It was a terrible stroke of luck: I had the singular (questionable) pleasure of catching a glimpse of Bob Guiney on my TV screen mid-afternoon one day last week. It turned out I was watching Oprah---the stupendous female apotheosis of America. Bob was talking with Oprah, and so forth.
And Oprah was fawning over him as was the skittish, largely female audience, as Bob was gleefully scattering his zany punch lines like popcorn. His every gesture and utterance greeted by ogles and shrieks---my, what a Tarzan. If only the guy could grow some sideburns.
The great side-splitter though, was Oprah herself winking and taunting Bob about all those “kisses” he planted on all those bachelorettes. The audience---looking absolutely riveted---obediently snickered its teasing agreement. Not only is Bob Tarzan but he’s also Casanova. Bob just shrugged and grinned like he couldn’t help himself; the magic is, shucks, just all over me. He then let us in on some interesting info: when approached by ABC he was initially gun-shy to become the new “Bachelor” and as it so happened, telephoned Oprah for advice before making the big decision. At the appropriate time Bob glanced into the audience and got downright solemn, “and who else better to call for advice, right?!” The crowd roared back its approval: Oprah is God. Bob is guaranteed another 10-minute slot in an upcoming broadcast.
So, here we have a 32-year-old man who after making waves as the hefty goof ball on Trista’s Bachelorette series, is in apparent doubt about starring in his own Bachelor show. Pressing on, he for some reason seeks out advice from an omnivorous media behemoth like Oprah, who peels off intoxicating wisdom like “go for it” and “have fun with it.” I think it is safe to assume that Bob’s questions for Oprah had very little to do with love and marriage (at least I hope so) and probably consisted of more mundane queries concerning handling the upcoming avalanche of entertainment pursuits as well as their financial formalities. (‘Oprah, how am I going to deal with being a male Oprah?’).
The cartoonish, hazy picture that is slowly focusing, I believe, is that Bob Guiney is certainly going for it and having tons of fun, yet frankly has very little business being our Bachelor this fall season. He is a somewhat sonorously humorous individual certainly at times and can be attractively pensive when he wants to be or feels it will work to impress somebody, but he is as hot to the idea of marriage---and I’m referring to a somewhat mature, meditative rendering of Marriage, you know, like a grown-up---as some blight on the world as, say, Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner. This is not because Bob is such a wearisome blight as these undeveloped parvenus but because he is clearly not an implacably confident gentleman.
And I shall not point to Bob’s annoying assistance from his mom (in the first episode) and his uber-mom, Oprah in securing his “love,” when at thirty-two---a “man” approaching middle-age---he should be at least contemplating making these kind of decisions on his own. The scandalous way he treated Mary and summarily kicked her off the show was a lavish example of how intrinsically void Bob is in understanding his own role in fostering loving relationships, beyond what they can produce for his jolly ego.
We know that Mary was the 35-year-old Cuban-American female from Florida who came to “love” Bob. We know that Bob had, at the very least, “strong feelings” for Mary. We also know that Mary let Bob know that she was delighted at the idea of starting a family, being one of the handful of women who actually verbalized this fancy wistfully. Bob has let it be known for weeks that this desire for children by Mary (he seemingly likened it to some sort of weird fetish) was a negative stumbling block. Basically, as Bob stated in this last episode, the whole Mary thing “is wonderful but it’s kinda freaking me out.” And the freak out, apparently, was the horizon and kids peering over it.
That said, Bob’s moment for potential greatness towards Mary came during their Jackson Hole “overnight date” dinner when he broached his concern about her overarching family compulsions (which Bob insanely described beforehand as something she “wants immediately.” Immediacy to Bob, we reason, is one or two years). Being taken to task, Mary having I’m sure given some thought to the subject, dispensed some rather reasonable opinion, stating that a married couple should wait “a year or more” before starting a family, meanwhile completely enjoying each other as a duo. She went on to say that she didn’t want to “wait 5 years... 4 years...” for kids, “I don’t want to do that,” which I think any slob would consider wildly reasonable. Then, lamentably, Mary crafts a dirty spectacle of her advanced age, hunkering-down, whispering to Bob with desperate tones, “I’m thirty-five years old... come on!” Ouch! This last statement probably shut the Mary door permanently in Bob’s mind on a subject she really had no need to explain. And this is where, if he were an earnestly honest man, Bob would have informed Mary of their doomed relationship. Instead, he brushed the elephant-in-the-room aside and ever the limp noodle, let the starry-eyed Mary make the decision whether it was “right” to, as the card read, ‘forego their single rooms and stay as a couple in the fantasy suite,’ adding with mock bravey, “however she felt appropriate.” Bob, moreover, had the audacity to say, “The last thing I want is to put her in a spot where she has to compromise everything she wants just to be with me,” and then puts Mary in just such an ominous spot. Bob got another night of ego-ballooning, Bob worshipping and sexual tomfoolery from a woman he had no intention of keeping around because God forbid, she wanted some children. In one sense, he’s just another jerk. An absolute commoner.
