Life Out Here: Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a ... sick

Being rich and single creates terrible human beings.

That conclusion can be reached from watching “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” the surest sign of the imminent apocalypse since Dane Cook became famous.

Yes, “Jersey Shore” features loud, drunken, barely clad Italian-Americans being loud, drunk and barely clad. I grew up with folks like that, so I’m not particularly fascinated or mortified by it. The reality television series that scares the cannoli out of me is “The Millionaire Matchmaker.”

If you haven’t seen it, good for you. If you’ve endured it, you’ll know the show features a “third-generation matchmaker” with a Prince Valiant haircut named Patti Stanger, who hooks up single millionaires through her Los Angeles and New York offices with women and men looking for sugar daddies and honey mamas.


Most of the millionaires are men, and most are vain, crass, egomaniacal narcissists. And those are the nicer ones. The rest are complete psychos, Ted Bundys with bundles.

The women trying to be fixed up with these moneybags tend to be, no surprise, gold-diggers with the integrity of Chicago aldermen … during the Capone era. Even though most are harlots who already show as much skin as possible, Stanger provokes the women to tramp it even more by further shortening their skirts, deepening their cleavages and pushing up their assets with hydraulic undergarments.

Stanger, who is even ruder than that limey who spittle sprays into faces and skillets on that cooking show, screams at women with curly locks that they must immediately straighten their hair or they’ll never even land a loser who only makes several hundred grand a year.

“Men hate women with curly hair,” she shouts from under her helmet-like coiffure.

I’ve heard men talk about women for about 50 years now, and while I’ve heard men say, “She’s flatter than a foursquare court,” “She looks like she sat on a belt sander,” and, “I think she wears granny panties,” in ruling out women as potential romantic prospects, I’ve never heard one say, “Her hair is too curly. She reminds me of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Julia Roberts or even worse, Marilyn Monroe. ”

Stanger also does makeovers on the millionaire men and somehow makes many look even nerdier than they did before she got hold of them.

Once everyone is remade, the whores and men seeking whores mingle at a mixer kicked off by Stanger shouting, “Meet my millionaires.” Then the tramps rush toward the moneyed men like Labradors to the morning Purina. Next the millionaires mingle until they zero in on the dimmest bulbs in the room, who almost always are young enough to be their daughters. Finally they are set up on mini-dates where the man gazes down the woman’s cleavage and the woman gazes into the money signs in the man’s eyes. If all goes well, the two go out on a real date, during which the man often brings along another woman for a potential threesome, preferably in a hot tub. The woman acts shocked when she is treated like a prostitute, despite the fact that she prostituted herself by going on a date with a guy solely because he’s rich.

The potential relationship then goes down the gold-plated toilet. End of episode. My thoughts tend to run to these when I watch “The Millionaire Matchmaker”:

Thank God I don’t live in Los Angeles.

Thank God I don’t live in New York City.

Thank God I’m married.

And rather than giving these millionaires more tax breaks so they can spend even more millions on hot tubs, hair transplants and Viagra, wouldn’t we all be better off repaving a freeway or something?

Bret Kofford teaches writing at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley campus. His opinions don’t necessarily reflect those of SDSU or its employees. He can be reached Kofford@roadrunner.com