A Candy Apple a day keeps the men away. Bite me.
You wish your nails looked this good, Apple bitch.
Tell me where you bought that shirt and you get the birth certificate.
Snookie sez: Status should be based on hair height.
You know how it goes.
Sometimes after a really hard day at work you just need to come home, grab some snacks, rat up your snood and kick it with some Dance Moms.
Thank you, Lifetime. You must have read my mind, because this week there was more rat snooding and snood ratting than I could ever hope for in one episode.
Abby Lee Miller and her caravan of crazies were heading to Ohio for the Rising Star Competition this time around, and even though they scored a sweet trophy in their last competition the stakes were much higher on this road trip.
That’s right.
Ohio. Home of pretty much nothing except (…insert dramatic 1960′s Batman TV theme music here…) Candy Apple’s Dance Center.
The Evil Dance Lair, as we like to call it. Headquarters of the chunkily highlighted, revenge seeking dance villain Chaos Cathy Nesbitt and her League of Soccer Moms Gone Bad.
Like glittery little meerkats, Abby and her troupe are scooting across the highway to the enemy camp and getting up the nerve to stick their noses down the hole. They’re looking for a fight. And like any good Animal Planet throw down, even the cute ones stand a good chance of getting their heads chomped off at the neck.
But they gotta get there first.
We start out at the Abby Lee War Room with the reveal of the Maddie vs. Everyone Else Loser Pyramid. Why Abby doesn’t just frame Maddie’s headshot, toss everyone else’s on the ground and put out a cigarette butt with her toe on the pile, I’ll never know.
It’s always Maddie at the top. Big eyes. Big teeth. Big star.
Naturally, Kelly’s daughters Brooke and Paige are on the bottom. Right away that guarantees some form of Kelly meltdown later on the in the show which always makes for good TV.
Brooke is on the bottom because she has hit that mopey teenager phase where she writes on her hands with a Sharpie and blacks out the Yearbook faces of any boys who make fun of her at the Mall. She is only 13, but morphs from a whiny 7 year old to a 19 year old video vixen in a heartbeat.
Paige was at the bottom because she did something 32 times on the way home from the last competition and it rubbed Abby the wrong way. I forget exactly what it was, but I’m thinking it was probably trying to throw herself out the emergency exit door in the back of the bus. Anything has to be better than that ride.
Instead of wearing “Candy Apples Suck” sandwich boards across their chests, Abby has chosen to go the subtle route to stick it to Cathy and will have the girls carry apples, wear apples, eat apples, dance to apple music and basically do anything short of tossing apple bombs on stage like the Green Goblin did with his pumpkin grenades in that Spider-Man movie.
Seriously. If Abby could figure out a way to pry the gigantic Apple logo off the front of the computer store and drop it on stage from a crane that would be less obvious than the approach she is taking in Ohio. But whatever. Don’t poke a dog when it’s already growling.
The group number she chose was a 1940′s meets Katie Perry mash-up kind of jazz hand thang, but without the Katie Perry part apparently. She kept throwing that line out in rehearsals, but I didn’t see anything even remotely Katie Perry, unless it was the whacky hairdos.
To capture the true essence of the 1940′s, and subsequently force Mom Holly into a one woman scavenger hunt for hair toys, Abby wanted rats and snoods.
Lots of them.
Hold up. Before you waste your time Googling it, let me just break it down for you.
Snoods are those thinly crocheted hair bag thingamabobs that you stuff all your hair into in the back of your head. Like the crazy cafeteria ladies wore in school when they slopped up hot lunches. Except it’s more like that one crazy cafeteria lady who could never seem to keep it on her head and it kept falling backwards. Remember her?
Like that.
Rats are basically…cover your ears, kids…foam wieners.
It is what it is. Don’t judge.
Your roll your hair around it in the front until you look all Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and you’re good to go. I’m pretty sure New Real Housewife of Pittsburgh Jill wears at least 4 of them stuck together in the back of her head, but maybe she didn’t read the directions. She’s got some major league Snookie going on back there. Higher the air, closer to Jesus and all…
Anyway. As the girls are rehearsing their group number, the Moms are up in that surgical viewing booth sniffing around Jill to figure out what her deal really is, why she is a Studio Hopper, and why she is suddenly so interested in invading their Mom turf.
Jill, who I swear is a host on Home Shopping Network, is not happy that her daughter Kendall is on the bottom of the Maddie Is Better Than You Pyramid. She feels that her daughter should be higher up on the food chain, but if you do the math that means someone else needs to drop down. She thinks it should be Nia.
