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Don’t Quote Me: Tila and Lala Land

I like people who are really f—ed up. … I am very high strung and suffer from multiple personalities. Jane. She’s crazy and she always wants to kill me. Tila. … Poor Girl. … She deserves a break. … I do a lot of things that are self destructive. … I’ve always been a nerdy geek trapped inside a umm … woman’s body. Yea. … That’s me. People love me for some reason. I don’t know why. … I do but I just say I don’t know why just to be modest.

– Tila Tequila, star of A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, in a post on her MySpace page

I don’t feel comfortable at all. So I gotta go.

A Shot at Love contestant Lala, to Tila, just before she walked off the show in Episode 2

If there’s one good thing to come out of MTV’s A Shot at Love, the show that pits a group of straight men against a group of lesbians for the chance to fall in love with a bisexual woman named Tila Tequila (and so far I’m convinced that there is only one good thing) – it’s the contestant named Lala, a self-respecting and self-declared “full lesbian” from Richmond, Calif.

Despite her ungenerous name and the fact that she mumbles (I didn’t really hear her say of Tila Tequila, “She try to show me her rug, I’m gonna show her my rug,” did I?), when Lala hobbled off the set in her high heels in Episode 2, I heard a choir of angels singing “No More Drama.”

Lala became for me, at that moment, a most unlikely messiah – the dubious anointed one whom I’d prayed for since I first heard Tila (or was it Jane?) say in the opening credits of the first show, “If you ever hurt me, I’ll kill you.”

Even now, weeks after Lala tried like hell to strut off in the truest sense of the phrase, the clicking of her heels on Tila’s driveway echoes in my mind as a reminder of the ultimate redemptive sacrifice she made for viewers. Regardless of whether her actions were scripted or not, she is the true source of lesbian salvation and atonement for that big, fat sin known as reality dating shows.

Sure, I know that reality programming is an effective and often very funny evil. The genre, even at its worst with A Shot at Love, has, in a very twisted and ignoble way, done much to increase LGBT visibility. But not until Lala’s imperfect exit were we reminded that there’s room for dignity in the well of vapidity and in the guilty pleasure it provides.

Lala did something that’s rarely been done, and she did it without sobbing, screaming or spitting in anyone’s face: She walked willfully and civilly off a reality show. And I’ll drink to that any time.

Lala didn’t get kicked out, voted off, fired or, as the judges on America’s Most Smartest Model say, “purged.” No one told her that she’s too old, too young, too fat or that she can’t sing. And Tila, the latest woman to be popular for being popular, never got the chance to tell her, “Your shot at love has ended.”

It was Lala herself who cut short her 15 minutes of fame because, unlike so many others beside her and before her, she has more than 15 brain cells. Underneath her long, painfully bright red hair are scruples, and when they banged on the door of her better judgment (while screaming, “There’s not enough tequila in the world!”), she answered. Perhaps without even realizing it, Lala raised the dating show bar. It’s clear, now that she’s gone – after the girl-fights, the boy-brawls, the unfortunate waxing and the “bi-athlon” (a competition where each contestant had to blow up a “tiny Tila doll,” then drag it through an obstacle course) – that she didn’t raise the bar permanently. But for a brief moment she pulled it out of vacuity.

She lifted it high enough that if it were the measure of who could join her on the love roller coaster of her life, Tila Tequila now knows she’s not tall enough to get on.

Whether future contestants on this show (yep, it’s been renewed, sans Tila) or on others will choose to follow Lala’s lead remains to be seen, but I’m not hopeful. Lala will likely remain the most honorable “lesbian” to have ever appeared in the reality dating show genre, simply because she disappeared as a matter of principle.

Lala’s story isn’t the most uplifting lesbian tale you’ll ever hear, but it does come with a message: Sometimes when you’re given a shot at love, you want to shoot yourself – right in the head. Twice.

Lala felt, correctly, that she’d been deceived. She’d participated in A Shot at Love because she was led to believe that she was being given a chance to fall in love with a “hot” (Tila’s word, not mine – definitely not mine) bona fide lesbian, not a bisexual woman. She’d come prepared to battle other lesbians for a bachelorette’s affections, not to pit her parts against those of straight, man-boy cabbage-heads.

So, after Tila announced – poolside and with her eyes appropriately moist with tears – to Lala and the other contestants that she’d betrayed them all and is not a lesbian but rather “a bisexual,” Lala’s dreams of living happily ever after with Tila, of opening mail addressed to Mrs. and Mrs. Tequila, were shattered.

“I’m not feeling this,” she admitted to the camera.

Unlike fellow contestant Amanda, who after meeting the guys vying with her for Tila’s love expressed her shock and disgust rather crassly (“Hello. Excuse me. What is penis doing here? Gross!”), Lala took the high road … on high heels.

Aggravated yet tight-lipped, she clomped off in a bright white bathing suit and matching stilettos without even stopping to throw on street clothes or the sexy maid’s outfit that she’d modeled for Tila the night before.

Less has never been more.

But when Tila learned that Lala had bolted, she was stunned and – you guessed it – insulted. “Lala – Miss Crazy Firecracker – like, just took off!” Tila exclaimed. “I’m like, dude, where’s Lala?”

Dude. Exactly. That’s why she left, Einstein.

Tila ran after her, of course, in heels of her own and because, hey, she hadn’t made out with her yet. (Note to the remaining contestants: One in four women have herpes.)

“Lala. Lala!” Tila cried. “Don’t walk away from me. Please.”

Lala eventually stopped beside a U-Haul van – yeah, funny! – and Tila, who often manages to appear miraculously demure opposite her more obnoxious suitors, began her passionate plea for Lala to stay. “I thought you were down with me. … Why do you give a s— about who’s in there?” she asked, pointing at the house.

I know this one – because Lala’s a “full lesbian” who doesn’t like “being out of her element.” And, oh yeah, I almost forgot, because everybody in there is “out of pocket.” (Lala-to-English translation: This show is stupid.)

But Tila still couldn’t understand why Lala wouldn’t want to stay on a very long date from hell and continue to suffer through weeks more of her mind-numbing and degrading hook-up “journey.” Unable to wrap her brain around Lala’s principled exit, Tila Tequila stood before Lala befuddled. She looked and likely felt insignificant, as if she’d just been taken down a notch – or, in her case, a shelf – and called Tila Can O’Bud.

So Lala attempted to better explain. “I’m down with you, too,” she said in her most consoling voice. “I just don’t feel comfortable at all. So I gotta go. For myself.” Then, in an effort to pretend to finally understand that not everything is about her, Tila told Lala that she respected her decision to leave, and added, “I’m just on a journey here trying to find myself, and if you feel uncomfortable with that I’m really sorry you feel that way, because I’m do-o-own with you.”

But Lala clearly didn’t buy it. I suspect she knows that while Tila might, indeed, be on some sort of trip, she lost her luggage a long time ago.

So, with a hug and a whole lotta class, Lala said goodbye to Tila and hobbled onward, leaving in her dust a tiny cloud of integrity for Miss Tequila to choke on when – or if – she finally realizes that Lala was a shining example of the type of person she should walk away with, not walk away from. Lala might have offered her exactly what she claims to be looking for.

“These are my real feelings,” Tila told a lesbian contestant named Rebecca in Episode 1, “and I don’t want to seem like a joke to people because I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve. …When you’re around so many people and everyone’s grabbing at you, it feels even lonelier! Because I’m for real, and I’m looking for someone to be with.”

Or not.

So, give it up for Lala, for she realized early that no woman in her right mind and really on a journey to find true love would agree to a layover in Jackassland.

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