'll say. Anyway, they went to yet another in the string of empty fancy restaurant that this show seems to exclusively traffic in. Little Gloopy was pretty awkward, asking her over and over and over again if she was having a good time. At first Camille was... impolite. Then the second time she was just plain rude. Then on the third time she pulled a revolver out of her clutch and shot him. Camille will not put up with your shit. Because she's an uptight, awkward little troll creature.

Sorry. But. She is.

After the lame date, apparently Camille got shitcanned with Gloopy and totally did him. At least that's what Gloopy hinted to PC when they were on their own little boys go shopping trip. At this one Gloopy tried to make awkward sexual innuendo about Camille of all people and after I'd finished vomiting and screeching out my window (goodbye, Brooklyn!), I'm pretty sure I heard Gloops say something was "homo" and then PC chastising him because "everyone here is gay" and WAS HE TALKING ABOUT HIMSELF? Or just about the edited-in homos that Bravo cut to twice? Who knows. So, PC said he heard that Camille had a little reputation, which is also shriek-inducing (you'll miss me, Brooklyn!)

Whatever. Camille, sex-fed and feeling social, decided to have a dinner party and suspiciously invite the entire cast of the show, who are not at all friends in real life. Kelli was invited, of course, as were Sebastian and Rags. But, um, Rags? Rags was bringing Soots. Holy cow. Drama! Camille's glassy eyes twinkled with antici...pation because she loves pretending she's the scandal-centered belle of the gossipy bitchy Dorothy Parker New York ball! But she's not. No, that crown belongs to young master Peterson.

Oh, PC. PC, PC, PC. I'm not really even sure what to say about what happened to ruin Camille's dinner party, but it was definitely ruined. PC, thinking he was funny and way mature, started needling the "children" about sex and other HORRIBLE things and Camille's glass eyes plinked out of her skull and rolled around and Soots picked them up and stuffed them in his grubby pocket to sell later to those old Chinese crones over in The Narrows who collect such oddities. There's a video of all of this above, so you should watch it. Also note that there was awkward Sebastian/Rags/Soots behavior and PC fell in love with Rags and wants to make her a project. He also gravely offended Kelli by calling her young and stuff. Disaster!

There in the ash-strewn fallout of the terrible event, everyone staggered around in the white light and black rain trying to figure out just what had happened. Kelli had the best assessment of the evening, asking if PC thought he was mature just because he wore tight pants and says "darling." I just about fell off my couch laughing very, very loudly (don't worry Brooklyn, I'm gone soon) because it was the funniest, best thing ever. Camille meanwhile tried to broker awkward peaces between people who didn't give a shit about peaces but Camille doesn't care because she just has to be at the center of everything all the time and ohhh man didn't Camille totally come off as the worst of them all this episode? I mean, Sebastian is a bialy-faced idiot, but Camille... Camille is committing the cardinal high school sin of trying to transcend her caste. This is not done, Camille. It's never done. Just because you're on a TV show now, it's still not done. You're a nerd. Deal with it.

PC meanwhile didn't give a hearty shit, and went to go ignore Jessi's advances some. And, oh, I shouldn't be mean to Jessi because she came across as really lively and funny last night. Making good jokes and seeming actually mature, not just weirdly pretending to be. That real, genuine, wonderful smile that splayed across her face after she and PC finished their let's-make-up coffee date was just so... charming. Friends having fun. That was nice.

Meanwhile in younger, darker corners, Rags and Sebastian were having a conference. They chose the city's best conference spot: The enormous rotating cube in Astor Place that nobody likes. Perfect. So they stood there and Sebz just spat into the breeze and Rags fiddled with her pet fly on a string and you felt exactly zero ache. Precisely no pain. Because these little vacuum bags had already up and moved on long ago! Because the high school heart can easily weather, over little strands of time, little pokes and prods. It's only when something really tears the tissue that you should start to worry about scarring. But that hasn't happened here! Naw, it's just two youngsters—one a rich kid, disappearing forever as he bumbles over the hills in his roadster, the other a hobo child who will disappear herself, into soup and mist and dust and train smoke when she turns 21, as is hobo custom. You can follow a hobo after they turn 21 if you want, but it's difficult. You have to understand runes and weathervanes, you must master the art of deciphering code from half-eaten roadside sandwiches, of the language of leaves in the wind.

Meanwhile Camille will practice her technique, do the steps and math, trundle on vicariously, hurtling into other, more interesting lives lest she feel that lonely pang of being so far out ahead that you can't see number two, that you'd rather turn back, sacrifice the race, than finish it on your own, all alone. Kelli will stand and smirk and continue heading straight for the middle. A place where she'll always be mousy and brown and a wannabe singer. She'll have strange hardened edges that her parents, had they been around at all, would have softened. She'll never be timid, but she'll never be brave. She'll just always be Kelli, missing a Why.

And PC! And Jessi! Next week looks precariously gay for PC, so... squeal. I think, though, they'll be fine in the end. Jessi will always be Jessi! Always funny and needy, always excited about being bored. I think it might be something to know her in private life. Then again, it could be shitty. She could have just had one good episode. That's, um, more likely, isn't it?

PC: martinis and cigarettes and tight pants and jackets and booths and banquettes and listless drunken girls and little hobo projects and dark-eyed men who stare from corners, from behind candles, from behind panes of glass. That's what PC will be. He'll look back at his first wobbly clucking at this one dinner party and it will seem so forced and practiced, so uneasy and embarrassing. But he'll get better. Oh he'll get better and rule his little roost when he finally gets one and everyone will be scared and delighted and upside down when he comes to a party and starts spewing his words.

And then one day, like all great empires, he'll fall. He'll be 30 maybe, jacketed and between boyfriends, smoky and sour and tired. And he'll start picking away, pick pick pick, at the weakest in the group. A doughy Bowdoin grad who's invited everyone to her parents' Nantucket house. The sun will be setting, orange and blue and lazy on the horizon, and they'll be knee-deep in white wine, a favorite of the house, and at dinner everyone will be hot from the beach, everyone will feel crabby for home, wanting to go back. And PC will nag at this poor girl—her clothes, her school, her chosen lack of job—and everyone will shift awkwardly but laugh still and then finally, like the end of Buffy, this thing will get strength. Bonnie from Bowdoin will raise a verbal fist, make slits of her eyes, take a cool sip of wine, and say "Wait, Peter, weren't you on that reality show? What was it called? New York Prep or something?" And the room will fall silent and electric. And PC will stutter and cough and try to come back with something. But it will be too late. It will be out there. And the rest of the evening PC will just walk on the beach, pretending to be pensive and writerly and interesting. But really he's just trying to figure a way out.

Trying to decide how to best leave this annoying dinner which has, so far, been just desserts.

Yes it was the winter break episode last night, and all the kids were bundled up and snowy, shivering against a cold world that threatened to consume them. In some cases this was quite literal. Kelli learned the notion of Death in the stony, frozen expanse that some ancient Indians called The Hamptons. Rusty old Rags McTattershanty had to make a frigid, pine needle-strewn Sophie's Choice last night. To save her rep and marry out of the hobo clan, or follow her tin foil heart and get railway hitched to reliable soup seeker Soots McKenzie? Never has a fifteen-year-old been faced with such adversity.

