I’ll lay down bets that Monday night’s obligatory “The Men Tell All” didn’t change many hard-wired perceptions of anyone following Jen Schefft and the current The Bachelorette season. I suppose this penultimate exercise, while annoyingly entertaining in a street corner fight sort of way, served to merely congeal the already faint and unfocused snapshots we have ourselves hustled away from the show. Summary judgments such as, say, that Jen remains ardently disconnected from any romantic zeal for any of her suitors, or that Andrew Firestone remains a fantastic fellow, or that Fabrice is an erotic fraud, were simply---within the hour---cemented in stone.

By David W. Taylor
Reality Reel Media
02.23.05

Apart from this sordid tale, the unsettling mechanics of the upcoming finale came crashing upon us also, and it was a bizarre tumble at that. What we shall see, I take it, is both Jerry and JP bending knee and offering a proposal of marriage. Jen will deny one man, and the other will know his fate live on national television after the taped broadcast, much like the Survivor scenario. I conjecture that this fork in The Bachelorette road has as much to do with Jen’s squeamishness with her present matrimonial possibilities as it has with the producer’s bent to fine tune his mix. Jen probably wanted the extra months to consider growing a moustache and heading for Mexico.

In this context, the hour’s most telling event, as I see it, was the nonappearance of Jen Schefft, who as Chris Harrison repeatedly stated, “couldn’t be here tonight.” Well, OK. Couldn’t or wouldn’t? I guess it hardly matters... her noninvolvement with this show personally, when other Bachelorettes and Bachelors have actively participated in past “Tell Alls,” may be another mindful indicator of Jen’s quandary with the entire process¬¬---a process which could lightly be described as a progressively airless, pressure-cooking sinkhole.

That cavernous void Jen is gazing into is, of course, a future of her own making. Having opted to unlink from Andrew Firestone (and that damned bothersome global travel) and begin anew in her own Bachelorette escapade, it seemed, I’m sure, a feat of release both empowering and grandly exciting (once again). But when all is said and done and the pomp begins its gradual fizzle... one is back to that familiar melancholy square that one left many months before, with things not much changed: A ring and a promise and a human being standing there in front of you. Oh my! How lovely that pastel panorama---with its flash and luster---appeared so long ago; and now the brutish corpus lingers still. Is it on to Oklahoma or a quick course in sign language? The assorted options may even look bleaker than ever. Vineyards notwithstanding.