Punished for designing a suit that Donald Trump deemed "so gross" that he wouldn't even touch it directly, Carey Sherrell, a 25-year-old marketing and promotions firm owner from Atlanta, GA, was fired during last night's broadcast of the second episode of NBC's The Apprentice: Los Angeles.
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The Apprentice: Los Angeles' second episode began with the seventeen remaining candidates meeting The Donald at Santa Monica's Pacific Palisades Park and learning that their second task would require them to design a line of mens and womens swimwear for Trina Turk, one of LA's most successful fashion designers. Each team would show off their collections during a beachside fashion show, with the team that managed to generate the most sales from the show's fashion buyer-filled audience winning the task. However after revealing their new task assignment, Trump had another surprise for the teams -- in addition to exempting them from the competition's second boardroom session, winning the task would give the winners a second huge advantage: they wouldn't even have to participate in next week's third task.
Since last week's task loss meant that Frank Lombardi had lost the right to remain Arrow's project manager, Nicole D'Ambrosio, a 25-year-old commercial real estate corporation owner and broker with no apparent fashion design experience, became the team's new project manager. However despite being the team's leader, Nicole appeared to let Carey, a gay man who enjoys making "fashion forward couture" in his spare time, dominate the team's decision making process.
Although Michelle Sorro, Aaron Altscher, Tim Urban, and other members of the team all appeared to have issues with tight, revealing mens swimsuit that Carey had designed, Nicole failed to overrule Carey's decisions and instead privately criticized Michelle -- the design's most outspoken critic -- for speaking up and offering her opinion. "Sometimes if someone says something and you don't agree with it, you don't really have to say anything -- that's fine, you don't agree with it, you keep going -- and because Michelle don't have that, a lot of the guys are not connecting with Michelle," Nicole later explained to the cameras.
Meanwhile, over at Kinetic, although some of her teammates appeared to be growing resentful of the fact that her previous week's victory meant that she would remain the team's leader, Heidi Androl remained Kinetic's project manager for a second week. However unlike last week's smooth ride, the team's second task hit some bumps when Heidi, feeling the team's bikini design was too classic, clashed with Marisa DeMato. "Marisa is really insistent on this one so I'm going to let her have it, but if Marisa's swimsuit is referenced as being too plain and too mainstream then Marisa is going to be accountable for it," Heidi later confided to the cameras.
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After the fashion show -- which included, in the words of fellow gay candidate Derek Arteta, Carey personally "flaming up" the runway in his tight, revealing mens swimsuit design -- Turk revealed that Arrow had sold only $350 worth of mens swimwear and once again lost to Kinetic (overall, Arrow sold $19,616 worth of swimwear to Kinetic's $20,111). The decision shocked Carey, who, after seeing Kinetic's collection, had grown even more confident that his team would win the task.
As their reward, Kinetic got to attend a party at Hugh Hefner's bunny-filled Playboy mansion, a somewhat miscast reward given the nine person team included only one straight male, Surya Yalamanchili. Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Carey -- no doubt clearly feeling that his designs were responsible for the team's loss -- approached the rest of his teammates and announced that he would not have any conversations about who should be fired. However although Carey pledged to not discuss the upcoming boardroom session, that didn't stop some of his teammates from telling Michelle that, due to her poor interaction with the rest of the team, she was likely to be the person that they were going to suggest be fired.
Although Michelle attempted to iron out her team differences prior to the team's boardroom session, that still didn't stop Carey (probably mostly out of self-preservation) and Aaron from recommending that Trump fire her during the boardroom session. However luckily for Michelle, Trump made it clear that he felt that fact that the team had designed a skimpy mens suit that only well-build men like Carey and himself could actually wear was the main reason for the team's loss. "I have a great body -- I really do, I have a great, great body -- I could wear that suit Carey and you could wear that suit but nobody else at this [boardroom] table could wear that suit," the 60-year-old unabashedly boasted to Carey.
While Carey attempted to persuade The Donald, Ivanka Trump, and Heidi (who as the winning team's project manager, once again attended the boardroom session) that his designs where intended to appeal to Trina Turk's gay consumers, Ivanka questioned not only his decision to target such a small slice of the overall market, but also his failure to recognize that the task required the team to create designs that would appeal to the clothing buyers, not potential consumers.
In the end, although Nicole decided to have Michelle and Carey both accompany her back to the final boardroom session, Trump decided that the "gross" designs that Carey had "ramrodded down everybody's throat" had doomed his team to failure. "That suit, I can tell you, is a loser... on this task, you did a horrible job -- Carey, you're fired," Trump finally announced.
About The Author: Steven Rogers