In One Night, 3 'Survivors' Out

"Survivor: Palau" got off to a very fast start and end for Wanda Shirk, Jonathan Libby and Yolanda Jones. And the first two didn't even get a chance to really play.

What went wrong?

"Grandma got run over by some models," a chipper Wanda sang to The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler. "You might think there's no such thing as justice and as for me and grandpa, we agree. Not fair!"

And even good looks did not help Jonathan stay in the game. Just as children pick teams in school, "Survivor" contestants chose their teammates. Jonathan, like Wanda, was just the last man to be chosen, which meant he went home.

"It was very nerve-racking because I can't imagine why somebody would pick Willard over me, but that's the way it worked out."

Yolanda, who actually got to play, knows exactly why she was chosen at tribal council.

"Because they all were afraid of me," she says. "I knew I was in trouble, like, on Day One when the young girls were in the water, and they were talking about how perfect my rear was."

Yolanda was the first to get to shore in the initial challenge and thus won one of two immunity necklaces. But alas it only lasted 10 minutes. Her immunity required her to take the role of team captain, making her Ulong tribe's first pick.

"Women cut each other down," Yolanda says. "That's just what we do. Women have insecurities and it's my belief that 'Survivor' exacerbates your insecurity."

It wasn't her strategy in the first challenge that led to her demise, she says.

"Understand this," Yolanda says. "We got to strategize before the challenge, but we decided as a team that we were going to take everything. So it was sort of funny, the editing, because we decided we would take stuff, and there were some of us who just wanted to take fire.

"There were a number of decisions that I absolutely didn't agree with. And that's fine. I don't regret anything they did. People have insecurities and they had to go fight with me. I expect for things not all always to work out right," she says.

Editing was also blamed for making Wanda, the 55-year-old English teacher from Ulysses, Pa., look irritating on the show.

"I think they set it up to look like the songs were annoying," Wanda explains. "But there were people asking me. The songs were fun. I want to learn that song. When I left, did you see the people crying?

"Did you see they called out and said,'Wanda, sing for us?' Sure they can get Willard, the curmudgeon, to beat it over the head. That's his job to be a curmudgeon."

And yet, everybody else was in the boat rowing, while she was seen as just singing away. "We did a lot of rowing and we did some talking. It took one minute to sing that song and every little snippet they had of me they put on," Wanda says in her defense.

Jonathan agrees.

"It wasn't really irritating," he says. "After we hadn't slept the first night. Wanda just comes with this energy 24 hours a day nonstop, and never gets tired and never wears out."

Jonathan's mistake may have been that he could not wait long enough in the boat to get closer to shore and was the first to jump off. Why did he jump?

"It looked like the boat wasn't moving at all," he says. "It was so hot. We were tired and we'd been rowing all day. And basically, I jumped in the water."

Sadly, Wanda says, nobody got a chance to see how well she could swim and run.

"I trained for months like an Olympic athlete, but never had to be a chance to be in a challenge where people could see that," she says. And Ibrehem [Rahman] talked to me on the phone and kind of apologized. He said, 'It was a tough decision to make; I went by age.'"

No regrets for Jolanda, though.

"I never went on the show to win the money," she says. "It was an adventure of a life time."