And some of the coldness, some of the arctic mire, was in a more metaphorical sense. There was poor potato-eyed Jessi, awash in a sea of dappled Miami sadness. Eating lonely lunches with her Florida friend, a beanbag chair wearing a wig, all the while missing her one true love. That unresponsive fellow is none other than mop-browed blunderer Peter "PC" Peterson. Yes PC was busy getting lost in the aforementioned Mexico, smothering his furtive, grainy desires—which were rushing up suddenly into his loins and mouth and brains like lava in a burbling Guatemalan volcano. He'd gone to visit an old boarding school chum, the lean and dangerous Charles Ryder JP, a young Mexican baron of sand and sadness, of louche-limbed sexuality that confounds and brutalizes PC's ever-knotting insides.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves! Let's return to that scene, of that crime, a bit further down. First:

The Tough Tale of Rags McTattershanty
It was glitter, she decided. Glitter that she'd begun seeing in the corners of her yellowed eyes. A bright, quick glint or sparkle there in the periphery when she awoke in the morning, covered in the debris of last night's meal. Chicken bones and magazine scraps. Uneaten sardine tails and flecks of tin. Rags was in love. Or some manner of love, some status-crazed version of adoration that had nestled and clotted in her heart like grease. You see, she and Sebastian were a thing. Of course Rags didn't know that Sebastian had taken his carriage for a day's journey to the countryside and visited with Kelli at her parents' Westhampton manor. That the angular and mismatched pair had played billiards and discussed the nature of pets, Kelli's feeble bat wing heart fluttering and whimpering. Rags didn't know of that visit and, really, she didn't need to. Nothing of note had happened, just feelings being glooped across the floor like the maid's wash water. Sebastian had sat there in the sprawling manse and the only thing that came into his mind was not sympathy for Kelli's ailing dog, Lady Stoutbiscuits (a dog that later died and Kelli shook and shuddered and plead with Death to take her instead but it would not work), but rather Rags. Rags with her squat, gymnastic frame. Her heaving bosom toppling cheaply out of a Target chemise. He needed her, he had suddenly realized. And so he dashed out of the mansion, Kelli calling dimly after him, and ordered his driver to spurn the horses harder, and harder still! To the city! To see his beloved!

Rags had been sifting through the small pile of rubbish she called her bureau, that nagging and delightful glimmer playing in the corners of her vision, when she felt a featherweight tap on her shoulder. And there he was. Her golden tendril'd Orpheus, the sallow stink of boxer shorts and potato chip breath like a sweet intoxicant cutting through the bitter cold air. The pair—reunited, soldered together like circuits on the beautiful motherboard of love—took a walk in the snow and discussed the lay of the land. "So what are we doing?" she asked him coyly. And he'd smiled and taken her hand and said, in verse lovelier than Byron, "I dunno." They kissed and parted ways and Sebastian stood there, shaky in his trainers, a new seed suddenly buried in fertile soil. Is this it?, he thought. Are we gonna do it?

As Rags puttered off in her jalopy made of popsicle sticks and stolen leprechaun wishes, she felt that nothing could be finer than a rich boy in her 'giner. But little did she know that something wicked her way was coming (is that a sentence?). That something came at her gymnastics meet. Hobo gymnastics meets consist of three events. There's Upside-down Pie Cooling on a Windowsill Stealing, the Vertical Knife Fight, and something called Chicken Tickling that, for FCC reasons, Bravo was unable to air last night. So this was Rags' first meet ever and she was very nervous. She twisted her kerchief in her fingers and lulled herself with soft vagabond melodies but still something rattled her. And then she realized what it was. There, perched in the bleachers like a scrawny vulture in an overcoat, was Soots. He'd come not just to watch her deft nabbing of a delicious rhubarb pie (which she aced, btw) but also to woo her back. After the meet he took her to a vegan restaurant and, after Rags stuffed all the silverware up her sleeves and filled her pockets with loose sugar, he rat-a-tat-tat gave her a laundry list of reasons why she should come back to him. He was so weird, a little young Woody Allen, all confident and forceful in that neurotic, nebbishy way.

So he wanted her to break up with Sebastian and she looked at him with her pursed, strawberry features and the wood and iron gears of her fraught hobo mind turned and turned. Next week it looks as though her music box romance with Sebastian will crumble. Which isn't surprising. Lord Sebastian had earlier gone to lunch with his terrible red-eyed father—a pierogi slump of a man in sad shiny brown pants, wisps of math-teacher-comb-over hair grimly foretelling Sebastian's inglorious future—who had prodded and probed him repulsively about his luck with the ladies. He wanted Sebastian to buckle down at school but also to party and fuck, to do the things one cannot do once the years have clumped and molded you into some land-wealthy Gollum, some zombie husk stretched over withered muscle that was once taut and defined from tennis games played in the browning 70s. Yes, maybe there was never really any hope for a bottle cap beauty like Rags and this vicarious teen boyangel. But still: Will she actually make the choice? Or will it just be made for her? Only time will tell.

And now for Part II.

A Corona Is a Glow, Coming from Millions of Miles Away
It was glitter, he decided. This strange shimmer sticking to his skin. PC picked at it, the silver speck on his forearm. It was the thick, dull part of morning and he was sprawled out in a bed, in his briefs, something rude and unfriendly taking root in his stomach. What had happened last night? He couldn't remember. But we can.

As mentioned before, PC was in Mexico. He'd gone to meet the dashing JP for a wintertime romp in shitty, slitty, glitzy Cancun. It was a strange place to find PC, the affected snob young hen of Upper East Side TV society, but it worked really well for the show. Because it stripped him of context and clout, reduced him to a sad, scared boy teetering on the brink of some wide chasm. And chasm, thy name is Homosexuality. Yes, last night we got our first substantial particle waves of the inexorably unfolding gay plotline and, I must say, it was done in far more interesting chamber piece fashion than I'd thought Bravo capable of pulling off. While PC and JP and RT and QV and DMX and the gang did their cock-and-ball strut through the booze-filled feeding trough, we saw poor PC just get angrier and sadder, sadder and angrier. That scary fugue of abandon was flickering full behind PC's beady hazel eyes, and a troubled character began to emerge. He just seemed to unhappy and frightened and botched and blocked.

See nothing really happened. And that was sort of the point. PC and his buddies were besieged by flock after flock of wayward vacationing girls, drawn like moths to the magnet glare of camera crew lights. Is there some homing beacon installed in the youngs nowadays that just seeks that shit out, like pigeons or computer-guided missiles? It's sort of uncanny. Anyway, tortured PC wanted nothing, I mean nothing, to do with them. Because, ew gross, they were from Texas or wanted to dance or wear sombreros or do Yaeger bombs. No Peter Chesley Malificent Peterson is wayyy better than that, plus there's JP.

There's JP, a tall "beautiful" Mexican, all sinew and strut, chest puffed out like a sail pointing towards Eden. Oh gorgeous JP who rumpled PC's hair on the beach as they sat, shirtless and free, and made jokes to boring girls about how PC was bisexual and had a gay boyfriend back home and PC just sat there and took it, just sat there and dreamed a thousand What Ifs, bundled them up like flowers or tissue paper, made houses of them, made children of them, made slow beautiful waltzes toward death of them. Here's the truth of it, plain and bald like Sebastian's ghoulish father in five years: PC is in love with JP and is struggling terribly with it and it is sad but, oh, it is also such compelling television. I hope Bravo isn't teasing us, I hope they don't cop out on us. We'll see.

For now, PC just seems upset and agitated all the time, happy and calmed only when JP has wrapped his tawny arms around his shoulders and urged him on into the night. For her part, boulder-faced Jessi sat rotting away in Miami Beach, calling and texting and BBM'ing and all other manner of communicating with PC to no avail. PC was ignoring her. "She isn't my girlfriend," he kept saying. And then he would say it once again inside his head, softer and more meaningful this time, She isn't my girlfriend. And she never will be. No one ever will be. And the finality of it, the fact of it, would just thud on him like coconuts in a 50s beach comedy, like the sproingy thwack of a tennis ball hitting the sweet spot of a Wilson. When he got back from Mexico—when the drinking and yearning had ended (or begun???)—he and Jessi stood in her room, unpacking. PC held up a rainbow-striped teddybear and asked "Is this a gay pride bear?" And she shrugged it off, thought nothing of it, ignored it, swept it away. But it lingered and hooked in PC and now suddenly there was a whole new freighted vocabulary. How the world suddenly handled differently, like a new car.

