Continued from page 2

The Morning After

Thursday February 20, 2003 10:57 AM EST

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That's one virtue Zora can justly claim, along with a noble stoicism that helped her endure a ruined hot tub date with Evan that the other women crashed. "The Zora I've known my whole life takes the good, the bad and the ugly," says an old Boulder friend, Carrie Bowers. "She goes with the flow and rolls with the punches."

Still, the sniping and plotting among the Joe Millionaire ladies may have left a few bruises. On the finale, Sarah Kozer, a 29-year-old notary who has lately experienced a small degree of notoriety for her appearances in foot-fetish and bondage films, referred to Zora as having fallen off the proverbial turnip truck. "I'm sure she said a lot more than that about me," says Zora. "They teased me that I was the grandma of the group because of how early I went to bed." A loner, "I did a lot of yoga," she says, "and I walked a lot around the château."

But Kozer insists that she and the others weren't the wicked stepsisters in this reality-TV fairytale. "It was a joke," she says. "There's absolutely no animosity between myself and Zora -- there never was." After the finale, she adds, "I called and congratulated Zora and told her how she looked."

Rejected contestant Alison Ball, a 28-year-old graphic designer from Manhattan, agrees. "Not by any means did any of us feel like that about Zora," she says. "None of us thought she was less worldly than the rest of us. She was just very sweet -- a little less analytical than the rest of us maybe, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I liked Zora."