One has to wonder how appropriate it was to cast Bob Guiney for The Bachelor. This show it appeared, lent some gravity to the process of a marriage-minded man seeking a like-minded woman---the advertised result was a marriage proposal with some expectation for a future family. Guys wanting mere “relationships” could fit in easily elsewhere; Bob could have served well as Joe Millionaire, or filled an uproarious fifteen minutes on Blind Date or the new Average Joe where the expectations for serious matrimony are somewhat jaded. The fact that he admits to Kelly-Jo that he has no “master plan” for a future family, or that he tells Mary that, “it’s me not knowing my time line on things... when you said you might want a family in one year or maybe in five years, I don’t even know if I’d be ready at that point in my life,” is staggering. He’s cast as America’s Bachelor Of The Moment and the guy frankly doesn’t have a bloody clue as to what he wants, except maybe a hot chick he can canoodle between limo rides to Oprah and People magazine photo shoots. Not knowing whether you’ll be ready for a family with your wife in five years or more is fairly obtuse. It’s basically saying ‘I don’t want children but let’s see if I change my mind, I guess.’
Now, one can begin to see the strange attraction Bob has for Estella who is quirky, nontraditional and an apparent loose prize to attach to his arm during jaunts to the Caribbean with buds Trista and Ryan. She also, thank our blessed stars, never mentions children or family or the future anything. Estella is all about Bob and that’s what Bob likes. Estella’s Bob adoration and Bob magnification in Belize was so pleasing to Bob that he said, “There wasn’t a moment today when I sat there with you and thought about anyone else... it says a lot to me.” Estella thought that was “pretty cool,” keeping things just at the right lowbrow Generation Y tempo. When Bob pulled out the Fantasy Suite passport, Estella left the proposal up to Bob. After Estella agrees to be transported to Bob’s Love Shack, Bob seductively murmurs, “Well... I’m excited you want to do that.” I’m sure we’re all glad Bob is still so concerned about getting “excited.” Good God. I’m now starting to have high opinions of Aaron.
I hope Bob doesn’t believe for a second that he gets a free pass from family drudgery if he hands out his final rose to Kelly-Jo, which I still believe he just might do, though Estella is racing dubiously upward in status. Kelly-Jo may be only 23 but I can almost swear that she ain’t going to wait five years for procreation. In the Alaskan hot tub she said pointedly, “I need kids. I love kids.” Bob quickly said he loved kids too, sounding much like saying one loves whales or take-out Thai food. Hey, who doesn’t love kids? The Grinch? Satan?
Kelly-Jo took a fateful plunge off the abyss in Alaska and made the ultimate faux pas a yearning young lass can make to a well-worn, divorced bachelor egomaniac like Bob Guiney. She openly, innocently declared her Love to Bob while he just sat there looking at her with glazed eyes, transfixed, doped-up on the elixir of being transported to fairyland and becoming the Fairy King. Of course, all Bob could do was babble something about not being able to babble something and commence smooching, his battle won and over. After the fluids ceased slurping, Bob gazed wondrously at Kelly-Jo and said, “You’re feelin’ this, aren’t you?”, like he was a detached pimp in some ranch whore house amazed at how his concubine was cracking the whip. More subtle minds could maybe separate pent-up horniness with what it means to Love another person, with being “excited” and “feelin’ it,” with blurting out that you “love kids” and yet being dumbstruck as to their place in your destiny. But by the time we figure all that out, heck, Bob will have married Oprah.
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