Jessi looked him, sure that something was different. "Were there skanks in Mexico?" she asked, all fake in her chillaxitude and whatevsness. PC laughed darkly and told her no, not at all, they were all gross. Jessi seemed mildly satisfied but was still confused by the new flint she saw in her old friend. PC sat on the bed and felt himself retreating into darkness, into the cold peculiarity of a life he'd never planned.

Meanwhile elsewhere Camille was there, still cockled and strange, buying chocolates and whispering nasty things into Rags' ears. Hooting in her I-don't-wanna-be-a-nerd-anymore way that Rags should create as much boy drama as possible, so Camille can leech off of it, suck it deep inside herself so it can nourish and preserve that wicked tickle that now clamors more loudly than Grades or College or The Future combined. (Years later, when Camille is bundled up in a weekend rental Vermont ski house, Camille will turn to her partner Ruth and confess to her that that was the day, that winter afternoon in the chocolate shop, when she first felt her life yawing sideways, felt it dip then soar—a swallow fleeting a barn—into a brand new sky.) Rags listened to Camille's advice and mulled it over while playing her hobo harmonica—a contraption fashioned from dust and glass and old fireplace bellows—under her favorite bridge. What mystery awaited her, she thought. And that was just her next meal.

Kelli meanwhile lingered in a graveyard. She missed that skittering, yippy thing. She missed its silly hair, its cute noises and smells. Other than Sebastian, though, she also missed her dog Lady Stoutbiscuits. How hard it is to say goodbye to something! What pain God's given us and called it a life. She stood there, paying mournful tribute, until she got cold and she saw the cameramen getting disinterested and this episode was over for her. "Come on, let's go back. I'll have the maid make us some lunch."

But yes, back. We'll go back. Back to the bright silver blot on PC's arm. This bed, here in Mexico. This new thing in him a worm or an organ. At first he was confused, disoriented, unsure of the walls and drapes and sad sailboat painting framed beside a muted TV. But then there it was. Sense. Sense like sense has never been. Framed in a doorway, bent and beautiful. The smooth bulb of an Adam's apple, the rolled glens and hillocks of shoulder and collar, the crisp taper of stomach and waistband. JP. The legend to a map. A key. A beacon. A lighthouse.

A lighthouse perched on a precarious Yucatan shore, amid rocks and palms and finely-ground shells. The old elements and matter of dangerous Mexico. But it wasn't these things that destroyed PC. It wasn't disease. It wasn't villains on furlough from Juarez. It wasn't the burnished metal of a conquistador—not Cortes, not Pizarro, not eternal Ponce de Leon. No it wasn't any of that which felled proud, mighty PC. It was nothing simpler or purer than love and abandon themselves. Those things that eat from within and without. Here they were. Here we go.

PC scrambled out of bed while JP waited impatiently. He pulled on some shorts and a shirt and grabbed his wallet, his hotel key, his near-empty pack of cigarettes and they headed off for breakfast. Halfway down the hall JP threw his arm over PC's shoulders, pulled in him tight and asked, exuberant, "Ready for another day in paradise?"

And there, for just a second, while still in the warm pocket made by two people, faraway and safe in another country, PC felt ready for anything.

Hopefully you remember the moment to which I'm referring. Glass-eyed Camille is sitting at the fancy club birthday party and chatting up the rumply Russ troll that is Sebastian. See, she was trying to get information out of him so she could run and tell poor pointy-faced Kelli, but she's also a teenage girl and he's a teenage boy that everyone's in lurve with so she was also trying to flirt with him, just a little bit, just a little sad, aching bit. So she asked him some dumb question and gave him a big smile and a little coy head tilt and he just said to her: "You have something in your teeth." And there in the still glass of her eyes, something exploded or crumbled. She laughed and said "Wait, are you being serious?" and he nodded and she covered her mouth and ohhhh holy Anything in heaven, it was just so... We've been there. We've all been there as someone is just so flippant and casual about mortifying you. That she'd been leaning in close, trying to act cool (See, I can talk to boys...) and then there it went, up in smoke like flash paper. Oh man. It just hurt my soul and tickled my funny bone and then poor Camille just sat there, deflated and quiet, while the rest of the party raged on. Agh. A primal scream to you, poor Camille.

Anyway. That was toward the end. So let's cycle back, through whole other series of embarrassments, to other moments of kids being precarious kids.

The evening started with PC and Jessi, eating dinner in a fancy kitchen, leaning against the counter, feeling cool and whatevs about it all. They had their snappy little dialogue that they always have, because they are such dear friends, such dear hearts who are so similar, and PC said that everyone thinks Jessi is a bitch and she slapped him across the face (really, she did) and said "I am not a bitch!" and we were meant to see the irony there, or the contradiction, or whatever, and say "10 points to Bravo house!" or something. But instead I just watched it, slack-jawed on the couch, the sticky night cobwebbing my brain, and thought: Man, Jessi is really really in love with PC and it is sad. And it's true, and it's sad, but it's also pleasingly real in a way. There's a soft hurt that's not manufactured. There's something that Jessi will look back on, in the midst of the college sprawl, and say "Oh, yeah. I did feel that once." And then she'll keep walking. For now, though, it's probably miserable. So, sucks for you J.

Speaking of miserable, dim Kelli went on a date with mumbling Sebastian. Well, she thought it was a date—he brought her cupcakes and she loves cupcakes, she's obsessed, she likes them more than cake!!—but he just seemed bored. She smiled and twinkled and giggled and cooed like she'd learned to do from TV but none of it worked. He just sorta smirked at her and then told her that later that night, he was going to a fancy French restaurant with the apple(core) of his eye, the brave hobo princess Rags McTattershanty. Kelli's face fell and she said "Her? Really?" And Sebastian grinned his jerky playa grin and inside Kelli a sad opera aria'd to its end, a cave door started to close and brave Aida held her heart up to the disappearing sun and then it was time for Sebastian to go.

While Kelli was stuck on a park bench, wallowing in the past, old Rags was skibbling down the sidewalk, her skeleton chorus following her in a grim-yet-cheerful dance macabre, dreaming of the future. The date was on! Since she'd never set foot inside a restaurant except to scuttle in and steal dinner rolls from the plates of negligent old dowagers before getting chased out by an angry chef wielding a rollingpin, she decided she needed new garments. She opened her leather coin purse and sifted through its contents. She had two mismatched buttons, a few kernels of corn, and a gold tooth she'd taken from Smokestack McGee after he'd fallen asleep in the storm drain one rainy night and never woken up. Perfect! It was just the right amount to go to a thrift store and buy some dress-like cloth. While perusing the store with her two hobo compatriots, Loretta Jingles and Barnacle Betty, Rags mused that lord Sebastian probably doesn't even know what a thrift store is. Why, he's probably never had whisker stew, either!

Over in richtown, little PC was feeling blue. PC was feeling lost and strange. Something was changing in him, something he couldn't quite explain. He went to see an old girlfriend of his, a wise girl of 19 who said that he just needed a change of scenery. Needed to get out of that cliched Upper East crowd, needed to shake things up, to open himself up like windows in a shuttered summer house. Let the clean air in. The 19-year-old looked as though she had something else perched delicately on the tip of her tongue, a small sparrow of knowledge, and she almost let it flutter out but PC just looked so sad and so worried just then, on that little black couch, and she decided now wasn't the time. But PC still didn't feel better so he went to see a therapist. You know, the kind of therapist who holds her sessions in the I Dream of Jeannie bottle house and lets the session be taped. PC said that he was very hard on himself, that he didn't let himself show feelings, and the therapist too felt that little sparrow alight on her tongue but she swallowed, gulped it down like so many other people in poor PC's life, and he just stared off at nothing in particular and felt the gears of his feelings grind on in their lonely way.

