MONDO EXTRAS

Lori and Sophia: Goodnight!

MG: I'll be right back, you guys.

Here the interview pauses again while I put the child back in bed, in front of a movie to keep him occupied. Moments like this are why I tried to refrain from criticizing any of the kids' parents in my recaps.

MG: Are you guys still there?

Lori: Is he in bed?

MG: Uh...he's...down.

Lori: You mentioned every now and then [in the recaps] that the kids didn't look that dirty. Even the last show, they didn't look that dirty. But when I picked Sophia up, she was so disgusting. I mean she was just gross. And you don't notice that, even at that Town Council meeting how dirty they were. They didn't take that many showers.

MG: Yeah?

Lori: Their clothes were disgusting. I didn't want to take anything home, but she insisted. It was just...the place was disgusting.

MG: And you guys had just been running around with garbage for an hour, too.

Sophia. Yeah. There should be a lot more of that Showdown than they showed. I guess they had the whole time complex.

MG: Sophia, what would you have done differently on the Town Council?

Sophia. I'm not sure. I would have tried to get the town running more smoothly. It just didn't seem that hard. I don't know, I had a totally different perspective than they did, obviously. But what the Town Council leaders were struggling with, what they thought were huge obstacles, I thought could be solved very simply. All the stupid town dramas usually caused the most problems for the Council, and I just would have attempted to crush all of that.

MG: Would you have done this when you were younger, like when you were ten or twelve or eight?

Sophia: Yes. I don't know if my parents would have let me go, but the idea, I think, would have been appealing to me at any age. [laughs]

Lori: Sophia at age fifteen is like she would have been at age eight. She was just always this way.

MG: Really?

Lori: Sophia was always old. I remember, for her tenth birthday party, we had a Revolutionary War party and everybody had to come in Revolutionary War hero costume. And she was obsessed with John Adams through ages eight, nine, and ten.

Sophia: A brief phase. [all laugh]

MG: I must have missed that phase.