Go Fly a Kite, Gary Busey

We made a $50 bet that Gary Busey would get fired tonight and in the really misleading episode “Raising the Steaks,” we thought we were going to lose because we actually liked the men’s presentation better than the women. We would have gladly paid up if the bet was against John Rich getting fired, but it wasn’t — it was against La Toya Jackson. The two scapegoats were correct, all the same.

The task at hand was to cook up an advertising campaign for Omaha Steaks, a company none of the celebrities seemed to have ever heard of. Well, they have their own chefs and someone screens their mail and all, but the rest of us see Omaha Steaks offers online all the time and some of us even get their yummy steaks for Christmas presents.

Now, we all know from last week, how pissed the men all were at Gary, but he still somehow ends up being project manager. Last week’s team manager, Mark McGrath, got fired when Team Backbone lost, so this must be their strategy to get rid of Gary and from what unfolds, boy, does it ever look that way.

Donald Trump says Gary is “a genius or a moron,” but he hasn’t figured it out and asks Lil Jon and Meat Loaf if they know. “Yes, I have,” Lil Jon chuckles, with a clear moron implication. Big laughs all around, but Gary says “sure, when some people see me, they think somewhere there’s a village missing their idiot, but that’s not true because I have an internal wealth of knowledge that will forever be unknown to them because I’m not going to let that cat out of the bag.” That reminds him to do his impersonation of a cat.

Hope Dworaczyk will lead the women’s team ASAP. She’s not even a red meat eater, but when asked, cites her Texas origin as proof that she love steaks. Maybe she does, from afar. Most of the steaks eaten in Texas come from Kansas anyway. As the women brainstorm, Marlee Matlin suggests a ‘men’s night in’ and poker night theme, while NeNe Leakes says “If this is for men, right, we could do 6 burgers, 6 steaks, 6 condoms …” and brays loudly. The cold look on Star Jones’ face was just priceless.

The two Omaha Steak executives, Bruce Simon and Todd Simon, meet with both teams. They are cousins and 5th generation members of the family-owned company which has been in business since 1917. The ASAP meeting went off better than the one with Backbone because of Gary. Besides his off-the-wall questions to the execs, Gary has this hare-brained idea about a Father’s Day kite that two kids will give their dad on Father’s Day after their Omaha Steaks meal. The kite will advertise the company and nobody tried to talk him out of this idiocy.

more on the kite in QUOTE ROUNDUP: CELEBRITY APPRENTICE 4, TASK 7

John Rich says that although he believes Gary to be a “saboteur,” he will still bring his A game to the challenge. He was there,”to be a tool in the toolbox” and, true to his word, he just generally was a real tool, belittling Gary at every pass, complaining and reinforcing discontent.

Lil Jon is annoyed that Meat Loaf will be the cook. He wanted to make drunken crab legs but still says he will do whatever he’s told. Meat Loaf’s unhappy he was appointed cook since it’s not his strong suit. Gary just assumed he could cook because he has a food’s name, we guess. “You dudes better not leave me back here by myself with Gary,” Meat Loaf warns Lil Jon and John Rich.

La Toya can’t cook so the ladies task her with cooking burgers. That way if anything goes wrong, they reason, they “can get her out.” Sure enough, La Toya manages to set fire to the burgers and sure enough, NeNe Leakes is head of the Cunning, Obnoxious League of Women Celebrities against La Toya. “Omigosh, she’s trying to do the Michael Jackson on me,” NeNe griped.

John Rich takes high offense to his claim that Gary told him to shut up and called him “boy.” We don’t see Gary do that, we just see John telling Meatloaf that Gary said, “Shut up, boy, and listen to me.” John Rich gets all puffed up: “You just don’t call another man ‘boy’ and expect there to be no repercussions.” Is this the biggest load of b.s. you’ve heard in the whole show so far or what? Meat Loaf says Gary will deny it but John knowingly says it doesn’t matter what Gary says. Who’s the saboteur now?

When Rich attacks Gary on it and also refuses to accept the apology our space cadet offers, it is in this scene that Gary first claims he said kaboy, not in the boardroom, and it is also clear that John Rich didn’t say anything about it when it happened, because he said Gary is “so unaware” of offending people. In the boardroom, later, Rich straight up calls Gary a liar. Maybe John Rich can write a song about Ka-boys, to add to his other boy songs he’s already associated with, like “One of the Boys” and “Good Ole Boy.”

The ladies ultimately prepared their food in advance for their presentation, except for NeNe’s lobster. Hope found LaToya’s “baby talk” voice too weak, saying someone was going to hit her if she kept it up. NeNe and Marlee kept referring to the company as simply “Omaha” which didn’t go over to well with the Simons. They had great branding on their aprons, and even passed out aprons to the audience.

The men, or rather Meat Loaf, cooked everything on the spot. The weaknesses in their set: a couple of misspellings on the menu, Gary’s rambling and infamous kite idea. Surprisingly, the Simons found fault with their audience participation, which we actually thought was cool. Even John Rich thought they had a shot of winning by the end, kite notwithstanding.

In the boardroom, the men dropped all pretenses of solidarity and ganged up on Gary relentlessly, even before finding out the women won. La Toya is asked who she will consider a friend when all is said and done and she says she thinks she could call up Hope, Star and Marlee, leaving NeNe out. NeNe seemed quite offended by this, as well as Donald Trump singling her out as hard to get along with. She then refused to participate in the women’s celebration. Just like when NeNe sliced and diced Dionne Warwick, she was upset by the aftermath. She thinks she can insult and backstab anyone and they should still like her, and she’s not even related to them (because we know lots of relatives tend to have that unnerving trait).

In the final analysis, we think that the Omaha Steak execs picked the ladies because it will be easier and smarter to sell the poker night package than a package of in-bone or bone-in ribeyes with a kite advertisement, or whatever the men’s package was.