The Seine gurgled on and the Tour Eiffel sent its searchlight beacon twirling around and around and around, and an accordion played softly while two young lovers, be-do'd Sebastian and worried Rags sat and ate fancy French food. Well, OK. Sebastian got steak frites while Rags, who didn't understand the concept of a menu (at first she just said gruffly to the waiter, "I'll have whatever it is you're cookin' back there"), just had a plain house salad. No dressing. That was it. Oh, teenage girls. Just eat! It'll be OK. I promise. Anyway, the pair talked cute and Sebastian grilled her with questions and she swooned at his French. She said she wanted to be a philosopher. Sebastian was impressed. What Rags didn't tell him is that Hobo Philosophy is very different from Muggle philosophy. Hobo Philosophy is concerned with the deciphering of runes, with the mulling over of how to best jump a moving boxcar, with the History of Soups, with the proper way to tie a bindle, with the true meaning of the phrase, coined by Jewish-Hobo thinker Shlomo Slacks, "There's six ways to get a nickel, but only one way to spend it." Rags didn't tell Sebastian all of this, because she was scared he'd be confused and run away. Probably a good idea. That said, Sebastian was smitten. He walked her home and they kissed on her doorstep.

Kelli, meanwhile, was sitting in a pile of mud with Camille. They were at a spa. Kelli's insides felt muddy, too. All thick and gloopy and brown. She talked to Sebastian on the phone and he told her about the date and the kissing and Kelli wanted to just sink down there into that mud and disappear forever. Float through the Earth and out the other end and then there'd be outerspace where, sure, there are no boys but at least there's no pain, either. Later, she and Camille asked a post-date Rags to come meet them at Intermix so Camille could act like a total weird-o-matic and dig, vicariously, for details about Sebastian. Rags was just amused by the store, saying she could "buy" (i.e. have Phineas Fingersticks cause a commotion while she stuffed it under her tophat) the same shirt at Target for a way lot less. And I liked her then. She was charming and real. But anyway, she eventually let it spill that she'd kissed Sebastian and Kelli fell over dead, her sad, fake "I don't care" smile frozen on her face. Camille and Kelli's corpse invited Rags to a party that a girl named Zoe was having, because Sebastian was coming too and Kelli wanted to see them together. Why, Kelly, why?? Why are you torturing yourself so?? Oh, kids. So dumb.

Zoe is a girl who lives in a hip loft downtown and is friends with Jessi. She and Jessi just have a wacky time together, talking about clothes and doing jokey-joke dances and making fun of bridge-and-tunnel folks and their stupid big SUV limos. Zoe is one of those girls, so stuffed and matted with insecurities and prickly city miseries that she ends up letting herself spill out on the world and be mean. She's the kind of girl who you become friends with in college because she's interesting but then you slowly realize that she's cruel and spoiled and woefully unhappy and you quickly try to unknot yourself from the friendship. And years later, around the time that you're lazy and drunk and nostalgic and about to graduate, you sit with friends somewhere sharing old stories and someone says "Remember Zoe?" and everyone laughs and said "Oh God, Zoe! Whatever happened to her?" And of course she went abroad and never came back and someone saw her at a New Year's Eve party in the city last year and she was just doing coke all night. So, Jessi, I'm glad you have friends who you aren't secretly in love with, but Zoe... I dunno about her.

At Zoe's birthday party, obviously, yes, the horrible incident of the teeth happened and Camille's life was forever ruined. Also at the party: Jessi was mean to Kelli and Camille because that's what the producers have told her to do. Sebastian and Rags danced and sat next to one another and fell blissfully in love and Kelli watched all this from the sidelines and was miserable. She started to tear up and then stormed out and it was just sort of like... But, Kells, m'love. You made this happen! You knew it was going to happen if they both showed up at the same party, but you willed to happen nonetheless. Because teenagers like to hurt themselves sometimes just so they know they are feeling something. Kelli is an emotional cutter. It's sad, but true.

It wasn't all sunshine and posies for the Royal Couple, oh no. Rags was sitting there all happy until she felt a knobby finger tapping on her shoulder. She turned, and oh crap, it was Soots McKenzie, her old flame. They weren't "quite over" or some such nonsense. The child is 15 for God's sake. And yet this wealth of history she has! Oh do come sit with me by the fire, Rags, and tell me tales of old. Of adventures at sea, of knife fights, of loves won and lost, of bathtub gin exploding. Sebastian was really unhappy that Rags and Soots were talking, so he went, like a robot with one particular set of programming, and chatted up other girls, plunking their numbers into his phone, collecting things he would never use, like marbles or decorative plates, that at least look good on the shelf.

But his efforts weren't necessary, as Rags really only had eyes for Sebastian. She shooed Soots away and he went tinkering into the night, whistling a vagabond song and twirling his bone-topped cane. Rags and Sebastian strolled down the street and professed that it was all about them, it was only ever about them, and they kissed and somewhere in another part of town it snowed cold wet snow in Kelli's bedroom.

While all of this drama was going down, lonely PC was waiting for a blind date. He went to some vast restaurant along the park and sat with a bottle of wine, waiting waiting waiting. And she never showed up. After 50 minutes, the date never arrived, and you had to figure that Bravo was just being cruel to this poor lad. And crueler still they will be, when next week the Question becomes concrete and two girls assume he's gay. So this is where PC's story is headed, whether we like it or not (we do), and isn't Bravo wily for trying to trick us.

So, this episode was pretty good, right? I mean, with the dating intrigue and gloomy, torturing Kelli and the ascendancy of Rags McTattershanty to the vaunted halls of Those That Made It Out, those that transcended and skipped up into a new plane. The Hobo folk call these people Mulligans, those that get a do-over at life. Those that marry a Pullman car worker, those that stumble upon a cache of gold bullion while sifting drunkenly one night through the tall reeds down by the docks. Rags has landed herself a richie, and by Hobo law, she'll have to leave all of her old world behind. Goodbye Loretta Jingles! Goodbye Barnacle Betty! Goodbye forever, Smokestack McGee! Thanks for the tooth.

What do you think it was like for poor Camille to watch that misery unfold last night? I wish she was in college now and that it didn't matter, but she's not. She's still moored in high school, still easy prey for all those high school nasties that, unfortunately, gnaw at you forever. But they do dissipate some, dear Camille. I promise you that.

For now you'll just have to gulp it down and try to move past it. And check your teeth. In the mirror or in a polished butter knife. Just to be sure. Be vigilant. Be brave.

And, most of all, carry a toothpick.

1.) Moms and Their Boxed Wine
After staging an intervention for her son, this woman's family then staged one for her over her Xanax addiction. She didn't want to go to rehab because of the its strict no-alcohol policy.

2.) Does Joan Rivers realize that perhaps she's gone too far with the cosmetic procedures?

3.) Did you like the Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion shows?

But it sucks that they never revealed what exactly Danielle "tried" to do to Dina that Caroline was freaking out about. From the way Caroline told it, Danielle took a hit out on her. But that doesn't seem realistic. Danielle sort of hinted at what it might on her blog:

I had no idea at the time what "disgraceful" acts she was referring to. I only found out later what she was talking about, from someone in her own family. I simply gave a phone number to her ex brother-in-law to contact proper people with questions that he had concerning something that was absolutely none of my business. I was asked to give this information to him.

4.) Cop Without a Badge Guy Talks
Danielle's ex-husband, Kevin Maher, who gave up all the dirt on her in "The Book" was on The Insider talking about how Danielle is "a bisexual." She didn't really deny it though.

