The Celebrity Apprentice recap: A Work of (Truly Surreal) Art

A lot of people have complained over the years about Celebrity Apprentice being two hours long. And I agree completely. It is a total joke that this show is two hours every week when we know it clearly should be…THREE! Hell, make it four! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would watch a round-the-clock C-SPAN type network showing me nothing but Celebrity Apprentice contestants doing whatever it is Celebrity Apprentice contestants do. (We can call it CA-SPAN.) Give me live internet feeds! Give me Showtime’s Celebrity Apprentice After Dark! Give me Celebrity Apprentice Pad, where people just hang out in bathing suits and wax every single piece of hair off their entire body! I want it all!

So obviously you can guess how I feel about this Easter Sunday episode of All-Star Celebrity Apprentice being only one hour. I’m as surly as Trace Adkins! (By the way, is Trace Adkins ever not surly?) Half a show means only half the absurdity to dish and delight on. But guess what? Posing as Adrian the Elevator Operator, I snuck into Donald Trump’s private vault and stole all the footage that did not make it into this episode as a result of an hour of the show being cut, and I can now exclusively share what happened in all the scenes we didn’t get to see. Here it is!

* After harassing poor guest adviser Arsenio Hall about what day of the week he was born on, previous winning Project Manager Marilu Henner shockingly then forgets what charity she is playing for and is therefore unable to deliver the big check to her designated charity. She instead pledges the funds to a Kickstarter campaign to get Cannonball Run 3 off the ground. Working Title? Cannonball Run 3: Balls Out!

* Gary Busey mistakes “Art Gas” for “Fart Gas” and starts sniffing each of his teammate’s pieces of art. He spends extra time suspiciously examining the works of one Lisa Rinna.

* Under the false impression that beauty pageant contestants are now part of every Celebrity Apprentice task, a drunken Farouk Shami shows up at Team Power’s art show yelling “WHERE MY BITCHES AT?!” He then removes his red leather cowboy boots, splashes a bit of BioSilk of them and screams “THERE’S YOUR FREAKIN’ ART!” before leading all the gallery patrons in a rousing rendition of “God Bless America.”

* After bringing a fired Omarosa down to the ground floor for her car ride to nowhere, Adrian the elevator operator returns to the Boardroom waiting area, musters all of his courage, boldly walks over to Amanda the receptionist, grabs one of the six pairs of golden scissors on her desk, and stabs himself in the chest while sobbing “I may as well cut out my heart and hand it to you, because that would be less painful that having to gaze at you constantly across these six feet of carpet keeping us apart. Before I die I just want you to know…” Adrian’s last words are then interrupted by Eric Trump clearing his throat in the elevator behind him as he waits for a ride to street level. Always the professional, Adrian covers the wound with his Trump Tower jacket, stumbles back to his post, presses the ground floor button and dies in transit somewhere around floor number 8. Trump steps over his dead body and into a waiting car outside.

So, that’s what you missed. Now let’s get into what we actually were priviliged enough to see with the most amazing moments of this week’s All-Star Celebrity Apprentice.

NEXT: 20 bucks if you can make Trace Adkins smile

1. Trace Gets Traded

With the losers on Team Power now down three members to Plan B, it was obvious Donald Trump would do something to even out the teams. Because Donald Trump is all about fairness! Not only did he take someone off of Plan B and make them go over to Power, but he made the guy who picked the players on Plan B, Trace Adkins, go and join Team Sinking Ship instead. In a truly shocking development, Adkins — who from here on out will be known simply as Sunshine for his glass-half-full demeanor — was unhappy with the move. “I don’t like you very much right now,” grumbled Trace, to which Trump replied, “That’s okay, a lot of people don’t like me.” Really?

Later, while buying art supplies for their task — which was a fundraising project that involved the contestants creating their own artwork and then selling the pieces for as much moolah as possible — Sunshine asked for a gun to go shoot himself. The scary part about that is…that’s Sunshine on a good day! Just wait until he spends some more time around Dennis Rodman.

