At another café, Lisa Rinna has taken her daughters out for lunch to discuss whether or not they’re excited for their annual family trip to Canada. One of her daughter (Amelia? Delilah? Lhasa Apso?) says it’s not that she doesn’t like going to Canada, but she gets homesick halfway through the vacation. Lisa kind of nods and doesn’t bother fighting back. She knows that they’re teenagers; they want to be home with their friends. Raising teenagers isn’t for sissies, claims Lisa, and she gives Kyle credit for having already raised four of them and this leads us into what I’m guessing is The Mother Sequence of tonight’s show because now we join Kyle and some of her daughters as they wander into a jewelry store where the owner obviously hugs Kyle because she is Kyle. They are there to get some piercings. Sofia will go first and then young Portia will follow. Okay. I don’t feel all that great speaking ill of children and I have no idea how old this Sofia girl is. What I do know is that she looks so much like her mother that it’s almost shocking. She’s got long brown hair and expensive sunglasses and she’s probably gripping a Chanel keychain in her paw and I look just like my mother too, but this is ridiculous. Anyway, Sofia doesn’t take well to pain – or she just takes better to massive amounts of attention because she screams bloody murder while GETTING HER F*CKING EAR PIERCED. She was so hysterical that Kyle had to straddle her in the chair to make her feel safe. I have seen women squeeze out nine-pound babies with more grace that Sofia exhibited in that jewelry store, and I am obviously stunned that Kyle raised such drama queens because she’s the kind of woman who shuns attention at all costs.
Back with a mother I don’t kind of hate, Lisa explains that she doesn’t really listen to everything her daughters say to her anymore. Their words and complaints are just a lot of white noise in the background for her so she tends to tune them out and I honestly think that’s some excellent parenting.
Lisa Vanderpump’s kids are out of the house, so her concern for the day is presenting the two new horses to her husband. Lisa wants Ken to love them immediately and it appears that he does; he’s just a little perplexed why there are so many horses suddenly in his backyard. Still, Lisa has already decided that they are a part of her family and all they need now is a proper set of golden Maloof hoofs and they will be good to go. I smiled when she said that – but then my grin turned to one of terror because it’s possible that with that sentence, she might have just conjured up the spirit of Adrienne Maloof and I felt a hard chill pass through me so I quickly called in an exorcist and I feel little better now. The scene ends with Ken saying that he’s blown away by the gift, Lisa congratulating herself on shocking the hell out of her husband, and one of the horses pissing a reservoir on the back lawn.
We’re finally back with Yolanda again. She and David welcome Erika and her husband to their Malibu home and Yolanda says that Erika has been a great support system for her during her illness. There does seem to be a nice ease between the two women. As they sit outside and Yolanda wraps herself in a blanket, David asks Erika if she’s performing or if she’s writing and she says she’s doing all of the above. In fact, she’s about to do a show in Chicago and she’d love to get David’s opinion on her music. But see, David is a little busy. He’s getting ready to jet off to Europe to play a show with Andrea Bocelli for his foundation. The event will be in Tuscany and, this year, there’s going to be an opportunity to meet a very special guest who just so happens to be the Pope. I’d much rather meet Springsteen myself, but the Pope is kind of a special guest to have at an event. I mean, it’s not as though they’re announcing that someone big will show up and then they end up saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Hilary Duff!” Yolanda, chock full of excellent ideas and taking a break from smoothing her husband’s hair and kissing him in front of her guests in a way that reads as even more creepy now that we know they are getting divorced, suggests that Erika should perform with David for the Pope! Fortunately, Erika realizes that Erika Jayne and her compression catsuit and her “eat a dick” mentality do quite jive with stuff the Pope probably stands for and she bows out of being sent to purgatory permanently.
Then comes a moment that probably sums up why so many people I know think David Foster’s a d*ck. The four of them are chatting away and David asks Erika’s husband if he can take a week off work. “No,” Erika responds, knowing full well that her husband of fifteen years doesn’t do sh*t like that. And that’s when David looks directly at her with a hard glint in his eyes. “Don’t do that,” he tells his guest, going on to explain to her that interrupting is wrong and Yolanda answers for him sometimes too and he hates it. Remaining cool as a f*cking cucumber – or looking like Erika Jayne invaded her soul to provide some backup – Erika tells David with a shrug that that’s what happens when you’re married to a strong woman and I almost high-fived my TV screen and then rolled across my living room floor wearing something mesh and see-through in an effort to show her some solidarity.