5.) Promise Piercings
Kids are expressing their love for each other in new and different ways, like piercings…

…And emails.

6.) More Kid Stuff
NYC Prep was alright, but not great, IMO. But I did really like this girl, who is friends with one of the cast members, but not part of the cast herself. She's down town/to earth.

She seems tipsy.

And I love the way she communicates.

7.) Snoop's Statement On Michael Jackson

8.) Snoop Getting Off The Phone




9.) Larry King And "My daddy, P. Daddy"

10.) Reading: With Kathie Lee & Hoda

It's hard to recap a first episode, because we're just meeting all the youngsters—getting to know their peculiar BO stink, the weird way their tight little faces try to make facial expressions, their cockly eyes, their billowing girl-magnet manes. One thing we can be certain of, one constant like the Pole Star, is that teenagers fucking suck. Teenagers are horrible creatures whom nobody likes and who like nobody. Well, OK, that's not exactly true. Teenagers like each other in fits and starts, sweaty lusting and sad desperate clawing towards one another, the kind of thing that makes you glad that, even though you are feeling old and cancerous and haven't left the house for two days, you escaped that age. That you busted out and figured out other people at least somewhat, at least halfway, and so nothing is as fraught as it once was. Nothing is as exciting, either, but that's the compromise of growing up.

Anyway.

We met these kids in media res. PC the urban dandy and his trusty and loveless assistant Jessi met to discuss things like boys and girls and dating and loving each other. This was supposed to establish their rapport as friendly but sharp, with PC as the witty-but-mean dilettante and Jessi as the hardened New York fashion lover with a tiny pinhole prick in her heart for this dark, caustic Oscar Wilde. But mostly we saw a young boy trying very, very hard. Every little cock of the head and withering smile so practiced and childish, his face and limbs still lanky with baby fat, everything squirming in those trussed-up fashion garments. And Jessi was just sad for PC, sad in love, sad in loss. She looked at him as best she could and she knew he was gone, but it didn't matter, dear Diary. It will never matter, never ever. She'll always keep chasing.

The pair discussed going to some sort of fashion-art event and they both agreed it would be good to be there, to network as 18-year-olds, to make a go of it. Deep inside Jessi thought And to kiss! To hug and kiss and let the rest of the world fall away! Oh, just once! But she buried it down and talked to the camera about fashion. It is very important to her. Clothes are like her children. And, in the future, her children will be like clothes: boring after a few years.

Anyway, let's leave them in their leather banquette corner for a bit. Over to Kelli and Camille, two best bitchy friends who never know what the hell they're talking about. Camille is the glass-eyed go-getter, a girl as driven-yet-purposeless as any of those lonely Tracy Flicks you knew in your high school. Right now the plan is Harvard, then Genetics (right?), then at 40, kids and a hubby. As if nothing gets in the way! I bet it'll be Middlebury, maybe, and she'll study drama, and then she'll bounce around lonely in New York for a few years, smoking too much weed, but having no reason to stop. Eventually she'll meet Ruth at a yoga class she decides to go to one lazy, drizzly April Saturday afternoon and the two will get to talking. "Didn't I see you somewhere?" Ruth will ask, her bangs falling in her face (a phenomenon that Camille will come to cherish and adore, but she won't know it then). Camille will laugh darkly and say "Long story..." and then she'll tell it over coffee and though she'll never tell that one particular story ever again, she and Ruth will end up having coffee forever, and that will be a life. But for now, it's Harvard and genetics. We'll see.

But anyway, in the here and now. Camille's friend is Kelli, a girl with pointy features and screwed up everything else. See her blonde ice queen mother and toothy father live in an enormous summer palace in the Hamptons year-round. But Kelli wants to sing and her older brother wants to I don't know what, so their parents said oh sure what the hell, live in an apartment in Manhattan all by yourselves. We'll come see you once a week and we'll order Chinese, like every week is Jewish Christmas. Which is such a good idea! For kids to be kept lonely in some apartment, staying out whenever they want, never feeling the tug of responsibility or, oh what the hell, love. Ugh.

Evs. Kelli went to dinner with her two no-name friends and they sat there like Carrie Bradshaws or Blair Winkerwonks or whatever and drank soda pop and then from the doorway emerged some golden god of sandy beaches and warm rumpled bedsheets. It was Sebastian, the long-maned stuff of teenage girl catnip. Confident and breezy, boyish and dull in just the right measure. There's nothing terribly cute about Sebastian, I think we're allowed to say that, but you kind of get why all the girlies lurve him so. Because he acts like they want to act: comfortable. It's that simple. Kid just doesn't give a shit. Or is at least very good at pretending that he doesn't. Either way, it just gets everybody's brand new delicates in a knotted bunch. Especially, that evening, Kelli's. See Sebastian leveled his caramel gaze on Kelli and decided that she was the next one. And the minute he did so, she was hooked.

The pair went on a date downtown so she could buy clothes. Sebastian sat there on a black leather couch and commented on her outfits. The one we saw was a dangerously low-cut black dress that he said looked nice and she said she didn't like it because she wanted it shorter and Sebastian's gear-eyes turned and you could see he was figuring out a new tactic, realigning his strategy ever so slightly because oh maybe now she was easier than he'd thought. Kelli didn't really notice, or did and liked it, so she invited him to a party she was going to at a Japanese restaurant somewhere downtown. (Was it Japonais? I think it was.) He casually said he would go and inside Kelli everything did bellyflops and a door flew wide open.

The girl, who was having the party? Her name is Rags McTattershanty, and she lives under a bridge eating bugs and canned lima beans. Rags goes to a public school called Professor Shitbox's Idiot Academy for Nobodies, where all the trashcans are on fire and hobos teach you Hobo Arithmetic and in gym class you learn how to jump boxcars. Rags really hates it because she wants to be one of the rich kids just like the private schoolers are, plus her mom is a mean old goat (literally, a goat wearing a necklace and carrying a purse) that keeps trying to eat her BlackBerry. It just sucks so bad being her, and being so poor, and having all her best hats can-openered open and all her gloves getting their fingers cut off and sometimes when it's very late at night and one star shines brightly in the tarnished tin sky she fondles her bindle and dreams of Mexico.

But for now she's dreaming of a party and while the mean old goat doesn't want her to have it, she's a goat and what can she do, really? So it's off to the bash at the upstairs lounge of Japonais. The party looked really fun. Who doesn't want to sit in a darkened room with a bunch of high school girls who won't talk to each other because everyone's awkward and everyone is wearing dumb dresses meant to hide terrible rolls of things and that's it? There's probably soda pop and no one eats because it's a 15-year-old girl's birthday party. Camille and Kelli show up and Camille doesn't really know how to talk to anyone. See, whenever Camille is around other girls she gets this cotton-mouthy feeling and she starts uncontrollably trembling and her stomach squeals and ties and she gets warm all over. She just doesn't get it! (Once, one morning when Ruth has decided to call in sick and the two are lying knit-up in bed, Camille will tell her about this feeling and Ruth will turn and kiss her eyelids and say "Yeah, me too." And then they'll groggily and excitedly plan what to do with the rest of stolen day.)

Anyway, all the girl tension was broken when, like a colt coming galloping out of the barn on a misty spring morning, in sauntered Sebastian. A nervous hush fell across the crowd and everyone gurgled and Rags' favorite hobo love song played in her head:

Beans, baby, beans.
Do you know what it means?

That from fava or lima or kidney or chick
You're the only bean that I'd pick?

Forget knives and trains and jamboree fires
You 'n soup is alls I requires.

And Sebastian too was thinking about some sort of love song—this one about fingering under the bleachers after lacrosse practice, far less romantic—so he immediately turned on the ol' Floppy Haired Charm and Rags smiled and began to tap her foot a bit.

