Trotted out for critics Friday in the day’s most anticipated panel was Deena Nicole Cortese, an old friend of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, who came on board for the third season of “Jersey Shore,” currently being shot back at Seaside Heights, N.J.
“I’m having a blast,” she told critics assembled at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. “Thank you all for having me here.”
Cortese said she was used to coming down to the beach, so it was natural for Snooki to invite her to stay in their shared beach house. “I’m from the Jersey Shore, and the Jersey Shore is my life. Like, I go down there every summer. THis is what I do always. So when Nicole told me, she was like, ‘Yo. Come to the house and you live down there.’ So instead of me having to drive back and forth, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m so down!’
“Party!” Snooki elaborated.
“Party right here,” Deena Nicole elaborated.
“When I first came in the house, I was a little nervous because I was like, you know what? I don’t know what I’m up against. But all these people are beautiful inside and out. They welcomed me in like family and now, like, I consider them like my brothers and sisters. They watch out for me, and I watch out for them.”
“She fit right into the family,” said Mike Sorrentino, who still refers to himself as The Situation. “So we welcomed her with open arms.”
She seemed to serve as a replacement to on-again, off-again cast member Angelina Pivarnick, who was not part of the group in Beverly Hills. Where’d she go? Vinnie Guadagnino only told me, “you’ll have to watch.”
The beefed up, fussily-coiffed cast, some of whom are millionaires because of endorsements, maintained they haven’t changed despite all the attention.
“To be honest, it really hasn’t changed us at all,” said Sorrentino. “We’re still the same kids.”
“We interact the same way. WHen we go out, we have fun. I cook every Sunday — sausage and peppers,” he said. “We have fun and we are just ourselves.”
The dog and pony show — they were the only panel of TCA whose participants were not allowed to sit — demonstrated how fake the new season must be.
Reports from New Jersey and Miami have shown that fame from the first season has changed just about everything around them. “Huge crowds follow us around,” Vinnie said. But none of that appears on the show.
“They did an unbelievable job of blocking that nonsense out,” said Paulie DelVecchio. “You don’t see any of that crazy , like, paparazzi taking pictures or even people running up to us or whatever.
“We’re still able to do our same thing: Hit the clubs, and kill it like we do and ineract just how we would normally.”
Video of Snooki’s arrest last week showed just what an effect the cast has when just walking — or stumbling — down the beach.
“Obviously it wasn’t a good time,” said Snooki of the arrest. But, she added: “I didn’t hurt anybody. I just went out to have a good time on the beach and, you know, stuff like that happens in Jersey.
“I was in the drunk tank. I had too many tequilas, What are you going to do?”
Squeezed into a black and magenta corset dress; her hair parted in the middle and without the customary poof, Snooki seemed in many way the focal point of the press conference.
When someone asked if she had a boyfriend currently, she said, “What new guy? Im Snookin,’ checking out what’s going on.”
What’s Snookin’? “When you’re lookin,'” she said. “So if I say ‘I’m snookin’ for love, I’m snookin’ for a guy. If I snooked the night, thn I took the night, get it?”
Both terms are to come out in a ‘Snooktionary,” an item that even she seemed amused was coming out. Later, she rubbed lipstick off her teeth and stuffed the napkin down her dress.
Asked her reaction to a New York Times profile of her (that referred to her as childlike), Snooki said she never got a copy. “We don’t get to see anything because we’re filming right now in Seaside. Bur from what my dad said, I think it was a pretty article.”
The group seemed happy to be back on the shore after a season in Miami, which is just now showing on MTV. “Miami is all about being seen, and martini and bottle bars and VIP,” Jenni “J-Woww” Farley says. “Jersey is like college. Everybody just wants to have a good time. Nobody cares about how they act, or what they look like. It’s all about fun. We had fun most places, but Jersey, I think, is closer to our hearts.”