The Real World: Key West, Episode 1 & 2: Welcome to Sunny Florida

Audition tapes. John is catching a Frisbee in the snow in a Scooby-Doo costume. Svetlana adjusts her breasts. Tyler does high kicks. Paula seems to brush her teeth with a napkin. Jose is pushed into a fountain. Janelle doesn’t realize the camera is on. Svetlana reveals her lips are real. Zach shows that the rest of his family has big hair. Svetlana says she’d get her nose done, if anything, because there is a bump there. And if there is one thing that guys hate on a woman the most, it’s bumpy noses. Zach fails at a cartwheel. John, in a Fred Flintstone costume, hits his friend in the crotch. Svetlana says that her boobs are real and jiggles them.

We’re in for a bumpy ride.

In Philadelphia, Svetlana, who is from Richboro, Pennsylvania, kisses her boyfriend Martin at the airport. She says that she knows she’ll miss him a great deal and she’s never been away from home for more than a week.

Paula from Meriden, Connecticut wants a fresh start. In her tape she reveals that she recently became “kind of bulimic.” She knows she has issues with food and doesn’t want to get fat and ugly.

In Minneapolis Tyler worries how his roommates will take to his personality. It’s been a pattern in his life that people either love him or hate him in the first five minutes of meeting him.

Janelle says goodbye to her mother. She is from San Jose and is half black and half white. She hopes her roommates accept her for that.

John is from Fullerton, California and says goodbye to his blow-up doll. He wants a step up from the college experience and he thinks Key West is it.

Zach is from Vashon Island, Washington and shares that he has always played it safe. He thinks this opportunity will expand his horizons.

A native of Florida (Sunrise, to be exact), Jose has never gone down to Key West. A map shows us how far Key West is from Fort Lauderdale and Miami. All he knows is that it’s a small island and they’re always hit by hurricanes and have to evacuate all of the time.

The requisite Real World-patented giant Comic Sans type comes on the screen. It says “This season of The Real World starts during the most devastating hurricane season ever.” Whether you saw the previews, or just figured out by the news, hurricanes will be a huge part of the season. In the past few seasons, current events have played a very minor part. The last time I can remember was in the Chicago season, during September 11th. A little known fact about that is that what they showed wasn’t exactly what happened because the cast was doing a photo shoot during the attack.

A weather reporter’s voice comes on over a weather map of the Gulf of Mexico. Katrina is coming and the reporter says the weather for the Keys will not improve.

Paula is at a hotel in Miami and is anxiously waiting to meet her six other roommates but Hurricane Katrina comes along and puts her on hold. Shots of flooding and windstorms are seen throughout this.

Tyler interviews that he is stuck in a “shanty hut,” also known as a hotel room. He is waiting for Katrina to pass and he shows all of the leaking in his “shanty.” He reads from his journal that he found it ironic that he was chosen for such a luxurious show only to be struck on an island without any food or electricity.

John says it’s his first hurricane and there is water everywhere, the elevators aren’t working among other things. Zach shows that he slept in the hotel closet because it was the only place that had silence minus the bathroom.

The next day Janelle looks outside and sees that it looks good now. Svetlana was scared and thought she saw a tornado. Zach is just waiting to meet his roommates.

Tyler gets out of a taxi in Sugarloaf Key, Florida. He says that he enjoys people who are just as loud and obnoxious as he is. He then meets Svetlana. Hmm… He asks if she’s Russian and she says yes. Huh? I thought she was Jewish and angry when people thought she was Russian. Whatever. Tyler starts speaking to her in Russian because he knows a little of it. She says that she moved to the US when she was four and that she had an accent that everyone made fun of. I don’t see it, if she has any accent it’s a New York one, even though she’s from Pennsylvania. I don’t hear a Russian accent in there at all. Tyler interviews that Svetlana is Russian to a T. She has big t*ts, big jewelry and wanted to know where her damned mink was.

She sees a chunky bracelet that Tyler has on and asks him about it. He says it was an inside joke in his swim team that the girls would wear bracelets to show how many guys they’d done stuff with. She wonders if a guy would walk away from a girl like that. He says he’s gay so it doesn’t matter. In an interview she says that her biggest fear was having a lot of hot guys and being tempted but she’s happy there is one less boy she can worry about liking in the house.