“Are all magicians femme?” Patti Stanger
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: client intros
After Patti tells Destin and Rachel that she’s happy because she’s getting “regular sex” from her new boyfriend, David, Destin introduces his “millionaire magician,” Seth Grabel, 29.
Check out our full and snark-tastic Millionaire Matchmaker episode guide and updates! Trash and treasure in equal increments, we promise.
Later in the episode, we see Patti and David go on a date in Malibu, and he asks her to move with him as part of a roadmap of sorts (I guess?) to get engaged. Patti says yes – even though they’ve only been dating for “three or four months” – and then asks what kind of rock she might expect.
After this, Patti turns taciturn and immediately blurts, “I hate magicians. That’s like up there with clowns – I don’t like clowns either.”
When Destin attempts to continue, Patti figures out that Seth is also “bald and short,” which she then makes a cringe face about. Then she calls Seth “pathetic” for being a magician.
We’re all set to hate Patti (or I should say, hate Patti more), but then we see Seth in his video intro and he literally (I guess?) talks with his hand – or uses his hand as an unclothed hand puppet ventriloquism bit, or whatever – and suddenly we’re kind of completely on Patti’s side.
That’s the diabolical genius of The Millionaire Matchmaker at work here, people.
We then learn that Seth Grabel’s path to fame included working at Caesar’s in Las Vegas and opening up for The Amazing Johnathan. Grabel also has participated on America’s Got Talent.
Seth talks about how he’s been cheated on in the past and is looking for trust in his next relationship. Just when we’re tempted to have empathy for our guy, he does a cheesy card trick at the end.
“Are all magicians femme?” Patti adds.
Rachel, VP of Matching, then introduces Marty Yacoobian, 32. “He’s in, like, the production business,” she adds. This seemingly would translate into the fact that he’s a location scout for TV or movies. Oh, and his crush is Alyssa Milano, we learn.
Marty owns a 15,000 square foot home in Calabasas that he seems quite (boastfully) proud of, and talks about how “I’ll be making margaritas, hitting the bong, partying,” and so forth. So looks like we have a SoCal party bro-meets-douche on our hands here. Oh, he calls it his “drunk house,” and also has a warehouse of fancy sports cars to top off the image.
Marty also talks about how “flaky” women can be and announces that he demands the best for himself. Also: women need a “real man” and many men are “pansy asses” today.
Patti’s not wrong when she assesses that she has two “real pieces of work” for this edition of The Millionaire Matchmaker.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: Patti meets the clients
Patti meets Seth at a café, and it’s honestly super irritating that he’s messing around with a deck of cards when she shows up. His little intro segment that follows is even more irritating, so I’m not going to write about it.
When Seth tells Patti that he’s concerned that women will want to be with him for his fame, and she rebuts this by saying, “Brad Pitt you’re not.”
He’s also looking for a hot 21–25-year-old who looks like Natalie Portman and is into a vegan lifestyle. He’s also into “boobs.” Oh, and also someone who is into risk taking and extreme sports.
Patti tells the camera that her challenge will be to get Seth to look past “the surface” for deeper qualities from his potential romantic partners.
Over at Marty’s palatial frat bro “drunk pad” in Calabasas, we learn that Marty also has a 7,000-foot log cabin house in Oregon. Marty tells Patti that his typical move is to pick up flaky, “fly by night” girls at the beach and take them back to the party house.
Marty tells Patti that if he meets the right woman, he could see a relationship “evolving,” but it’s pretty hard to take him seriously based on what we’ve seen thus far.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: the recruiting session & mixer
Highlights of the recruiting session include:
- MaryAnne is a comedian who is a server by day
- Patti calls Savanna the “perfect spinner type,” and also “Alyssa Milano with blonde hair”
- Kip is a “lingerie basketball player,” like… for her job I guess
- Megan, 28, has a Master’s in education, volunteers, and is Jewish
- Catherine, 26, is a wildlife firefighter, and into extreme sports. “Burn your outfit in the wildfire,” she is told by Patti, Destin, and Rachel.
- Lisa is an “all-natural pastry chef.”
- Leigh is a wellness coach, but more importantly Patti calls her Dumbo because of the way her dress fits her. At one point, Patti manhandles her bra, saying, “It’s too big for you.”
- Kate is a certified nurse, Jewish, and from Omaha
The gimmick, er… twist with the mixer is that it’s a “bikini mixer,” which doesn’t do much to tone down the meat market aspect of The Millionaire Matchmaker, frankly.
During the mixer, Seth gets chastised for “staring at tatas too much” while Party Marty gets his hands slapped by Patti for talking about himself overly much with the ladies.
For the mini-date round, Seth selects Kate, the nurse from Omaha, and Marian, a comedy writer, and Marty picks Lisa, a pastry chef who also lives in Calabasas, and Rachelle, who works at a hotel.
