And with one fell swoop, all the delight of watching "America’s Next Top Model" has been eliminated. I mean, I knew DIONNE was on her way out soon — she’d gotten the "needs too much coaching" edit last week with the subtlety of a sledgehammer — but still, couldn’t she have stayed on one more week until the finale? If anything, I needed her for lines like, "I’m just gonna take my ass to sleep." (Ah, a girl after my own heart.)And Tyra telling Natasha that the competition "is not about doing one bad photo shoot and going home"? Uh, in case she hadn’t paid attention to ANY EPISODE IN THE PAST, that’s exactly what this program is about most weeks. The girl with the weakest photo goes home. Samantha can’t get her porn on? Out. Kathleen can’t figure out what anti-fur means and it shows in her face? Gone. Felicia looks dead in a photo where she’s supposed to be dead? See ya.Now, the other girls’ reason for picking Natasha as the model with least potential was weak at best — a "fake" personality still gets you in the door (unlike Brittany’s no personality last week) and her pictures are among the strongest. So maybe it was jealousy, or maybe they just can’t understand how delusional Natasha really is. "I did a great job!" she says after her disastrous shoot this week. (How can a woman who had dental work WITHOUT ANESTHESIA, then turned around and rocked a shoot, be felled by a head cold? She looked like a zombie.)Natasha is full-blown weird/crazy, as evidenced by her inability to pick up her cell phone while talking to her husband, instead preferring to nuzzle it while it lies on the edge of the bed and making sexy cooing noises and thankfully unintelligible gibberish. It’s moments like this I’m glad I don’t have closed-captioning. (Also, not taking that kind of schmoopy talk into another room? Annoying. It’s not like they’re stuck in a studio, and we all remember from the "lesbian" photo shoot how Dionne feels about showing affection…)The challenge involves the models telling their own story to aboriginal tribeswomen who are wearing black dresses with white handprints on them. I guess the story of that tribe is "men can’t keep their hands off us." Natasha wears her wedge heels into the bush even though, as Dionne puts it, "it is freaking raining, the wind is blowing extremely hard, and we are getting COLD." (This will come into play later, maybe.) The girls have 15 minutes to decorate themselves and their dresses and get ready for their Very Special Episodes about various life traumas through a dance in which they’ll be judged on "body art, movement and oral speech."In order: Renee was abused, has four sisters, strength, women unified, blah blah blah. She does not mention living in a car, probably because it would garner her no points with this crowd. Jaslene was once a young girl "who was misled into pain, agony and suffering" (is she Jaslene Christ?) but through true love she is so happy, "all I do is live, love and laugh." This sounds like a bad one-woman show. There is a long pause before there’s any clapping.Dionne says, "I don’t wanna do no dance. Tell what story? I do not want to dance, period. … I don’t feel like that’s relevant." Tell us how you really feel! However, she goes out and talks about her mother’s shooting and paralysis, and her sisters and kids, and does a pretty good job, although she and Jaslene could use a little help remembering the "movement" part of the challenge. It’s like they’re giving a PowerPoint presentation.Then here comes Natasha, who’s all sweeping the ground with branches and twigs, and has decided to speak very quietly so people pay attention. At first I thought it was because she was ramping up for big drama — OK, so maybe I’ve got too many disco diva songs on my iPod — but no, she spends the whole time talking barely above a whisper, which earns a hearty "What the HAYL?" from Dionne. (Yay!) I second that what the hayl, because when I can understand what she’s saying, she is saying, "I’m going to the forest, I listen to the trees…" It is nonsensical, like much of her English, and at the end she says, "My dance was really good because I use the tree branches and I am barefoot like the girls who performed before us."

