NEWSMandy Lynn: "Most Smartest" Computer Nerd?
Oct. 11 2007, Published 6:00 a.m. ET
Don’t let her performance on the series premiere of America’s Most Smartest Model fool you — Mandy Lynn is a beauty and a geek.
“I’m very smart with computers and stuff like that. Nobody else there knew anything about computers.” the blonde bombshell tells OK!. “It’s a shame nothing on the show had to do with building a Web site or photo editing or video editing because that’s my strong point.”
Mandy is so savvy with computers, she has made a second career out of it, constructing sites and MySpace pages for various companies and models, including herself.
But the 26-year-old hasn’t had a chance to flaunt her Web knowledge on the VH1 reality show, where she is the default underdog after Sunday night’s premiere that saw her botch a runway challenge and a spelling bee.
Still, there’s more than meets the eye to these tests of smarts. Asked to list anything round while walking down the runway, the Playboy model uttered, “Balls, cherries, balloons, tires"… and then proceeded to repeat the words, seemingly out of circular-shaped objects, but was she?
“They didn’t show you this — and I guess this was a trick — when they had us out there explaining the challenge, they actually said, ‘You can go ahead, think of a few things and repeat them. Just focus on your walk.’ They didn’t show you that,” Mandy says. “That’s reality TV for you.”
Crafty editing fooled viewers again during the spelling challenge when Mandy, a self-proclaimed great speller, flopped on the fashionable “Gaultier.” “I didn’t spell the word ‘g-o-a.’I spelled the word ‘g-a-u,’ but I forgot the ‘l,' so that’s where I got out,” she reveals. “But they made it look like I spelled ‘o-a’ because they used the ‘o’ from when I spelled collagen.”
The absence of the ‘l’ still cost Mandy, which didn’t sit well with her. “I’m a really good speller and I was really disappointed in myself that I got the word wrong because I felt like that was a good challenge for me to try to prove myself that I am a smart girl and I am a good speller. And I am.”
Mandy, who’s candid about the plastic surgery on her lips and breasts — “Everything else is real” — knows she has a lot of preconceptions to disprove on the show but believes that books smarts is not the be all and end all in life, and especially not in her career.
“To be a smart model, it also has to do with networking. A model has to be out there, in the public, they need to network with photographers and magazines and TV shows and all sorts of stuff like that,” she says. “If you’re not smart with that, then how does that make you a smart model because you can spell every word in the dictionary? Or name 100 things in two minutes? But that’s the show. It’s good TV.”
America's Most Smartest Model airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on VH1.
And check out Mandy Lynn's MySpace page HERE.