The mini-dates weren’t that memorable, though both fellas toned down their respective shticks and appeared to be more normal. Seth even refrained from doing magic tricks, but the funniest part came when he told Patti that the women in LA seem “more real” to him than those he meets in Las Vegas.
In the end, Marty opts for local gal Lisa while Seth picks Omaha gal Kate.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: Marty and Lisa’s first date
Marty has Lisa meet him at a high end yet hippie-ish bar called Sip in Malibu, where wine tasting is on tap.
Marty and Lisa are both into old school muscle cars, so that’s a good topic for them to connect about, and they have an easy rapport overall. They are both also into going down to the gun range, so these wacky kids may have a future in Calabasas yet.
Over dinner, Marty does a good job at first by asking Lisa about her culinary career and tells the camera that he’s proud because he’s keeping his drinking under control – for the moment, presumably.
But eventually he dominated the conversation, telling Lisa all about his party lifestyle and how he likes to invite tons of people back to his place at the end of the night for more drinking around the 2-3a hour. The punchline there is when Marty says, “And then the sun comes up and you’re like, what the f— am I still doing in my jeans.”
Lisa seems increasingly less thrilled by this point.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: Seth and Kate’s first date
Seth meanwhile takes Kate up to the Malibu Canyons (seems like The Millionaire Matchmaker crew kept the couples close together in this edition) to test out how adventurous she is.
And in fact, paragliding is the point of the date, and you can tell how amped Kate is about it by the fact that she talks about the risk of “imminent death.” Seth tries to get Kate to go first before eventually taking off first with the instructor himself. Kate goes next, and while she’s a good sport she seems pretty nervous about the experience.
Dinner is at a place called The Foundation Room, and Seth is dressed in a way that you could see him vamp into doing magic tricks at any given moment in time.
And then he does bust out a music trick, making a champagne bottle disappear (though not down his throat – that would be Party Marty’s domain). Seth then does a little ventriloquism routine after that. Kate thinks the goings on is “cute” but… I guess to each his or her own?
To be fair, Kate does seem super laid back and grounded overall, and honestly I wanted her to find someone better than Seth – but more from the fact that I find him to be annoying than anything else.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: post-dates upshot
Patti and Destin call Kate, who relays that she’s interested in continuing to date Seth. In the office, Seth agreed that the date was “amazing,” and that he behaved like a gentleman. And in fact, Date #2 is on deck for that very night.
Rachel and Patti then call Lisa, who says that Marty is “nice” but that she’s “not really feeling him.” However, in an unusual mood, Patti offers to advise Party Marty to tone down his party side and gets Lisa to agree to go out with him again on that condition.
Marty’s side of things is that things went great, and that he likes her. Patti tells Marty that if he agrees to tone down his party lifestyle, Lisa might go out with him again. And then the episode quickly ends.
The end of episode captions then reveal: “Marty and Lisa went out only one more time… for more drinks. ‘Party Marty’ admits he is not quite ready yet to become ‘Mature Martin.’” And: “Seth and Kate are still making magic together. Seth plans to commute from Las Vegas to see Kate.”
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian: where are they now?
Seth Grabel is still doing his magic act, with a website where you can get all kinds of related info. Over on his blog, the latest entry seems to be an SEO-baiting (I guess?) topic called, “How to Use Magic to Supercharge Your Sales.”
By way of Instagram, I was able to sniff out that Seth is married these days to a woman named Tammy.
I was not able to find much out about what Party Marty is up to these days.
Some stats and info about The Millionaire Matchmaker – Seth Grabel & Marty Yacoobian (“The Magnificent Seth Meets Party Marty”)
TV SHOW – The Millionaire Matchmaker
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 6, Episode 13
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Bravo
AIR DATE – April 9th, 2013
GENRE – Reality TV, Dating Shows, Trashtastic TV
STARS – Patti Stanger, Destin Pfaff, Rachel Federoff, Seth Grabel, Marty Yacoobian
GOOGLE PLAY DESCRIPTION – David asks Patti to take a trip to Catalina with him for the weekend, but first she’s got to set up two difficult millionaire clients who both need a lot of help. Seth Grabel, 29, is a Las Vegas Magician who’s looking for serious marriage material, but after being hurt, his criteria seems to be more about a girl’s measurements than anything else. Patti tries to help him by making him perform his biggest trick yet — passing her bikini test at the Pool of Temptation. Patti’s second client is Marty Yacoobian, a 32-year-old who got rich finding homes for movies to shoot in. Marty knows where the party’s at, but can’t seem to stay with a girl for more than one weekend. Can he mature enough to find the right girl to settle down with? Once the guys are on their dates, Patti and David finally leave town, but Patti has no idea about the surprise David has been planning for her.