This makes me very excited to hear next week’s My Life as a Cover Girl auditions. Very, VERY excited. Guest judge Carissa Rosenberg of Seventeen magazine picks Renee — who is still going by Nene, maybe to curry extra aboriginal favor? — because she feels like the Seventeen readers would care about her and want to hear what she has to say. Uh, what happened to "body art, movement and oral speech"? Eh, hers was probably the best of the four anyway.And now for the exaggeration of the week: Carissa also says that Seventeen has 13 million readers. Now, according to the Magazine Publishers of America, in 2006 Seventeen had 2.01 million paid and verified subscriptions and single-copy sales. So unless each issue is being shared by more than six girls, I’m saying her pants, although fashionable, are on fire.FYI, that number is lower than Good Housekeeping (4.6 million), Ladies Home Journal (4.1 million), Family Circle and Women’s Day (both just over 4 million), Cosmopolitan (2.9 million), Southern Living, Redbook and Glamour. … but well above Vogue, which clocks in at #72 with just under 1.3 million.Anyway, Renee and Jaslene win some South Sea pearls from a guy who looks like a butler but is actually an executive at Autore Pearls. "This jullery is stunning," Jaslene says as she fondles her earrings and bracelet. So much better to be picked as the friend of the jewelry-challenge winner than as the actual winner of a photo-shoot-on-top-of-a-bridge challenge!"I am at the point I really want to have some fun," says Dionne (whom I shall quote as much as possible this week, since it’ll be my — sob — last time). They decide to go out, Renee and Jaslene all julleried up. But Natasha, who has developed some sort of cold or flu, is staying in. That’s what you get for wearing open-toed shoes out of season! Also, Renee explains how Vicks Vapo-Rub works to Natasha. I love the Vapo-Rub. In fact, one of my aromatherapy oils is camphor. Sometimes I dab it on right before bedtime just because it helps me go to sleep.The girls rip the absent Natasha apart. "She was a funny Russian girl, but now she’s annoying to me," says Jaslene. "She got some lies floating around somewhere," says Dionne. They are grown-up Mean Girls now.Natasha, in her delusional way, says, "I’m in every conversation" (which in this case is true) but says it would distract her "from the competition to let these girls get in my head."The next day, it’s back to the cold, rainy bush for a photo shoot in which the models must act out an aboriginal story in the photo. "Isn’t that really cool?" Jay Manuel prompts, and the response is underwhelming. Dionne’s reaction was to think: "Do we have to dance again? And I’ll be damned. We have to dance. Again." God, how I’m going to miss this girl!Luckily the dances are minimal, since these are after all still photos. Jaslene is first and gets raves for an interpretation that is "beautiful and graceful." I love how all the aboriginal women in the photo at right are giving "jazz hands."Dionne’s shoot is frustrating for Jay because he has to direct her so much, frustrating for Dionne because she can’t figure out how to change what he’s asking her to change, and frustrating for me because I can see how this episode is going to end. The photo below pretty much sums it up: She looks like she’s trying to copy him but just can’t get it right — the legs, the left arm, so close but not quite…. Natasha’s shoot, though, gives me hope: It’s AWFUL. She has weird slashes on her stomach that make her look bloated, and she is so horrible it makes me suspect one of the other girls slipped her some cold medicine. And maybe a shot or two. It’s that bad. Jay stops the shoot not once but twice to tell her to work through it.Renee sounds kind of stuffed up in her interviews, too. She does well on her shoot. Has anyone noticed she’s getting all the "man, this stuff is great!" interviews? She’s savvy, that one.Judging! Tyra’s photos have her with a boomerang. There is no dancing, but we cut to her with that weird hand-on-hip pose as she leads the girls in and goes through the motions of everything. Dionne is first and they say it’s a good photo but eye contact is lacking, and the whole "needing direction" thing is brought up again. And then they spring the "evaluate your competition" gambit on the girls: By knowing their strengths and weaknesses, that’s how you get ahead, Tyra says. Uh, wha? … Dionne picks Jaslene as the girl with the most potential — oh, Dionne, have you learned nothing from previous cycles? — and says she doesn’t believe Natasha and her personality.Nigel tells Jaslene "this is a face of yours I’ve seen a lot," which, duh. She picks herself as the girl with most potential, mostly because of drive. She says she likes Natasha but she comes off "real phony."Renee had the most poses. "Family is the fire under my butt," she says as she picks herself for the girl with most potential, and says something’s lacking and fake in Natasha’s personality department.Natasha’s photo is rightfully criticized as bad, and Tyra calls it worse than the first photo shoot. She picks herself as the girl with the most potential because she has the Eastern European features that are in fashion, which, OK, give her points for knowing that. We never hear who she would pick as the one with least potential, although she says that "if Gisele Bundchen were behind me, I’d say she had the least potential because she’s the biggest competition." Maybe the other girls are jealous because she takes good pictures? And then she says something awesome: "It’s better to be talked about than to be not noticeable." In your face, Mean Girls!While the judges deliberate, Natasha tries to talk to the other girls, saying she doesn’t understand why they feel that way. Jaslene is the only one who’ll talk, saying that she’s not jealous and doesn’t see Natasha as competition, which is kind of deluded in its own way, considering how many times Natasha has won — including that interview challenge, where you’d think that Natasha Fatale accent would have ruined her.They say Jaslene is giving the "same look," even if it is a fierce one, and Dionne gets criticized for being the only girl who didn’t pick herself as the one with the most potential. Nigel says Renee is "not the youngest, freshest face on the block," and they’re boggled about why everyone hates Natasha, whom Twiggy lauds for dealing with the gang-hate "miraculously."Renee gets called first, then Jaslene. Will Dionne and Natasha please step forward? Dionne started out rough and got better, but her progress hasn’t been great. "If your path is rocky and you don’t believe in yourself, who will?" Tyra asks. Natasha, your photo shoot was dreadful and this sick thing is the oldest Top Model story and we are over it.Psyche! Not really. They think the girls are just jealous. "This competition is not about doing one bad photo shoot and going home," Tyra says, so they looked at the body of work instead. Natasha goes to hug Dionne, who won’t even give her some goodbye love. In fact, she looks like she might punch someone. Please let it be Tyra, while Tyra keeps that annoying pep talk/lecture crap going. "We gave you all the goods," Tyra says, and then I realized there weren’t going to be fisticuffs so I stopped listening. Seriously, how awesome would it be if Dionne just popped her in the face?As Dionne packs, things are just falling off the hangers onto the floor of the closet. "I’m very proud of myself," she says. And so I am! In fact, if she doesn’t have a career in modeling, I might just have to move to Montgomery, Ala., just so she can work on my teeth.

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