'Top Model': China, Or Lessons on "Inside Voice"

OMG! The girls from Queens, Texas and Valparaiso have arrived! In last night's episode, six of the "America's Next Top Model" gals land in fabulous Beijing, where it's twinkling, bustling and just like "The Jetsons" (thanks for the poetic description, Chantal).

And how do the ladies approach this groundbreaking cultural and, frankly, diplomatic voyage? They squeal, shriek and scream. Incessantly. At everything.

In the end, we think it's the Chinese who should be freaking out; the models hover over shopkeeps like giant, Bedazzled banshees. And then there's Miss Jay Alexander, always an enigma, wearing a shirt bearing Hindi script. (Where are we again?) The envoy, clearly, isn't doing America any favors.

Besides keeping their host nation awake at night, Heather, Lisa, Bianca, Saleisha, Chantal and Jenah are in China to learn to model, and their challenges this time are to learn martial-arts lessons for model movement and hawk Cover Girl's Queen Collection. Different challenges, but both very telling.

Bianca flat-out refuses to do a little aerial work to display the movements a la "Crouching Tiger," and she's disqualified from the challenge. Heather trips on her words in the Queen Collection ad, proving once and for all that she's not spokesmodel material (and no, it doesn't look as if she's going to get much better at it). The growing rivalry and discord between Bianca and Heather is showing itself in the challenges, too. Their successes and failures seem an almost choreographed seesaw ride; one rises, and physics dictates that the other must be on the bottom.

At least those two get to be on top some of the time. Gorgeous Lisa is simply cracking under the pressure, looking terribly uncomfortable in the air and just plain terrible in the spokesmodel challenge. Um, unless you like tears from the girl selling you foundation.

Like Ambreal, Lisa seemed pegged to go, having been in the bottom two the previous week. She is sent home, but with particularly warm words from Tyra. But that isn't the surprise. It is Heather, who drops to the bottom for the first time, suggesting her streak as Most Popular may be over (just as she's beginning to reveal a sour temperament, huh?).

Jenah, who's classy, sexy and rising in our eyes as the model who seems to wear the clothes best, seems to not ever win anything, and the judges have noticed (she's not trying, they say). They have some unusually harsh words for her, and we wouldn't be surprised to see her under the magnifying glass next week.

--Lavanya Ramanathan

By Lavanya Ramanathan |  November 22, 2007; 8:38 AM ET America's Next Top Model
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Posted by: anon | November 28, 2007 08:02 PM

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