Saturday, December 10, 2005

Super... Someday

Tucson’s Jayla Rubinelli had her ups and downs on ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ but in the end she just wanted to go home.

B. POOLE

Tucson Citizen

She insists she's nothing special, just another good-looking girl trying to make ends meet.

"I'm just some chick from Tucson," said Jayla Rubinelli, 21, a former Belushe's Bar & Grill delivery driver and Hooters girl who came within a hair's breadth of winning UPN's reality show "America's Next Top Model."

"I don't think anything about me is really different."

Jayla made it to the final four of more than 22,000 girls who auditioned for the show, and she won the praise - but eventual rejection - of the judges, including supermodel and show creator Tyra Banks and renowned fashion photographer Nigel Barker.

Starting with a casting call in Scottsdale, Jayla worked through a handful of interviews to earn the chance to live in a house with 12 other girls from mid-May through the end of July under the watchful eye of the cameras and compete for a modeling contract.

Wednesday, Nicole Linkletter, a 19-year-old college student from Grand Forks, N.D., won the competition. Her prizes: a contract with the prestigious Ford Models agency, a $100,000 Cover Girl contract, a spread in Elle magazine and an ELLEgirl magazine cover with Banks.

Jayla was not allowed to talk to the press until after the airing of the episode in which she was eliminated. That episode, taped in July, aired Dec. 1.

She admits there are really only two things between any beautiful girl and successful modeling: desire and knowledge. In the end, she lost her enthusiasm.

"I was done with it. I just wanted to go home, and I got my wish. There's a lot of mental anguish. There's a lot of drama going on, and you don't realize what it's like to be thrown into that until you actually are."

The "Top Model" house brought out the worst in the normally easygoing Jayla. Her temper built, then flared in the first couple of weeks, she said.

"Finally I had nothing to do but go into confessional and just rant and rave and get out all of my anger," she said.

Her mom agrees that the TV Jayla was not the real Jayla.

"She's not confrontational. When I saw her getting confrontational on the show, I knew she was stressed," said Lori Rubinelli, a health and nutrition coordinator at Tucson's Desert Mosaic charter school.

Jayla has no beef with producers, because what you saw is how she acted, she said.

"You just forget all the cameras are there, unless you wake up with a camera right in your face, which only happened to me a couple of times. You just forget about it," she said.

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