Next we join Kyle, who is basically hoping to replicate what sounds like a nightmare of a childhood, as she tries to turn her own child into an actress. She and Portia arrive at an acting coach’s studio and soon Portia is repeating, “red leather, yellow leather” over and over again in the same way other children are playing red light, green light, 123. Portia is the first of Kyle’s children who has expressed an interest in becoming an actress and Kyle is all but turning blue as she tries to convince us that this is Portia’s choice completely and that it has nothing to do with all the times she made wishes upon stars after blowing the fuzz off a meadow of dandelions while throwing salt over her shoulder and leaping over cracks in the sidewalk that her kid would become a star.
I’m also just going to throw this out: I think Porsche is very cute. I think kids in general are kind of nice. But I have zero desire to watch a seven-year-old engage in an improv session during a primetime show. I feel like I’m at somebody’s house and their kids come running into the dining room after appetizers are served to tell us that they want to perform a show for us and, as everyone else coos about how sweet the entire thing is, I am racking my brain trying to figure out how I can fake my own death at that table using only a teaspoon and a wine glass as a weapon and how to do the whole thing quickly so I don’t have to plaster a smile on my face when I hear that this is just an intermission and there’s more coming.
One thing I do find rather interesting is that Kyle says she had a very good experience being a child actress but she knows that such a thing is not the case for everyone. For example, her sister Kim’s experience was quite a bit different than hers and she believes Kim probably felt more pressure to bring home money for the family. But she also says that she doesn’t think that Kim’s addiction issues have anything to do with her child actress past, that people are simply born the way that they are born, and I have to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an adult so unwilling to look at what was a clearly flawed upbringing and admit that her parents seriously f*cked up somewhere along the way. By no means am I suggesting that Kyle should feel active resentment for her dead mother now, but maybe she should at least recognize the role all of those aspects of her childhood played in making her and her sisters the adults they are today. I haven’t done a great deal of reading on the subject, but even I know that Kyle and Kim’s mother, Big Kathy, was reportedly ruthless, consumed with money, and taught her children that fame and marrying into wealth were the highest achievements one could attain in life and well, maybe those lessons worked out okay for Kyle, but at least she should recognize that it was all, at best, some questionable child rearing advice.
Back at Yolanda’s, her health advocate is preparing vitamin packets for the days when she’s going to be away in Canada with David. Yolanda is excited to go away and just be with her husband so they can reconnect their souls and do some swimming. And while those pills look huge, swallowing them is no problem for Yolanda. If she had to, she would subsist on bark.
As for Lisa Rinna, she’s at her own house fighting with technology. It appears that she’s using FaceTime for the first time ever to take a call from her husband, a man she insists on calling by his entire name. They are all in Canada without her because she had to stay behind for a while to appear on QVC to sell a line of clothing I never knew she had. Lisa wants to be on vacation too, but she’s a hustler at heart and she’s trying to continue to earn a living and she wants to continue to appear relevant and she’s so blatantly honest about her motivations that I’ve almost forgotten what her lips look like at this point. I actually really like her.
And still 40 minutes or so have gone by and nothing has really happened. Eileen and Vince kind of fought but didn’t. Yolanda was able to happily adore the man she’s no longer married to, which is sad even though the guy is a d*ck. Kyle’s kid might be an actress. Ken finally got a mini horse…and that’s pretty much it. But things start improving a bit when we join Yolanda and David on vacation. They are being filmed by home video camera (By whom? Anyone else wonder that?) while they recline on a gorgeous yacht. It’s all going swimmingly until David asks Yolanda if she’d like to go for a walk and she answers, “I can’t, I can’t,” and then she tells him almost bashfully that he asks her that every day and she always has to say no. His response to her vulnerability is, “It gets hilarious,” and I don’t think I’ve ever hated this assh*le more.