Keep on Truckin' Trent

As episode 3 of Design Star begins, our ten remaining designers are dragged to a chilly Trump rooftop where they are greeted by Vern and an instrumental ensemble. As a viewer, my curiosity was piqued as to what kind of design-related challenge could they conjure up with these instruments. We found out quickly enough that the designers were going to be paired up with an instrument as their "inspiration" and then they would have to design a rooftop area with the other members of their team to create a harmonious living space. Since there were more men than women, the ladies got to pick one of the guys to be an honorary teammate. After a few minutes of intense whispering, they played "Red Rover, Red Rover, let DAN come over" and his fate was sealed. They chose Dan because of his construction skills. Stacey and Emily are all giddy about how it is "much more peaceful" with Dan on their team. Translation: they can use him as a "buffer" from having to deal with Nina. He then becomes Stacey's workhorse to build a fence to represent the keys on the trumpet, the frets on the guitar and the xylophone keys. She puts some plants and candles on it and calls it a day.
Emily puts together this table, that I did not care for. It reminded me of when I was a child and we would go to Aunt Tina's apartment in the Bronx and they would set their living room up as the dining room in order to fit everyone. This involved moving the kitchen table into the living room, but then they would get the giant aluminum folding table and throw a fancy tablecloth over it to make it look nice for the holidays. That is what this table reminded me of. Nothing special.


On the other side of the patio, Nina was busy. She painted the walls this beautiful purple color. Over the color, she then painted these squiggles to represent the twisted tubing of the french horn, which was her instrumental inspiration. Along comes Emily and tells Nina to paint over the squiggles as she doesn't like them. Nobody tells Nina what to do because Nina is Nina and gets the job done on her own terms and then proceeds to tell Emily that she doesn't like her table either because the scale is off and the fence is not all that thrilling to her. Everyone has their own opinions. And it's a good thing that Nina stuck to her guns because the judges liked the squiggles, and awards the win to the Ladies + Dan Team. Nina is granted the over-all win. So far, there have been three challenges and she's won two of them. To me, Nina seems like she knows what she's doing.


The other one who seems to know what they are doing is Michael. He has been consistent with his design knowledge and experience and has a fantastic eye. His instrument inspiration was the trombone. He creatively used an extension cord wire as art and fashioned music notes, as well as a visual representation for the trombone slide. The judges seemed to like that and I think if the men's team had it together enough to win the challenge, Michael would have been the over-all winner for this one.


However, the guys were all over the place and it showed. Everyone was working on their own project and it didn't mesh when it was time to bring it all together. Our first disaster was with Alex. His instrument was the bongos. He found this beautiful day bed that would have been perfect.....if he had bothered to measure if it was going to fit in the elevator to make it up to that rooftop patio. (My question while watching this was wasn't there a freight elevator in the building? Stairs?) The piece did not make it and they had to come up with "plan b". Plan b was not so great. Tom decided to help Alex and they designed a day bed which was nice, but didn't say "bongos" and certainly didn't look as nice as the original choice. Instead he ended up with these blue round ottoman pillows that although they were blue like the bongos, they missed the mark.


Disaster number two was Courtland's decision to Venetian plaster the wall to match the color of his cello. The wall ended up being this pumpkin pie orange-y color. All I kept thinking was that I wished I could call on Casey because she would know the answer to this one: If yellow is an aggressive color, then what is orange because it certainly did not give me the relaxing "Sedona Arizona" feeling that Courtland got from it!


The death knell for the gentleman's team came from Trent. Scott Adams, who created the "Dilbert" comic strip coined a phrase for people that work in an office that do not work as hard as their co-workers. He referred to them as "dead weight, pretending to be contributors." This is the best phrase I could use to describe Trent and I'm glad he went home! From the little bit that we got to see from him, all he did was make a big fuss about how he wasn't the type of person to argue or make a big fuss about himself or his ideas. It showed. When he signed up for a reality show competition, didn't he realize that he would have to confront and deal with other people? His instrument was the keyboard, so he selected the barbecue grill as his design element because his thought process interpreted grill = party. The judges didn't agree and weren't impressed. He also got lost in his video presentation. I don't think the whole Design Star experience was a good fit for him! Alex remains for another challenge and we move on to a flower-related task for the next episode.

I'm not sure if we have a new episode Sunday because it's Fourth of July, but either way, I'll have my DVR ready to go.