Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap – 3/31/15

Not confusing is the wave of total icks that descend upon me simply by the way Sir Andy Cohen begins these Reunions. He flicks his odd eyes over to the women one at a time and greets each individually (“Hi, Kyle!”) and each one then has to greet him back (“Hi, Andy.”). I have no real idea what it is about this unnecessary greeting system that makes me wish that I could unzip my skin and hand wash it in a delicate cleanser that smells like coconuts, but my reaction to the somewhat snide greetings –said by a man who will spend the next eight hours bringing up every single misstep these women have made – is strong. Let me put it this way: in the History of Greetings, Andy Cohen’s Reunion hellos come in third as the most sinister. The number two slot is held by Hannibal Lector (“Hello, Clarice”), and never moving from the top spot is Richard Dawson, the host of the old version of Family Feud. (For those of you who are very young or had parents who didn’t allow you to watch sh*t TV, Richard Dawson was the host of a mindless game show that I loved and he would greet each member of the family playing the game by shaking the hands of the men and then all but tonguing every woman. It did not matter if one person was fifteen-year-old cousin Krissy and another was eighty-seven-year-old Grandma Dollie; he slobbered on them all.)

As Andy weirdly welcomes the women, we are able to see the look each chose for this momentous occasion where they will be reminded how much their fellow Housewives and the fans despise them. As mentioned earlier, Kim looks like a marshmallow Peep; Kyle is wearing red and already looks like she’s trying hard no to cry; Yolanda looks sleek and chic in a white sheath; Lisa Rinna looks oddly businesslike in her white dress and I’m not so sure I like her in white, as the contrast makes her kohl-lined eyes look like she’s been punched in the face (is that what Harry did?) while the kohl looks kind of cool when she’s clad in all black; Brandi might be in a pale pink dress, but it’s impossible to tell because my eyes cannot stop staring at her remarkably swollen face; Eileen looks plain and pretty in strapless blue; and Lisa Vanderpump is swathed in a lot of purple and she has her hair in a Bumpit, which is terribly unfortunate.

Poufed up hair aside, she is still my favorite and I still want to vacation in her closet.

First we get the happy stuff out of the way – and we should embrace the moment because the rest of the Reunion is bound to be an explosive debacle of epic proportions. Andy mentions how successful Yolanda’s genetically-perfect daughters are doing in the modeling world and then he announces that Kim will be appearing in Sharknado 3, which is clearly the best casting idea anybody has ever had in the history of forever. Plus, Nancy McKeon and Hayley Mills were unavailable; they were both on luxurious vacations, spending the money they saved from their years as child stars instead of drinking it away and blaming everybody else for it. Kim has also been on the show Revenge, a show I watched back when it was good, and I cannot imagine how any producer looked at footage from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and decided, “Yes! We should hire her immediately!” but I guess such a thing happened.

(I have not seen either Sharknado 1 or Sharknado 2, as I already watch enough sh*t television to have permanently damaged my soul, but I will watch Sharknado 3 under one condition: that Kim Richards is eaten by that carnivorous shark and that her final words as she is gnawed upon will be some garbled version of, “You stole my goddamn house!” which will make about as much sense when she says it to a shark as it does when she says it to her sister. I’d also like to request that she is bitten directly in the larynx, which might make hearing her final words difficult but I believe we have all heard them enough times to get the point just by reading her lips.)

Moving on from the upcoming AFI tribute to Kim Richards, the finest actress of our time, we find out that Yolanda is badly struggling with her Lyme disease. It’s truly awful to watch her eyes fill with tears as she discusses the way her brain needs quiet, especially since it’s already abundantly clear that the only thing she will not be graced with during a Housewives Reunion is any form of solitude. The other Housewives look on with concern as she talks about her health challenges and it’s evident that every single one of them feels badly that she is struggling. And the reason for the universal good wishes and concern she receives is directly related to the fact that Yolanda has never fought dirty or repelled acquaintances or caused viewers to believe entirely in creatures from the underworld.

Revealed next is that Kim and Kyle have not spoken in about three months, which means that it makes perfect psychological sense for their first interaction to be on camera. They don’t delve into what it finally was that caused the separation because this Reunion is three parts, my friends! They’ve got to keep some of the bullsh*t contained for a while to ensure that the later episodes will be fraught with dramatic misery, but rumor has it that the silence started the moment Kim’s dog mauled Kyle’s daughter. As Andy peppers Kim with questions about how it feels to be estranged from her sister, Kyle sits stone-cold quiet, her hexagon-shaped face only hinting at the devastation and the anger she feels, which you can see if you focus on her eyes or her lips – or that twitch that randomly comes into her cheek whenever Kim waxes poetic about Brandi.

