If you’re a normal functioning adult person who purports to have adult things, like “standards” and “dignity” and “even a modicum of good taste,” it’s quite likely you have not familiarized yourself with MTV’s latest reality television entity, Floribama Shore, which takes seven single southerners between the ages of 21 and 25 and deposits them in a beautiful house on Panama City Beach.
That’s okay. Fortunately, I am not such a normal functioning adult person; and fortunately, this article is not really about Floribama Shore. This article is about Kortni—presumably, Floribama for “Courtney”—the undisputed goddess of not only the show Floribama Shore, but of the tank-top-littered stretch of Gulf Coast from Alabama to Tallahassee known as Floribama Shore itself.
How to express my love and worried admiration for 21-year-old Kortni, the undisputed id of a house whose spirit animal can be roughly described as the lovechild of Newport Menthols, frozen pizza and lukewarm Red Bull vodka?
The craziest and airiest and most volatile cast mate in a cast that includes a proud wannabe trophy wife, Aimee, and an actual person named Codi Butts—Codi fucking Butts!—who looks and talks and acts exactly how you would expect a person named Codi Butts to look and talk and act?
An inebriated mess who, over the course of four episodes, has not been sober long enough to give a coherent confessional?
A freshman-year basement frat party of a human being willing to throw punches without knowing who she’s punching, much less why?
A person who had the gall to not only pee in someone else’s bed, but in a recycling bin on the beach in broad daylight—all in one episode?
A mere mortal who, through an unparalleled display of drunken stupidity, genuine kindness and shamelessness, has risen from the beer-scorched earth of Floribama to become the immortal queen of reality television?
The answer is: it’s just not possible. At least not in standard prose. Ergo, I’ve composed a Shakespearean sonnet to Kortni. May she continue her reign of the Shore for as long as MTV lets her, before inevitably realizing she’s a danger to herself and others....
Shall I compare thee to spiked Gatorade?
Thou art more crazy and degenerate.
One can’t argue with the sad barbs you trade,
When thou art so drunk and intemperate.
Sometimes too hot the eye of ‘bama shines,
And thou bladder fills like a clinic free.
Senses dimmed, thou ignorest all the signs
And perch atop a bin to let flow pee.
Thou shalt never lose the giraffe onesie,
Nor the spirit to wield punches at bars,
Nor the desire to lendest thou string bikini
To wiccans your roommate so rudely mars.
So long as men can breath, and keep the score,
Thou shalt be queen of Floribama Shore.
