Ellen: Recap - w/ Christina Hendricks

Is Ellen on the phone here?

I have never considered myself to be the manliest man, as evidenced by the fact that:

a) I have a blog about women's television
and
b) I once spent an entire afternoon shopping at Bed Bath and Beyond without my wife (and loved it),

but I am certainly not the lamest dude either. I actually have some very primal, masculine qualities that may not be on par with Bruce Willis', but are certainly comparable to say, Maxim Chmerkovskiy's or Elton John's. For example, I have a decent amount of chest hair, can dribble a basketball with either hand and once ate an entire Roast Beef Hoagie with a stick. That being said, I have never done anything softer than centering my day around an episode of Ellen like I did last Thursday afternoon.

In my defense, my intentions were VERY manly. My sole reason for watching the show was to see special guest, Christina Hendricks. As I have written before, I can't get enough of her mesmerizing bosom and here  was my opportunity to see how Christina (the actual woman / bosom combo) compared to Joan (the Mad Men enhanced woman / bosom / sexpot combo bonanza).

Please tell her to stop looking at me like that. I can't handle it.

If you've never seen Ellen's talk-show, it is structured similarly to every other talk-show, but Ellen has a few signature wrinkles that set it apart. Following her monologue, they play music and Ellen starts wiggling her shoulders and proceeds to dance up and down the aisles along with her audience. THE WOMEN IN THE AUDIENCE GO ABSOLUTELY BONKERS. They all love it and smile as if they're staring at a thousand babies, especially the women who are seated in the aisles and have the chance to potentially dance with Ellen. Occasionally some do get this opportunity and do so with the most intense look in their eyes as if they must dance harder than they've ever danced before. Ellen normally gets a kick out of this and then leaves the women behind like her name was Charlie Sheen.

Later, Ellen introduces her mystery word of the day (which is a blatant rip-off of Pee Wee's Playhouse) and tries to get her guests to say the word, thus winning an enormous case of Pampers for her entire studio audience. Thursday's word was "papaya."

It was at this point in the show that I received a text message from loyal reader and my very masculine friend, Sergio, which produced the proudest moment in the history of TV My Wife Watches. Sergio wrote:

Dammit, I can't believe I'm watching Ellen. 

With renewed excitement and male companionship, I sprung up during the commercial break to get a glass of A&W Diet Root Beer (we were out of Crystal Light). When I got back to my seat, I placed my full glass of root beer down next to the empty glass I had left on the side-table the night before, which sat right next to the glass of Gatorade that I had forgot I had poured myself before Ellen had started.

(Let it be known I was drinking out of my favorite 1992 Portland Trail Blazers glasses. I have the complete set: Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Cliff Robinson, Jerome Kersey, Buck Williams and Kevin Duckworth RIP.)

That's Clyde the Glide just laying back in a hammock wearing his tennis whites.

Ellen was now interviewing her first guest, Simon Baker, The Mentalist. I've never seen The Mentalist and know a grand total of one person who has, but it's one of America's most popular shows along with around 17 other shows with one word titles: Bones, House, Chase, Glee, Benson, Maude. Clearly, I wanted to hate The Mentalist (the person, not the show), seeing as he's on a show called The Mentalist and oozes masculinity, but considering he wore sneakers, admitted to loving ping-pong and had a British accent, I was charmed. Minutes later, Ellen got him to say "papaya" and I jumped out of my chair with excitement, quickly realized what I had done and started coughing to cover it up. I then realized that no one was around, leading to the following question: if an unemployed guy wearing sweatpants cheers while watching Ellen in the middle of the day and no one is around to hear it, is he gay?

Okay Mentalist, if you could just lean to your right and stick your elbow out ... perfect!

Eventually, after a musical performance by Bruno Mars in which he sang some song about a girl he knows that has a perfect smile and an amazing laugh and a round butt, Ellen brought out Christina.

This was it, the moment I had waited for all day long.

Would Christina be as amazing as Joan? Would she ooze sex-appeal like Hillary Clinton? Maybe she'd admit to loving blogs or men who drink diet soda. I hoped she didn't laugh like a horse.

And then, there she was, walking out in that elegant way that she does, with one foot in front of the other and with both breasts leading the way, in a red, Mad-Menny dress with her legs looking smoother and whiter than sour cream.

(Quick tangent to show how amazing my wife is and the fact that she is not repulsed by dudes who make sexual references to women with smooth, sour cream legs: her LIFELONG DREAM is to take a bath in a giant, moving, truck full of milk. Picture a huge eighteen-wheeler pulling a large, oval-shaped cylinder, like one that's filled with petroleum, but cut it in half lengthwise and fill the container with milk instead of gasoline. Yeah, she wants to swim laps in there while I drive her around town like Morgan Freems. What a woman!)

So anyway, there was Christina, sitting next to Ellen, a moment that I had waited 46 agonizing minutes for. I sat up in my seat, turned up the volume and put down my root beer for fear of subconsciously pouring it all over my chest in some sort of sexually deviant way.  And just as Christina lowered herself in her chair, with both legs closed a la Lady Di and sat up straight to smile at Ellen, a graphic appeared on the screen covering up her entire lower body that read:

"appearing tomorrow: Kevin Nealon" 

Now I must say that before this moment, I really liked Kevin Nealon (especially Mr. Subliminal). In fact, I always felt kinda bad that he never achieved the level of success that so many other SNL cast members did. But at this moment, when they flashed that Norm MacDonald-wanna-be's name up on that screen covering up my girl Christina, it might've well have said "Adolph Hitler" was appearing on tomorrow's show.

Hey Kev, I'm gonna shove that apple up your ass if you get in the way of me and Christina ever again.

I calmed myself down with a few sips of root beer and went on to listen to Christina talk about how she grew up in Idaho and reinvented herself as a goth teenager when her family moved to suburban Virginia. They even showed a picture of her as a teen in all-black, with a bowl-cut, possibly the same haircut that my friend Sergio had in 1991. She was mildly entertaining, had really great posture and according to Sergio, "did not show nearly enough cleavage." The highlight came when she showed Ellen how to swing her hips when she walked, and dangle her arms like a cat. This caused me to spit my root beer all over the floor, which is fine because I recently bought a really cute and efficient Swifter from Target.

All in all, a pleasant, masculine afternoon hanging out with a sneaker wearing lesbian, a mentalist and the  current spokeswoman for London Fog jackets.

Who just so happens to sort of laugh like a horse.