Remember the story of Junkpan Zeke
Met a girl and couldn't speak

So he cut open a doggie-do's heart
Now he 'n Lady Bootstrap never do part.

Kelli can tell when a hobo is falling in love, just always been something she could do, and she can also tell when asshole rich boys are losing interest in you, just something you can tell, and so she and Camille stormed out and Kelli cried softly on the street and another girl was ruined forever. Sebastian meanwhile played all cool and got the Rags' digits and, well, another girl was ruined forever.

So then it was time for the big Fashion-Art Party that was going fine until a bunch of stupid teenagers with camera crews decided to crash the damn thing. (Or maybe, you know, the whole party was arranged for the stupid teenagers with camera crews.) Jessi had been having dinner with her fart-faced friend Marissica. She and Marissica have a mutual love of fashion and so they find lots to talk about. Like how Marissica is willing to wear $20 clothing because she's "so downtown." I don't think "downtown" means anymore what people think it means. I mean, it sort of does... But... Ugh, white people. Jessi also complained that she had been written about on some sort of wannabe Gossip Girl site that said "Saw Jessi getting out of a car." Scandalous! Jessi hated that she was being written about on websites. Jessi loved that she was being written about on websites.

Then Marissica brought up the topic of PC. You know, 'cause Jessi and PC are such good friends and they used to date "such a long time ago." You know what annoys/tickles me more than anything else about teenagers, maybe? How if they're 18, something that happened when they were 16 was "such a long time ago." Like they're old seasoned pros now, and that was just their wild past. I know that time is stretched out in weird ways during high school, but it's just so funny. And annoying. It is both! Digressions! You could tell that Jessi is still butt-crazy in love with PC and she will be blinkered til the day she dies about what sort of .... proclivities ... he may or may not have. (But we're not talking about that today! I promise!) Outside a rainy car honked its bleary horn and it was PC waiting to go to Fashion-Art (Fart!).

At the party Jessi turned her eyes upward to all the professional fashion types, while PC had to look below him to feel cool. This is how his pecking order works. Someone older and more experienced in the ways of absolutely everything would find PC ridiculous. But two younger girls, girls like Camille and Kelli!, would find him... oh, ha, completely ridiculous. Well, at the party they didn't, but later... Before Later happens, Jessi saw PC chatting it up and boy oh boy did she get mad. Not because she was being ignored, not because she was supposed to have a wingman for talking about Fart. No, it was simply because she loves PC dearly and she wants him only with her, only a part of her, never using his questionable charms (PC said something earlier about talking like a snake but eventually being "bitten by the creature" and he thought it was so clever and wicked and I just put my head in my hands because kids are so dumb) on anyone else but her. But Jessi can't articulate any of this because she knows, deep down, what the answer will be, what it will always be, so instead she sulks and pouts and tries to make the drama exciting, tries to make the drama something fulfilling and whole in its own right. If I can't be in loved, I can at least be sad and angry, totally completely butt-crazy sad and angry. Whatever works, babe.

So she stormed off and PC acted like a regular bitch and condescended knowingly to his little compatriots and said they should have dinner. So they did have dinner! Jessi was mad when she found out, but again hid it under the potato field of her face, buried it in the loamy Idahoan soil of her cheeks and smiled a toothy, sandy smile. So at dinner PC acted a regular fool, asking the girls if they were 12 (they are) and offending Camille with his sunflower-faced sensibilities. ("I knew then. I think I knew then," she'll say thoughtfully to Ruth as they stare out over the Adriatic, happy and full of memory on a sunsetty vacation.) PC just thought it was ridiculous and funny that they still get grounded and he's so old and Kelli's face crumbled like it was on a mountain face in New Hampshire because, why were boys like this? And another girl was ruined forever, again.

Speaking of girls being ruined, forever, Sebastian and his lame wingman Peter Pettigrew went to Kurve to woo some new ladies. Kurve is an empty spacestation Thai restaurant around the corner from my old apartment and it is always so sad because no one is there. They must have pissed themselves when Bravo showed up, brandishing clipboards and sweet, sweet publicity. Anyway, Seb and Scabbers devised a system wherein Seb would grunt and muggingly toss his hair toward the "one he wanted." The "one he wanted" turned out to be a toothy thing by the name of Celine who looked at him with calf-eyes and flirted the way she'd seen in movies. Sebastian wooed her with his French, saying filthy things and translating it as "I want to marry you tonight," and Celine coyly twirled her iced tea and said "Where would we go on our honeymoon?" Sebastian hopefully thought Third base... but instead said aloud "The South of France, of course." Then the kids talked about girlfriends and boyfriends and Sebastian said he wanted a girlfriend when he was old and ready to settle down, like when he was 25 or something. Then I shot myself and my roommate sent my mother a lovely corsage in condolence.

No, actually what happened was that another girl was ruined, forever.

Of course eventually all of Sebastian's ways will blow up in the face of the one who truly loves him, poor dejected Rags McTattershanty. She'll stare off into the flickering dusk there under that bridge and sing an ancient hobo lament.

Apple cores and bean poles
Hat shops and ant holes.

Clam digs and found teeth,
Mud pies with rocks beneath!

All good things, and all that's left,
Since you gone and made me bereft.

She'll pull her thatched newspaper blanket over her shivering shoulders and fall asleep. She'll dream a dream of Jell-O sculptures and succotash saucers. Creamed peas and open gates. She'll dream lonely Hobo dreams, stray dogs licking at her toes, Matchman Bob strumming his banjo made of bones.

Also what happened is that Camille got her SAT scores back and they were decent, so good for her. Maybe everything really will happen. Maybe all will fall into place and she'll think it's grand. But what she'll miss will be immeasurable. The trip to Orono to meet Ruth's parents, the trip when she fell while hiking and when Ruth ran over and saw Camille in bloody pain, the sudden stricken look of pure wild love that Camille saw streak across Ruth's face. The day, while walking down Bowery looking for a lamp, that Ruth got the call and found out that yes, the procedure had taken and there was to be a baby. All these bits of one life. Belonging only to itself, and to none other.

Ah well.

Later PC threw a water bottle at Jessi and Jessi got upset and then they made up and the cars of Columbus Circle roared on by and two kids disappeared into a particular night.

I don't know how thrilled I was by this episode, honestly. I think the show has great potential, and the preview clips make me believe as much. It looks as though those wicked Bravo producers are indeed setting us up for something, um, about PC, wink wink. And there will be Sebastian being a jerk and spitting in the street and many, many more girls will be ruined, and I'm hooked! Just getting to the end of that sentence, I'm hooked.

I do wonder, though, what these kids will think of it. Or what they did think of it last night. You know, time moves so slowly and yet so fast then. Years change you then like decades do later in life. Now that, for some of them, high school has become a dull, thin membrane receding into the past, like Staten Island fading behind you as you arch across the Verrazano, I wonder if they realize what a silly mistake it was. A permanent tattoo of something so mercifully fleeting. Because they are older now. And presumably (hopefully...) they've changed, grown up a bit.

Ah well. Beds have been made. Now let's go lie in 'em.

Um, you know, not creepily.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The deal with PC: He's the fashion-obsessed, Chuck Bass-esque, rich boy who has troubled relations with some of the ladies on the show. See he wants a girlfriend, but he doesn't have one, and he has trouble keeping one when he does (or something), and in the clips I've seen you just sorta scratch your head and think nastily, excitedly, wickedly, gladly, even: Wait, but isn't he gay?

And therein lies the problem. By all outward indicators—the clothes, the voice, the bevy of girl friends, the overcompensatingly loud discussions of so badly wanting a girlfriend—the young fellow (who was an 18-year-old high school senior when the series was filmed) is a closeted homosexual. We are allowed to think that. But are we allowed to say it? Yes, angry pedantic commenter, I realize I just said it above, but I mean can we continue to, at length and with fervor? I'm planning on writing recaps of this thing because OMG it looks so good and ripe for making up weirdo fanfiction (for this I am paid money, ridiculously), and I'm sure I'll want to say SOMETHING about the glaring pink elephant in the room. But is that mean-spirited? Is it witch-hunty?

