What happened to Andrae?

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE MOST RECENT EPISODE OF PROJECT RUNWAY.

For whatever reason, I’m a freak about avoiding spoilers for television and movies I haven’t seen, but I love love love reading others opinions after I’ve already seen them. I tend to go on rottentomatoes after seeing a movie to check out the reviews, and I (somewhat shamefully) really like reading TV recaps, especially of fashion-ish competition shows like Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model.

It’s kind of hard to know where to find decent recaps aside from Television Without Pity, though, as everyone and their father recaps Project Runway and most of them tend to be short and poorly thought out.

I was therefore delighted to notice that Lifetime, the show’s new owner, has been keeping Chris March (season 4), Nick Verreos (season 2) and Andrae Gonzalo (season 2 + countless renditions of “WHAT HAPPENED TO AHHHNDRAE?”) locked in their website’s basement writing recaps of this season. It’s especially neat because the nondisclose agreement on former contestants apparently only lasts for a few years, and the guys are now allowed to talk about specifics from their own experience filming the show, which is super interesting.

Chris March is hands-down the funniest; he’s on-point and fond of similes, my all-time favorite figures of speech:

The models come in and put on their pregnancy pads, each one looking something like a pool cue that swallowed a basketball.

But these guys weren’t hired because they’re hilarious writers (even though March legitimately is), they were hired for their insider status. And having been on the show does let them share some stuff on meta-reality that the average watcher might not have thought about.

Andrae, for example, sympathizes with ex-addict and frequent crier Johnny, who was widely crucified last week for fabricating a story about how his dress was ruined by a rogue steamer when he had in fact scrapped it and started over after a terrible critique from Tim Gunn:

Contrary to popular belief, the hardest part of participating on a reality television show is not the loss of privacy, but rather the adherence to the truth that is demanded of you when all of your behavior is documented on video. It’s Truth 2.0, essentially. …

Under the policies of Truth 2.0, honesty is no longer the best policy. You must also tell the truth. Using steam to shape a dress made out of paper is not a crazy idea; paper is a cellulosic fiber, so it should be respond to steaming, but also be vulnerable to it. However, regardless of the level of honesty Johnny’s steaming story possesses, it is not the truth about why he discarded his first dress and rushed to design another in the last minute instead.

“Honestly,” even if he suffered some horrible mishap in the workroom, the “Truth” is that Johnny’s convictions for his designs crumble under the pressure of critique, and his subsequent design statements serve to accommodate what his sewing lacks in virtuosity.

Some might say, “Well, of course he’s empathetic, Andrae was his season’s notorious crier.” But after reading that NY Times article on how reality competition shows throw enormous amounts of stress and liquor at their contestants for the exact purpose of making them cry and snap at each other, I’m a bit more sympathetic, too. According to the former Project Runway contestants quoted in the article, the filming is an unrelenting series of 18-hour workdays with most contestants getting around four hours of sleep a night.

It doesn’t seem like Lifetime is using these three in the best way; the three blogs are buried deep in the official Project Runway site and aren’t easy to stumble across by chance; I don’t think it’s just me being incompetent either, as their recaps seem to average two or three comments rather than the dozens or hundreds that can be found on FourFour or TWOP.

But seriously, if you’re keeping up with Project Runway, stick these three on your RSS reader. They’re pretty fascinating.

And since after writing this post I needed to watch it anyway, here’s What Happened to Andrae?/Santino’s elaborate imagined date between Andrae and Tim Gunn at Red Lobster. It’s interesting to watch it with the knowledge that these people haven’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks. Sadly, it would appear that Bravo and Lifetime’s recent legal fight hasn’t stopped the show’s lawyers from tracking down every non-crappy-quality clip of this that exists on youtube:

Incidentally, the present-day answer to the question “What happened to Ahhhndrae?” Is “He grew a HUGE MUSTACHE.”