This is the chorus that I and many other Amazing Race fans have been singing this week ever since Charla & Mirna made their way into the finals of the Race, knocking off fan-favorites Danny and Oswald, who, let’s face it, have run a few pretty bad last legs.  Still, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.  There were supposed to be super-accomplished teams that would make sure that the finale would be stocked with strong competitors.  But instead, the Race producers chose people like Dave & Mary, who couldn’t finish a leg of the race without the help of, like, six other teams, and ONLY ONE WINNING TEAM, the winners who had to beg people on the streets of Miami for money so they could barely pay a cab driver to get them to the finish line.
So this is what it’s come to: Charla and Mirna with a 1 in 3 shot to win a million dollars.  My fear isn’t just that they’ll win, but that the producers of the Race will think that this is what all of the fans of the show will want.  That this will be a glorious conclusion to a so-so season.  Here’s the thing, though: from my sample size of about two dozen of my friends and family who watch the Race, exactly ZERO PEOPLE WANT CHARLA AND MIRNA TO WIN.  We will hate it if they win; we will riot.  Some of us have even threatened not to watch the show ever again (that would be the some of us who are married to the some of me).

For those of you who aren’t avid fans of the show, I’m guessing you’ve even seen Charla and Mirna before.  Charla and Mirna are cousins, and Charla happens to be a little person.  Mirna, by the way, happens to be a heady cocktail of victimization and self-righteousness, stirred with a swizzle stick made of bizarre accents, but we’ll get to all that in a bit.  You might have seen footage of Charla and Mirna in the first leg of their first time on the Race where Charla was carrying a large side of beef through, if I’m remembering correctly, Argentina.  It was both comical and inspirational and for a few minutes we were all rooting for that team to win.
So what’s changed?  Have all my friends and family gone anti-little person?  Nope.  What’s changed is Mirna.  Or, not that she’s changed, but that she has taken the lead for this team and her personality has shown itself to be … some kind of nightmare, really.  What are the crimes of Mirna?  Let me count the ways:

• Mirna wants to have it both ways regarding Charla.  Mirna feels the need to tell us over and over that everybody is underestimating them as a team (and, really, who cares what anybody’s estimation of you is in a race; this isn’t Survivor) and that Charla can do anything a non-little person can do, and then, turning on a dime, Mirna yells at Charla to run faster.  Here’s the thing, dude: She is literally going as fast as she can.  I could draw you a diagram and explain physics to you, but Charla isn’t half-assing it.  Her legs are shorter than yours.  The end. Plus, if you don’t want people to discriminate against Charla because she’s shorter than others (and I’m with you on that), you can’t ask for people to discriminate for her for the same reason.  Either she deserves special treatment or she doesn’t, but not only when it benefits you.  Now you’re a big ol’ hypocrite.  And I hate hypocrisy (me and George from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”).
• Mirna constantly bugs people who are trying to do their jobs.  There doesn’t seem to be a travel agent from here to Timbuktu whom Mirna hasn’t pestered, gotten way too close to, talked down to, and lied to (she’s fond of acting like Charla has a medical emergency that only tickets on an overbooked flight can fix).  I have a soft spot for people who work in the service industries (mainly retail and food), because I have had those jobs, and they pretty much suck.  Customers get inexplicably stupider when they deal with retail situations, and yet they mock the people who are answering their dumb questions.  Mirna’s mean to service people, and that’s something I hate too.
• Mirna speaks a language heretofore unknown to mankind.  Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but Mirna, who speaks flawless, accentless English when she’s speaking to her cousin or any of the other Racers, lapses into some bizarre dialect when she’s speaking with anybody from outside of the U.S.  I can’t accurately repeat it, but let’s describe it as Andy Kaufman meets Borat meets this weird Eastern-European music I heard in my wife’s old neighborhood that we dubbed as the songs of Bob Marley’s lesser cousin, Claude (who would sing the song “Celebration” with lyrics like, “There is party going on right here, a celebrating that is lasting all through year”). This bugs me partly because I have to listen to it every week, but also because I have spoken to non-native English speakers and they have told me that they would rather hear someone speak normal English than try to recreate an accent back to them.  They understand normal English; pidgin English gives them a problem.  Plus, they find it insulting that someone would try to imitate their accent (okay, I don’t have any evidence of that, I just want to find new reasons to be bothered by Mirna).
• Mirna has absolutely no sense of herself.  And this might be the most bothersome aspect of her personality.  Mirna shouts things out that prove to me that the person she knows least in the world is Mirna.  She tells people that they have to help her because she and Charla are young girls (They’re 30.  I’m 31.  It’s not old, but they’re not “young girls”).  She thinks she’s at a disadvantage on the race because she’s skinny (again, she’s not fat, but she’s on a race with Miss New York and Miss California, so shut up a little).  She believes she’s the most noble, ethical person on the race (please see above about how she’s mean to others; also, she’s called other racers “criminals,” for no reason, which is awesomely ethical).  She just sucks.
• Mirna makes train wrecks wherever she goes. Simply put, there is no situation that runs more smoothly because Mirna is there.  It’s astonishing.  Every task is a headache, a screaming match, a bullying, a…

I think I’ve made my point here.  They just can’t win (“they” in this case means “she”).  The problem, of course, is that all of this was filmed a few months ago.  So they’ve either won already or they’ve lost already.  It’s the Schrodinger’s cat of reality shows.  What can we do about it?
Well, we can all use the power of positive thinking, the power of prayer, the powers of that thing that Oprah keeps pushing, or even the powers of Desmond on Lost to change the past, and hope beyond hope that this travesty never happens.

The fate of the Race depends on it.