The thing is, as this job has worn on for the past eighteen months or so, and national gay rights politics have become what they are, and the swell of June pride nags at my edges this gray afternoon, I'm becoming increasingly unsure of how to write about Gay Stuff on a nationally-read website. What's the tone to take? Is there a tone to take? Is silence, unless you have something nice to say, golden? Or is anything welcome, whatever gets the word out? Most important for me, can it ever be funny?

Writing about gay issues, both profound and profane, on the internet has gotten me in trouble. Sometimes the commenting and emailing ire feels unwarranted (I believe I am allowed to state an aggressive opinion about Adam Lambert) and other times it's completely justified. Sometimes I royally fuck up and thoughtlessly post links to embarrassing photos of Oscar-winning screenwriters/young beautiful gay rights activists.*

And that's OK, I think. The worthy posts and the fuck ups alike, because they're all part of a conversation that I'm having with myself and with, I hope, you, dear readers. Sometimes everyone says/does dumb things in the pursuit of... clarity. Those are the pains of progress, both personal and political.

Still though I wonder should I go ahead, knowing full well that it's not exactly nice, and say what I'm gonna say about PC, some murky idea of decorum be damned? 'Cause sure it's not exactly nice, but does that make it needlessly mean? He and/or his parents signed the contract, after all, willingly stepped off that ledge into the abandon of the public domain. Calling someone gay as means to an insult is a stupid thing to do, and would never be my intent. Yanking people out of the closet—especially young folks who are struggling just like any one of us struggled (or are still struggling) at some point—isn't my intent either. But just how much of a sacred cow is the coming out process, the fraught and frustrating and difficult steps toward saying "This is me"? When is a person's path a person's path (and a private one at that) and when is it about All Of Us—are we just as negatively affected by the temerity of public figures as we are by the brash and poorly-executed Perez Hilton garbage?

I think, ultimately, that there is a happy (one could say gay even, snarf) medium to be struck here. I may find some of PC's antics sexually questionable, and I may say so. And you may find that shitty, you may find it funny, or you may find it some depressing blend of the two. Please tell me! We grow and learn and stumble together, even when it's about something as asinine as a Bravo reality show about bragging rich kids.

At least I think that's so.

*This isn't just me working through guilt issues, BTW. I spend plenty of time doing that when I'm home alone, and the computer is off.

See one of the Bravo show's cast members, the cockle-eyed Camille, goes to Nightingale-Bamford, a tony Upper Eastern academy in the vein of those on Gossip Girl. Well the school isn't exactly thrilled about this attention, so the administration sent out a bitchy-in-a-stiff-East-Coast-way letter to parents basically saying "this girl does not represent Nightingale."

The decision to participate in the show was made by the student and her parents without consulting Nightingale's administrators. We counsel our girls to avoid such exposure, knowing that the best intentions are usually subsumed by a media machine that too often simplifies the many facets of a Nightingale education into a shallow and stereotypical view of independent schools. (As with most series of this genre, the show is "reality" in name only.) ... This is not the first time someone has presented skewed version of our world, nor will it be the last, so we approach this situation as we've handled others previously: focused on providing our girls the world-class education that has long defined Nightingale.

Plus all the cattiness and drugs and sex and handbags! They have also defined Nightingale!

Civilians who are in the know are also refuting any reality show's claim to UES verity. Like, for example, the playa kid on Prep, Sebastian, goes to a newish prep school on fucking Long Island. Girl, that does not count.

And while Peter "PC" Peterson may be the grandson of a real life tycoon, he still went on public radio on Long Island to call the Real Housewives of New York "trashy pieces of shit." (We've tried to find this interview online, but alas cannot. Anyone?) So there's lots of society infighting and name-calling and huzzabub and ugh. How silly.

As one society insider describes their experiences with New York's wealthy youngs: "What was off-putting was that the fact that we were in a mansion wasn't discussed." Which is exactly it. The wealthy don't talk about money. The rich talk about money. We guess that means the NYC Prep kids are rich. Which, as we all know, means nothing.

Oh, and, if you're curious:

Sebastian goes to the very-recently-established Ross School; Camille attends Nightingale-Bamford; Jessie and PC attend the Dwight School; Kelli (whose parents live in the Hamptons and visit their teenagers in Manhattan one night a week) attends Birch-Wathen-Lenox, and Taylor goes to Stuyvesant, which is not a prep school but a magnet public school.

[via Miss Chris Rovzar at Daily Intel]

He was filing for the New York Times blog The Moment, and his findings were both grim and delightful. Two anecdotes in particular sent shivers up and down our spine.

The first is of young Sebastian, the rumply teddy-bear playa who likes to crush a lot:

"My hobby," says Sebastian, a doe-eyed 16-year-old ladies' man, "is hooking up with the hottest girls I can." Like any budding player, Sebastian goes on a date to Kurve, a futuristic Thai place in the East Village, with a wingman and two hapless 16-year-old girls. This isn't so much what adults do as what a teenager might think adults do.

Ha. Which basically makes them the only customers that space station debacle of a restaurant has ever had. (Srsly, it is always sad and empty.)

The next is of poor Taylor who is, well, poor. See, she goes to public school, rather than one of the tony private academies that mold the young, molting minds of the other cast members. This often causes her dismay and anxiety. Mostly caused by the bitchy Kelli, who lives sans parents on the Upper East:

Kelli, a 16-year-old aspiring singer, lives with her slightly older brother without parent supervision - Mom and Dad come in once a week from their house in the Hamptons - on the Upper East Side. As you might expect for an unsupervised minor, she has nothing but bottled water in the fridge and eats out every night. (This is perhaps the most realistic detail.) Taylor, the "poor" publicly schooled one, aches to fit in with the cushy crowd and throws a party at Japonais because, "it's good to be perceived as having money." Sadly, the mix of public and private school sensibilities is not a harmonious one and her private school friends - Kelli, the singer, and Camille, the uptight overachiever - leave in a huff. (It doesn't help that Sebastian, who went on a date with Kelli to the Moschino store, spends the night flirting with Taylor.)

Oh how awful high school is! Throw money and terrifying plays for society status into the mix, and you basically get a cocktail as sour (and wonderful) as a gimlet and as potent (in a good way?) as a dry martini.

We sorta can't wait.

Oh, and here's the full preview special. It's brilliant.

The Good Stuff

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Weeds; June 8th, 10pm
Showtime's hit comedy, about Mary Louise Parker the suburban mommy pot dealer, regained any momentum it lost during the Albert Brooks period by shacking Nancy up with a deadly but lovable Mexican politician cum drug lord and deepening the stakes with a life-saving pregnancy plot twist at the very, very end of last season. Plus, Silas'll probably take his shirt off a lot more, and we might finally get to see where, if anywhere, the undeniable Nancy/Andy chemistry could lead. Almost as much summertime fun as just actually getting stoned.

Top Chef Masters; June 10th, 10pm
Basically the same thing as regular Top Chef, except with food world superstars rather than wannabes. You won't get the same disaster quotient you get on the o.g. version, but that's probably actually a good thing. Bravo's once proud (and dwindling) fleet of competition series have begun relying too heavily on wackadoo personalities rather than on talent, so maybe this is the ideal corrective. Sure they may have out-there, annoying personalities, but we're pretty much guaranteed they're all gonna be competent.

