RockSolid: Maria Kanellis and Curtis Stone, led by Sharon Osbourne, probably because she's the only one who hasn't won yet.
Tenacity: Cyndi Lauper and Bret Michaels, led by Holly Robinson Peete who didn't want to do it and doesn't need more winnings, but no one else wanted this task.
Ears/Eyes: Junior and Richard LeFrak
Task/Sponsor: Renovate and decorate a corporate (furnished) apartment, including a designated "celebrity room." The project will be judged by Lee Curtis of Bridgestreet Worldwide and designer Jonathan Adler. Richard LeFrak offers a personal donation to double the jackpot to $40,000.
Tenacity: At first, Peete grumbles about getting Michaels on her team, thinking that he will team up with Lauper against her. I don't know why she assumes that, but she quickly falls in love with him when she discovers that he's a true team player: he supports the PM. Lauper wants to do up the place in crazy random retro style; Peete wants zen. Michaels is on board with zen. Lauper suggests a lips-shaped couch and a disco ball to complement the zen look. Instead, she is assigned the celebrity room, which doesn't have to be zen, though Peete does say it should be red.
Much of the tension between Peete and Lauper is temporarily de-fused when they go shopping for furniture and decorations, but ratchets up again when Lauper gets stressed out and is verbally abusive with the hired men that are helping with the renovation. Michaels is shocked by Lauper's rudeness, and he and Peete beg her to be nice.
Michaels misses part of the task because he has a concert. His main contribution to the task is taking photos of the city from the apartment windows to make jumbo prints for the walls, but the prints he gets back are much less than jumbo, so he has to put in a rush job for something bigger. Since the elevator service there is inadequate (it appears most of the building is under renovation and the lifts are either in constant use or out of order), he has to dash up and/or down 17 flights of stairs to get the prints in time for the judging.
RockSolid: Although Kanellis and Osbourne are skeptical about their new teammate, the three are soon working together harmoniously. Almost. The main source of tension is a difference in taste: Osbourne, who has stayed in quite a few of these furnished apartments herself, believes they need to go with a neutral, modern look; she describes Kanellis's taste as "truckstop." Kanellis gripes and lets LeFrak know she doesn't like the plan.
Osbourne predicts that Peete has chosen an Asian theme; this is confirmed by a call to the furniture store. Stone gets a ton of free stuff from Alessi, decorates the kitchen, and recruits his friends to help them paint the apartment.
Outcome: RockSolid wins, though the judges are taken aback by the lack of any drawers in the bedroom and feel that the celebrity room was their weakest. (Osbourne says she doesn't use drawers. Does she hang up her socks and underwear in the closet?)
The judges feel that Tenacity's decorating scheme is cluttered and cheap-looking, and they don't like the seafoam green at all. But they like the Buddha statue, they love the NY photos, and they ADORE Lauper's red celebrity room. (I love seafoam green, thought the rooms looked nice though admittedly too cluttered to be "zen," and I don't think it's appropriate to use a religious figure as a fashion statement especially when you don't know who will be staying in the apartment. I was "wrong" on all counts - I'd surely be screwed in a task like this one!)
Boardroom: After last week's boardroom, Peete grumbled in disapproval because Trump had excused Lauper from the boardroom. (I grumbled more because Peete received no blame for her role in all the bad decisions in that task.) This week, she unloads her frustration to Trump.
To Lauper's horror, Michaels agrees with Peete that Lauper talks too much and was rude to the workers. I ROFL when Peete says that you shouldn't be rude to the people you work with. Really, Peete? You didn't openly diss Lauper in front of the Kodak executives when she was in the bathroom during the second task?
Peete and Lauper go back and forth. Lauper mentions that painting the celebrity room red was Peete's idea, but the rest of that room was all her. Peete brags that she and Michaels did the whole rest of the apartment. (Which the judges didn't like!) She also claims that Lauper asked her about every other aspect of that apartment as well, which isn't what I saw.
In other words, Peete takes credit for the celebrity room that she didn't decorate (other than to say that it should be red) and all the labor she put into the task, but none of the blame for all her decisions that contributed to the team's loss, like the seafoam green paint and the cheap-looking clutter.
Michaels is very quiet through most of this, wisely choosing to stay out of it until Trump wrings some more comments out of him. Michaels says that Lauper doesn't manage her time well. (??)
Trump seizes on the fact that Lauper gave Peete credit for choosing red paint for the celebrity room. He thinks she was foolish to reveal this; I don't know why. True, the judges did like the red room best, but not necessarily because it was red.
Fired: Cyndi Lauper, merely for giving credit where it was due. Trump could have used her rudeness to the workers, her lack of focus, or her 1-room-out-of-6 workload as the reason(s) to fire her; instead, he fired her for something that seems really trivial to me.
Donation: $40,000 to the Cedars-Sinai Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Program, which provides help for colon cancer sufferers and their families.
Remarks:
- Stone says that $40,000 for Osbourne's charity will mean 40,000 colon cancer screenings. I'm a little confused by that (surely it costs more than a dollar per test?), but it sounds good.
- Strangely, Peete claims in the boardroom that Osbourne used to tell Lauper to STFU. The way Lauper and I both remember it, Osbourne was telling Peete to STFU when she was being condescending to Lauper.
- After the boardroom, Michaels tries to end things on a friendly note, but Lauper won't have any of it and makes a beeline for the elevator. She grumbles in the cab ride and thinks Peete will be lost without her.
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