Holly immediately gets all Whatchoo Talkin’ About, Willis on her and Christi decides to set Jill up by sending her down to interrupt rehearsal to speak with Abby.
Call it Freshman Hazing if you want. I call it tying raw meat around someone’s neck and pushing them into a bear cave. That one pretty much worked out exactly as you would expect.
Back at the Evil Dance Lair, Chaos Cathy is plotting her attack. She is pulling out all her Big Dawg dancers to go up against Abby. She handpicks Erica to compete against Brooke’s solo, and creates a sassy Flamenco Fan Dance for the group number. That odd little red haired ginger kid just kind of rolled around on the floor for the entire episode. I don’t think Cathy knew what to do with him this week. He cracks me up.
Cathy’s daughter Vivi-Anne, who I believe hospital records will show came out of the womb wearing high gloss red lipstick, always seems to dance like she has a head cold.
Why a pint sized girl is wearing glitter eye shadow and crimson Maybelline at 10 in the morning is beyond me. No wonder that red haired kid kept falling down.
To inspire Vivi-Anne to greatness, Cathy barks “Dance like you want a puppy!” over and over, using the best bribery techniques she could steal from Toddlers & Tiaras without infringing on copyright laws. As a promise to make that pooch purchase if Viv doesn’t spin into a wall, Cathy pinky swears with her daughter…confirming a new puppy and slitting Viv’s finger open at the same time.
Curse you, over-sized cubic zirconia ring! Jill didn’t mention it was a child safety hazard when she sold it as last month’s HSN Today’s Special Value. Bitch.
Back at Abby’s, the Moms are hard at work stitching up the new costumes for the group number. Like gossipy little kids in an overseas sweatshop, they stitch and dish on each other until I thought Jill would get a needle in the eye before they even made it to the bus. Betsy Ross would have never finished the flag if she yakked it up as much as these Moms.
At some point Kelly did her weekly cry and then it was off to Ohio.
On the bus Melissa and Jill gave Abby another suck up gift. Remember last week Jill had presented the Holy One with a gift from the Walgreen’s perfume shelf. If Abby scores a present every time they get on that bus, she could potentially regift her entire holiday list this year and not spend a cent.
When they arrived at the hotel, all the Moms were invited to a cocktail party/booby trap set up by Cathy, which was basically a chance to liquor them up and have them all talk smack about Abby. They would have done more smack talk if there weren’t so many appetizers. Dance Moms like their free food.
Next day it was an explosion of sparkles and foam wieners.
(I’m dying to make a Pride Parade joke right now, but I’ll save it for another day…)
The competition went on, and as soon as the troupes hit the stage it seemed that those Candy Apple Girls were awfully close to becoming Candy Apple Women. Beside the fact that they were 2 feet taller than anyone in Abby’s Team and they didn’t have to pad their bras…something wasn’t right, but no one could seem to put their finger on it.
Could they…umm…be older than they claim?
Hmmm.
Cathy had her first tasty bite of crow when Abby’s Team won first place in the group number. They didn’t actually dance as well as the Candy Apple Girls/Women did, but foam wieners apparently cover a multitude of sins.
(Again, I’m dying to make a Pride Parade joke about bringing home the Gold by simply putting a foam wiener on your head but this is a Family site, and I already said I wouldn’t…so I’m not gonna. Don’t ask again.)
Brooke did her solo, and then Erica hit the stage. And then it really hit the fan.
Everyone started questioning how old Erica really was, and if she should even be competing in the same category as Brooke. Since there is no 7 – 19 category to cover all of Brooke’s personalities, she is in the 12/13ish year old division and no one believes that Erica is that young.
Leigh, who may just be my new all-time favorite Reality TV star even though I had recently given that coveted title to Big Ang from Mob Wives, hustled into the back room to get to the bottom of this scandal.
Even though she is a Player in the Dance World, Leigh was either intimidated by Cathy or had just gotten off a treadmill, because there was a lot of sweating going on there. But that didn’t stop her from digging up the truth. Don’t mess with Leigh. She will mess you up, wipe you up and not even get her Quacker Factory top dirty.
She wanted birth certificates, DNA samples and first borns before she was going to hand out any trophies. And an ashtray, I think.
Cathy got as googly eyed as her daughter when she was confronted, and it turned out she had pulled in a ringer. Erica was disqualified for being too old.
Brooke managed to stay 13 long enough to get first place, and Cathy pretty much ground her back teeth into chalk dust.
The Candy Apples choked on their own sticks this time.
But this is far from over.
Abby Lee Miller better watch her snood.