2. Stephen Baldwin: Artiste

I love people that take things seriously they have no business taking seriously. Like, I wouldn’t take Stephen Baldwin seriously, for instance. And Stephen Baldwin should not take being an artist seriously. But he did! And I loved him for it. After Penn Jillette and the rest of Plan B all decided that getting big donors was more important than the actual artwork, Stevie B looked clearly pained before rubbing his face, raising his hand, and asking Marilu Henner to sit back down. Clearly, something truly amazing was about to happen.

And that something was this: An artist being born in front of our very eyes! “Specific to me, the art does matter,” Baldwin explained. Stephen said that he wanted to make incredible art and then have a big name art dealer sell his art for tons of money, because who doesn’t want art from the star of Bio-Dome siting in their foyer? The rest of the team wasn’t buying the Pablo Picasso act. “Stephen was so full of s— I couldn’t believe it,” said Marilu. “What play was he doing? Who was he really talking to? We knew that Stephen probably wasn’t going to bring in anything.”

Hey! Whoa! Back off, Henner! Who do you think you are making such a judgment like that, Peter Marcelle? Incidentally, I have no idea who Peter Marcelle is, and I actually would not be surprised at all if he does not even exist, but according to Stevie B, he is a big shot who had big things to say about one of Baldwin’s pieces. “I’ll tell you something,” Stephen told some pour soul whom he had trapped in a corner. “Peter Marcelle, who is a real art dealer, said my piece “I’m Not Alec,” from a true artistic world, from that point of view, is the best one here. I wasn’t expecting that.” Neither were we! Also, define “real.” Funny, then, how Peter Marcelle did not appear to sell any of Baldwin’s pieces, although Stephen later got upset when Lisa was able to unload one to hairstylist Chaz Dean, claiming he could have gotten much more for it on his own. Perhaps the name of the piece should be changed to “I’m Not Realistic.”

NEXT: A blast from the Celebrity Apprentice past

3. Shake Your Thang

I’ll always have a soft spot for Marilu Henner due to my massive crush on her in the 1980s, but I have to say that Lisa Rinna has won me over this season as well. I used to write her off as a joke due to the fact that her lips are bigger than my butt cheeks (maybe I’m the one that’s a joke then), but I have had to rethink my drink this go round. The woman manages to be both sane and entertaining at the same time, which is a hard feat to pull off on this show.

Our delightful Lisa Rinna moment of the week occurred when the former soap star put her rear into gear for some impromptu dancing to Gary Busey’s even more impromptu singing of a song whose only lyrics seemed to be “Art is only the search. It is not the final form.” (I think lightning may have struck Mr. Hangbrain more than once, if you know what I’m sayin’.) But it is was another fun aside from Lisa who has turned into a real competitor this season. Especially when you consider that there has been only one female Celebrity Apprentice winner (compared to four male winners), meaning a woman is overdue to win again.

4. Feeling Blue

They’re baaaaaaaaack! When I saw the Blue Men Group show up to deliver some money to Plan B’s art show, I couldn’t help but wonder if Clay Aiken was sitting somewhere breaking out into a huge sweat and having horrible flashbacks to last season’s money delivery debacle.

In case you missed it, Penn Jillette got his buddies in the Blue Man Group to deliver a bunch of cash last year to an Aiken-run fundraising task outside in a park. Just one problem: Instead of doing the easy and practical thing of handing over a check or wad of bills, they shot the money through an air pump into a big balloon that then popped, sending money all over the place. Now, just imagine if you will for a second the reaction of people on the streets of New York when money literally starts falling from the sky. Chaos would be an accurate description. Clay looked like he was about to have a heart attack as random dudes starting stuffing their pockets with cash.