As Kyle appears miserable about the separation that has befallen her family, Kim reveals that she is feeling just fine. She says that she misses her sister, but she’s actually really happy these days and that maybe one day they will speak in a healthy environment, like a therapist’s office. Finally opening her mouth when Andy Cohen turns to stare at her for a reaction, Kyle keeps the waterworks in check for the moment and says, “I’m only interested in having honest conversations” with her sister, which means this standoff will undoubtedly last until the very end of time.

Moving away from the miserable sisters, Andy decides to refocus on Yolanda because, as he says in the most unfortunate phrasing ever for a woman debilitated by illness, “We’re going to lose Yolanda at some point.” While she’s still around – before she runs away towards a place where her brain can find some quiet – Andy shows a montage of how Yolanda attempted to be the voice of reason all season while the other women fired off verbal grenades in very public settings. The crux of the footage deals with Yolanda trying to get Brandi to act like a decent person instead of a demonic piece of sh*t that escaped from Satan’s sphincter, and when Andy then inquires about why Yolanda doesn’t cut Brandi loose after all of her disgraceful behavior, Yolanda explains that she is different from the other women. She “looks at life with an open heart instead of with judgment.” But when Kyle posits the belief that maybe Yolanda is able to keep “an open heart” for Brandi and her puffed out face because she has never been at the receiving end of her toxic vitriol – besides that one time Brandi called Yolanda’s teenage daughter an alcoholic – Yolanda explains that she will not allow Brandi to push her to the side “because that’s what everybody does.” And she then adds, “I think it’s easy for all of us to kick her to the curb like a bag of trash.”

Seriously, Yolanda?

First of all, if there is an adult human being that everyone always seems to kick to the curb, it is that adult human being’s fault. Society as a whole did not get together for a secret meeting that you gained entrance into by invoking the secret code (“Brandi’s an unhinged-lunatic-alcoholic-twat”) to collectively choose Brandi Glanville to be the person we should all detest. Even the other Housewives did not randomly pick her name from a hat and then sigh and think to themselves, “Well, I feel a little badly that I’ll have to kick her to the curb, but her name was picked.” It is Brandi’s stupidity and her inability to self-assess or to remain sober that causes pretty much everyone in her path to eventually decide she is a monster. And as for that reference to a bag of trash, I’m quite certain that there has never been a more apt visual illustration of Brandi. Here I have spent an entire season trying to figure out synonyms for the word “assh*le” so I can at least vary my insults, and Yolanda nailed it in one try. Brandi is a bag of trash, and it’s one stuffed to capacity with used tampons, moldy apple cores, empty wine bottles with cigarette butts stuck to the bottom, and empty canisters of Xanax, which I hope she refilled before this Reunion.

The entire time that Yolanda speaks about Brandi and her disastrous turn on this show, Brandi says nothing. She sits motionless, like a pufferfish who has just been stun gunned, and it’s right about here that I realized that Brandi probably came into this Reunion with an intention: to keep her f*cking mouth shut and to just allow everybody’s blatant hypocrisy to bury every single woman there until Brandi, The Hypocrite Hunter, assumes her version of a victorious stance (her legs spread as far apart as they can go) and stands high above the carnage. And she manages to stay almost mute for the first ten minutes, but the previews clearly illustrate that this idiot finds her voice – perhaps by rifling through that bag of trash to locate the real Brandi – and it is a voice that can only say witless and horrible things to women who are not perfect but don’t actually deserve such bile-filled viciousness heaved their way.

Example? Brandi told Yolanda that her seventeen-year-old daughter Bella is not an alcoholic, despite the rumors running rampant that she is – and neither is Brandi, so there. It was a full-on shocking statement because it was made about a kid directly to the kid’s mother’s face at a moment when the mother was literally bending over backwards in a reverse plank to give Brandi a break while inviting her over to the most gorgeous yoga setting I can even make my mind imagine while I’m experiencing shavasana on my living room floor. And by the way, there is no chance that Brandi paid even a nickel for that session. When asked about such an appalling statement, Yolanda explains that she chose not to react, and sure – that’s one way to go. Another way is by knocking Brandi off of her Malibu bluff for being such a piece of sh*t but such a large bag of garbage might really tarnish the perfect coastline.

“I feel compassion for Brandi,” says Yolanda, and I can only hope that it’s the meds talking because Brandi is a lost cause. Yolanda will continue to invite her to dinner and Brandi will continue to sweat off her makeup and bring up finger-banging at the table.

Lemons for everybody!