Stella's Secret Shame

I have a confession to make. I watch those Housewives shows. I don't know why. There is something about them that fills me with moral outrage and schadenfreude, and it happens miraculously all at the same time. I have the same feelings about the matchmaker lady show, Invervention, the OCD show, that show about the drunk stupid girls on the Oxygen channel (I am pretty sure it's called Bad Girls Club but it should be called Drunk Women Who Might Should Get Sober Club because that's what it is).

Most of these shows are vile -- I sit around feeling smug because I know better than to wear spangley tank tops and go to tanning beds. Almost everyone on these shows needs to get a j-o-b and stop asking other folks for money.

There is one reality show that is the opposite: it makes me feel like I should work much, much harder. This show is Kell on Earth and Kelly Cuttrone truly an inspiration for a number of reasons:

1. She works like a dog and expects everyone who works for her to do the same. They work hard. All the time. All of them.

2. She is smart and understands the difference between the work being important (doing a good job, making sure that the details are nailed, that everything that can be handled is, and that nothing is left because you weren't willing to work a little harder) and the business being important (it's fashion -- as she says, "Nobody is going to get excited about paying $2,000 for a pair of pants in this economy.")

3. Technically, she works at home. As a single mother of a school age kid, she's designed her life so that she lives and works in the same building. She runs downstairs and works works works works, and then darts upstairs and Swiffers the kitchen.

I love seeing people actually doing work for once, rather than "launching lines" (whatever that is -- it seems to involve paying other people to draw and make clothing, makeup, or jewelry), going to spin class, drinking too much wine, and generally sponging off of other people's ideas, money and energy. It's one of the few things I watch on television that makes me feel like going back into my office and doing more work.

I'm sure that feeling will fade if I watch the Countess drink wine on Ramona's rented boat. Er. Yacht. God, how I hate them.