So here came the Blue Man Group once again, and once again they could not simply hand over the money. This time, they folded $15,000 of individual bills into triangles inside 150 pounds of gelatin. Oh, Blue Man Group, why must you make everything so hard? And why must you look so creepy? Although I hear Peter Marcelle dubbed the entire thing a “masterpiece!”

5. Boardroom Odds & Ends

* Before we get into what went down in the Boardroom, can we pause for the cause and talk abut Dennis Rodman’s jacket for a minute. I mean, WHAT THE HELL?!? That is the craziest red, white, and blue zig-zaggy stripped sport jacket I’ve ever seen. Are we really sure Dennis Rodman is not still drunk, because I can’t see a sober person putting that on.

* Best Celebrity Apprentice exchange ever:

Stephen Baldwin: “May I finish.”

Doanld Trump: [long pause] “No.”

* So, Power lost yet again as Lil John’s team accumulated only $179,500 to Project Manager Lisa’s $225,000. Omarosa —who brought in only $12,500 (and $2,000 of that appeared to perhaps be from her own pocket when she asked a friend of hers buying a piece to add it to his total so she could raise more than Dennis Rodman) — hilariously then said that Lil John should be the one fired because he was Project Manager. “How can you possibly blame a Project Manager who brought in $82,500 when you brought in $12,500?” asked Boardroom advisor and licensed Omarosa hater Piers Morgan. Look at Piers Morgan, attempting to inject common sense onto All-Star Celebrity Apprentice! Isn’t that cute?

NEXT: Our long national nightmare is finally over

* This may make me sound like a horrible human being, but I am just going to go ahead and say it: I cannot understand a single world that comes out of Dennis Rodman’s mouth. I can’t! First off, the guy hardly says anything, but then when he does speak he has a tendency to blurt out words real fast. And then there is the fact that the words don’t seem to make a lick of sense. He’ll start saying one thing, and then without even stopping to breathe, go in a completely opposite direction, circle back, and then just blurt out some random words that have nothing to do with each other. It’s like one huge run-on sentence laced with mere sentence fragments branching off into every direction possible. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL HE IS TALKING ABOUT! And I would venture to guess that neither does he.

* But there is something that Trump loves about Dennis Rodman. It could be the five NBA championships. Or the fact that he hooked up with people like Madonna and Carmen Electra. Who knows? But their odd couple bromance led us straight into our Donald Trump Completely Subjective Motive For Firing of the Week! While our champion of this particular competition remains the week 1 firing of previous Celebrity Apprentice champion Bret Michaels due simply to the fact that Trump didn’t like the fact that the Poison frontman came back to play again, this one was pretty remarkable as well, as Trump explained how he was not going to fire Dennis basically due to the fact that Rodman has decided to stay awake during tasks this time. “Omarosa, can I be honest with you,” said Donald. “I think the Dennis story is a great story. Not because he did a little bit better or a little bit worse than you. It’s a great story of redemption. He’s representing a lot of people that had big problems and continue to have big problems — with drugs, or alcohol, or whatever he was on the last time.”

Now, make no mistake, anything that gets Omarosa fired and off the show is an A+ call in my book. And by all accounts, Dennis’ artwork was much better than Omarosa’s, if that matters at all. But there is nothing I love more than when Donald Trump doesn’t even attempt to fake it and admits out loud that performance on the tasks has nothing to do with his decision on who stays and who goes. Why isn’t Dennis being fired? Because it is “great story”? Okay.

* That sound you hear right now are the happy little hooves of a million Munchkins rejoicing and singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Which old witch? The wicked witch!” That’s right, Omarosa was finally fired. So now we can move on without the clearly orchestrated charade of her acting like a villain in a lame attempt to juice drama.

But the drama for this week is far from done because now it’s your turn to sound off. Are you glad to see Omarosa go? Did you love or loathe the show being cut down to an hour? And what was your most memorable moment of the week? Hit the message boards to let us know. And for more reality ramblings, follow me on Twitter @DaltonRoss. Have a great week, everyone, and until next Sunday: Cluck, Cluck…Splash!