True Blood; June 14th, 9pm
HBO's kitschy vampire series started off wildly uneven last season, veering from scary-sexy to scary-stupid in the middle of episodes. But it eventually found its deep-fried Southern Gothic stride, with clever storytelling and ever-deepening characters gushing out of every orifice. And, yes, Anna Paquin is ungodly annoying, thus rendering the show's central relationship something of a bore, but she's more than made up for by the dangerously sexy Ryan Kwanten, the filthy-fascinating Nelsan Ellis, and the as-yet-unexplored-but-still-intriguing lesbodrone that is Michelle Forbes. As entertaining a show as one could want during the hot 'n sticky months. [See Ed. note below]

Mad Men; August sometime, 10pm
AMC has two of the best shows on television right now, and this is their flagship (the other is the fabulous Breaking Bad). When we last left the worried Don Draper, he was staring down dual abysses—his swiftly unknotting past, and the disappearing of everything the late 1950s promised the 60s would be. Poor Betty has problems of her own to deal with (oh dear, a baby), and of course there's that whole Pete/Peggy thing (oh dear, a baby), and the unsettling matter of Joan's rape. Not exactly light summer fare any of it, but compelling, beautifully detailed, oddly menacing capital a Art nonetheless.

The Maybes

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Nurse Jackie; June 8th, 10:30pm
The first episode Showtime's new Edie Falco vehicle is actually already on demand, and we gave it a watch last night. While Edie Falco (who plays the acidic-yet-warm, painkiller-addicted title nurse) could basically recite tax code and make us swoon, we're not so sure about everything around her. Medical shows are really hard to make original at this point, no matter how many gratuitous swear words and sex references you throw into the pot. Peter Facinelli's Dr. Asshole is basically a (slightly) grownup version of the Asshole he played so many years ago in Can't Hardly Wait and the good-lookin' Haaz Sleiman couldn't really find his way through the dense thicket of ooh-snap girlfriend gay stuff the writers gave him in the pilot. Points, though, go to theater goddess Eve Best and sadsack Merritt Wever for handling their barely sketched-out roles with aplomb. We'll keep watching for now, but we're cautious.

Hung; June 28th, 10pm
HBO's show about a man (The Sweetest Thing's vaguely annoying Thomas Jane) who has an enormous penis and becomes gigolo has a great supporting cast (including the underrated Anne Heche and the vastly underused Jane Adams), but that premise... If it's funny/sad, we're into it. If it's funny/gross, we didn't like Californication the first time, so why would we like it grosser?

10 Things I Hate About You; July 7th, 8pm
We love ABC Family for Greek, but hate it for The Secret Life of the American Teenager. So we're not really sure where the hell we fall on 10 Things. The movie on which it's based was a tart little surprise of a teen flick, but the small screen cast seems, frankly, nowhere near as attractive or interesting as a lineup of Heath Ledger, Joe Gordon-Levitt, Gabrielle Union, and Alex Mack. That Larry Miller stuck around to keep playing the overprotective dad of Kat and Bianca (yes, like in Taming of the Shrew) might indicate that there's some quality poking through the formula holes. We're curious to find out for sure.

For When Our Brains Are Mush

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.NYC Prep; June 23rd, 10pm
The Bravo show is this. Just spoiled rich New York City kids—the real-life Gossip Girls. It'll probably make you want to drink, so good thing it's summer and that's when drinking is forgiven, even encouraged. So pour that wine into a big ol' tumbler full of ice and sip deep. Or shallow. You know.

The Real World: Cancun; June 24th 10pm
Yes, it's happening. MTV has decided to sacrifice seven not-at-all-virgins to appease vengeful Montezuma. They'll go wandering through the jungles of the urban Yucatan, figuring out what happens when people stop being polite and start vomiting body shots into each other's belly buttons. Bad boy rocker Joey (from fuckin' Lawrence, Mass kid) and contest-winner Ayiiia (yes, three i's) are stone fox boombalotties, plus there's lots of weeping in the trailer, so... sigh. We're stoked, dude.

Wipeout; Wednesdays at 8pm
People falling down was pretty funny last summer. We're hoping the charm hasn't worn off. Don't fail us, ABC.

OK, that's it. The Boston Globe has an easy list of everything else. So go! Watch TV and have fun and enjoy the silly summer pleasures. But also be sure to get outside once in a while and experience all that the sweltering season has to offer. Like, um... Drinking outside. Or drinking on the beach. Those are sort of the same things, huh?

Oh well.

Editor's note: True Blood, like other TV shows (even some mentioned in this very post!), is a Gawker advertiser. Their campaign, though, includes sponsored posts via Bloodcopy.com, which when it was introduced generated some discussion in the media about media. So here is the boring disclosure: Those Bloodcopy posts are written by the advertising department. Editorial posts are written independent of who advertises; we might endorse, trash or simply ignore TV shows that happen to advertise. And that's why you keep a bright line separating the editorial and advertising in the first place, kids.

Top pic via Getty

It's called NYC Prep and it premieres later this month and judging by just-released preview clips... whoooo boy. Basically it's potato-ish looking teenagers talking about money that's not theirs and you know, trying to act like they live the sweet (suite?) life, when in actual reality no real child of Upper East (or West, I guess) ivybots would ever be allowed to be on a tacky TV show.

But who cares! Look everyone! Horrible, horrible children that will someday be responsible for supporting your old ass when Social Security finally evaporates forever. My "favorite" so far is some creature ludicrously named PC who is overly-styled and professes to have a crush on Ingrid Bergman (gag) and likes fancy clothes and fancy restaurants ("STK... more of a lounge feel") and, duh, wants to be an actor.

So, I'm crying. Only I can't tell if it's from joy or sadness.

Showtime, perhaps concerned about belt-tightening, or perhaps concerned that the shows suck, have been turning down pilots left and right. They've passed on the Matthew Perry series End of Steve, a spin-off of The L Word, and now the buzzed-about comedy Ronna and Beverly, about two Jewish ladies in Boston. The pilot they ordered from Tim Robbins, Possible Side Effects, remains in the game, but it's far from a sure bet. [Variety] HBO has good news, at least. Their new film Grey Gardens has earned its very first rave. Big Edie hasn't been this pleased since Jerry liked her corn. [Variety]

Melora Hardin, who deserves to be a big big star because she is so funny as Jan on The Office, has landed a lead role in the new FX pilot Lights Out. She'll play the surgeon wife of a retired boxer who becomes an enforcer for loan sharks to help support his family (but... isn't she a surgeon?) Good for her. [THR] In other thrilling TV news: Have you ever felt that Gossip Girl, about richie rich Upper East Side teens, isn't real enough? Well now Bravo is bringing you NYC Prep, a reality series about horrible rich "social" children who go to fancy schools in Manhattan and poop Burberry-print feces and when they cry it just sounds like Deborah Voigt singing and their tears are made of diamonds and when they die they become the stone lions out in front of the Met Public Library. All of this happens in the first episode. [THR]

A Dutch television show has decided that Osama Bin Laden had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks, and that the accusation was just a part of "Western propaganda." Upon hearing the news, George W. Bush issued a statement from his Crawford, TX ranch saying "See? I didn't need to look for him that hard after all." When he found out that the show is in fact a stupid reality show called Devil's Advocate in which a fancy, sell-out lawyer tries to exonerate perpetrators of terrible crimes in the unending quest for ratings, Bush sighed and shook his head said "Well... Well, dammit. Laura, can I get a back rub?" [THR]

Indonesia will be adding Fox International's network Foxcrime to their broadcast roster, to be part of cable company Indovision. The network—which features reruns of tons of crime shows like NYPD Blue, Kojak, and the C.S.I. iterations—is also broadcast in Europe and other Asian markets. For a second I was kind of jealous that those foreigners get to have an entire channel devoted to shows about crime, but then I remembered that we have both TNT and USA. So suck it, Indonesia. [Variety]