I predicted it–you read it here first: Katrina Campins would be the next to be dumped from The Apprentice, NBC’s biz-reality show in which good-looking eager beavers compete for a $250,000 year job with mogul/shameless ham Donald Trump. Katrina, as the new Omarosa (Manigault-Stallworth), whined her way through last night’s episode, in which the two rival teams, Versacorp (Katrina’s team) and Protege each tried to lure gamblers to spend the most money at casinos in the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.


The teams were down to three members apiece last night. Perennial-loser Protege got to snag Bill  from winning-streak Versacorp, so Katrina, who had whined about then-teammate Bill Rancic all through the last competition, moved her moan-epicenter to her sole remaining teammates Nick Warnock and Amy Henry, especially Amy. Beautiful, ruthless Amy has spent all ten preceding episodes of “The Apprentice” wrapping Nick around her little finger, prompting Katrina to make cracks about the two bedding together at their hotel in Atlantic Ciy (didn’t happen), and then saying things behind Amy’s back like “She shot my ideas down.” Shut up and do your work, Katrina. One of the first rules in real-life business, as well as biz-reality TV, is that complaining is always a sign of weakness. It tells everyone that you’re not expending your energies on what you’re supposed to be doing on the job.


Versacorp lost, of course. Its customer-luring strategy, devised by project manager Amy, mother of all strategies, was to sell raffle tickets to a brand-new Chrysler Crossfire. Great — except that the winner didn’t get to own the Crossfire, but only to get $300 worth of free rental on it. Big deal. As Trump himself said when the Versacorp losers had to face him in the boardroom, “That’s a pretty lousy incentive.” (It was fun to watch the Versacorpers squirm and go into denial when Trump followed up his assessment with the question, “Who chose this stupid concept?”) Then, as an extra lure, the Versacorp team hired some “models” hanging around the lobby to flog the raffle tickets. Since few fashion models actually spend their free time louging in casinos, the models hired by Versacorp turned out to belong to the world’s oldest profession, and they seemed to be doing a certain amount of trading on their own accounts. “They got the hookers!” crowed new Protege-ite Bill when he spotted Amy’s strategy in action.


Not that winner Protege had such brilliant marketing ideas either. They hauled a giant roulette wheel with a $1,000 prize for the winning spin in front of their casino, and towards the end, a very large caged blue-eyed albino tiger borrowed from one of the shows. When I saw the tiger, all I could think was: Roy Horn. My husband, who was watching “The Apprentice” along with me, cynically wondered whether Siegfried and Roy, who shut their Las Vegas show down after Roy’s massive injuries a few months ago, cynically wondered whether the pair were now flogging their tigers in Atlantic City. But Protege had concentrated its marketing efforts on the Taj Mahal’s VIPs, so even though its efforts brought far fewer gamblers into their casino, they were big-spending gamblers.


Last night’s episode had a surreal feeling to it, and it wasn’t just the glittering, claustrophobic world of the gambling casino, or my knowledge of the widely reported fact that Trump’s Atlantic City casinos aren’t faring that well in real life. I also noticed that the Chrysler Crossfire was one of the sponsors of the episode, which made me wonder whether or how much all the team competition might be rigged. Bad vibes.


At any rate, there are now exactly five contestants left on “The Apprentice,” and exactly one of them is a woman. (Amy spared Nick the fatal second trip to the boardroom, undoubtedly saving him to feast on later,  and Trump spared Amy on the strength of her track record.) This says something about the nature of the “glass ceiling” that rad-feminists are always whining about, but what? We’ve watched the contestants in fair fight for weeks, and I, for one, haven’t seen one whit from Trump of the male chauvinism that is supposed to hold women back in the corporate world. Maybe, gals, just maybe, the fault lies in ourselves.