Finally, it’s time for Game Night at Dana’s. Kyle arrives first and navigates the treacherous pea gravel to ding-dong the out-of-place door that causes even my usually-detail-ignorant husband to ask, “What the hell is that?” Dana takes ten minutes to clomp clomp clomp down the stairs like Auntie Mame, and with every step I am waiting with bated breath for her to take a header. Kyle tells Dana she looks nice, and Dana responds with her weird pointing technique and announces “Valentino!” I don’t think Mr. Valentino makes coochie shorts, lady, but if none of the BH 9ers are the wiser your secret’s safe with me. In an ITM, Kyle shares her repressed urge to point to herself and shout “TARGET!” And that’s why we are friends. Except I can’t contain myself in such a situation, as we’ve previously discussed. I also have a weakness for fart jokes, so Kyle’s just obviously a much more mature person than I all around.
Here comes the Glands, crutching up in white-before-Memorial Day coochie shorts. Brandi’s skinny in the way that at certain angles her legs look broken. She’s already in a crappy mood, sort of like shit didn’t happen for her that day, so she’s spoiled for a fight and sets her sights on the isolated and vulnerable Kyle first thing. As Dana clomps back and forth to greet her guests in her “Fendi’s!”, Kyle and the Glands sit awkwardly and silently like Puberty Dave at a junior high dance. My friend Camille arrives and totally agrees with me that the place is oddly devoid of appropriate furnishings. She does not comment upon the piles of bric-a-brac stuffed behind the few chairs that Dana, expert party planner, has backed up against the wall in a straight conversation-encouraging line, but I observe them and sense a predilection for …collecting.
Artfully laid out on the pool table is a selection of burnt looking giant marshmallow dominoes, awkward sugary nibbles, and extremely thin breadsticks. None of it looks remotely edible which is just fine with Tay, who clanks in clad in a black satin nightgown and Alex McCord’s Herman Munster shoes. “Don’t get up,” she tells the gimpy Glands, who replies, “don’t worry, I won’t.” And then, guess what? Adrienne cancels! Dana, who has to put her phone down on the floor because she doesn’t have a table, announces that she just hates it when Adrienne doesn’t show up – didn’t they just meet? Like the day before?
And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Kim arrives. After talking to the flower boxes randomly flanking the door that fell off a Home Depot truck outside Fresno, she bursts into the house in a state of deshabille and greets her host, Pam, by smacking her in the face with her giant bubblegum pink suitcase. Kyle takes one look at her and thinks, “Shit.” Shit indeed, my friend. Buckle up.
It seems Kim’s been having panic attacks and hasn’t eaten or slept in seven days which if true I believe would be sufficient reason to get her involuntarily committed. She’s losing her balance and seeing double and can’t hear out of one ear because she stuck a banana in it. She’s crying all the time and the mirror’s too damn dirty to put on her fake eyelashes. She’s a hot mess, that Kim. I’m wondering if perhaps she’s short on sleep because she’s drinking a triple Venti coffee cocktail after dark? I have a colleague at work who as a matter of office policy is restricted from drinking coffee after 2 p.m. because it keeps her up all night, so if I were Kim I’d start with that and see what happens. Might bring some zzz’s, might also reduce her QVC expenditures. BTW, Kyle tastes her coffee cocktail and it’s not doctored up….yet.
Elizabeth, you got me laughing at “poopy pants,” and I haven’t been able to stop yet!
Paul Nassif may be having money troubles, though I’m inclined to agree with you that considering where and what his business is, discount specials don’t sound indicative of anything to me, except possibly overkill, as he gets more free publicity from the show than he’d get even if he had Free Boob Job Friday every week.
Be that as it may, I saw the Radaronline story, which was immediately echoed everywhere else, and it sounded plantish to me, devoid of specifics, and consisting only of vague generalities, and coming, naturally, from an “anonymous source.”
As we learned along with the Giudices, real “financial problems” of the very wealthy tend to trail over into the public information department at some point, or at least flesh themselves out somewhat.
That’s all irrelevant, however, as the Maloof family own everything in the world, and are thus much more likely to cause financial problems for other people than suffer any themselves.
I suspect that Radaronline’s “big scoop” was intended as some sort of damage control, in the wake of viewer reaction to the football game episode.
For me, it was added confirmation, as if I needed any, that one’s impressions of reality show hamsters are ephemeral and not to be counted on.
I had previously opined that Adrienne seemed jarringly out of place on Real Housewives, as another blogger put it, “she’s just not trashy enough.”
Indeed, until the football episode, aside from being no less ostentatious than anyone who chooses to live in that neighborhood, she held the singular position of not having said or done a single thing that could be called trashy or skanky, not even by a judgmental old curmudgeoness like me.
The show glossed over the issue of how many people would lose their jobs as a result of the Maloof’s removing their ball team from the city, though they did show some signs that referenced it, or I think they did, and I don’t pretend to know if they intentionally placed that ITM clip, explaining that she simply wished to obtain more revenue, so close to those scenes.
It didn’t really matter where they put it, though.
Within hours of the first reference to the ball team on the preceding episode, even people who had never heard of it, or any of the backstory, knew enough, which was exactly what Adrienne said in her ITM: She wanted more money.
That was trashy. It was also, in my opinion, an ill-thought decision to include anything at all about the ball team in the show, precisely because of the controversy, and I don’t know if I’m more surprised that she permitted it, or that Bravo did it.
I would not be surprised to learn that at least some of Bravo, and all of Adrienne’s brothers, were extremely displeased and appalled, respectively, though obviously for different reasons.
The whole raison d’être of the Real Housewives franchise is to serve up, along with the trashfest, a heapin’ helpin’ of schadenfreude.
As viewers, we are supposed to come away from watching these shows feeling both entertained and immeasurably fortunate, that though we are poor, we are blessed with the ability to create, maintain, and generally cause the presence in our lives of joy and amusement despite having little or no money to do it with, and above all that we are blessed with loving and functional families, happy marriages, and as if that were not enough, good manners.
Real Housewives allows us to sink into the same kind of suspension of disbelief as shows about vampires and werewolves.
That rich men want more money is omnipresent in our own day-to-day reality, but we don’t want our entertainment time sullied by anyone making it so plain that the more money those rich people want – and are getting – happens to be the exact same money with which we had hoped to pay the mortgage next month.