Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap – 2/16/16

February 17th, 2016 | No Comments | Posted in Uncategorized

Back in Beverly Hills, Erika and Tom get together with Lisa Vanderpump and Ken. Before Lisa and Ken arrive, Erika lets her husband know that she is going to throw a barbeque for all of the Housewives, but it’s going to be a Beverly Hillbillies-inspired event because Erika has already proved her class through Erika Jayne and now she’s allowed to play in the sprinklers the world of irony. When Lisa and Tom get there, Lisa is interested in getting a tour of the place. They check out the chapel and Lisa is cheeky and complimentary and then they leave and head out to a restaurant for dinner. Tom offers to give Lisa a bite of his chicken and I really like the guy. He seems intelligent and thoughtful and he clearly adores his wife and I hope this show doesn’t destroy him – or at least that was my thought until Erika interrupted him and he all but told her to shut her mouth and just sit there and look pretty. It was a moment and a manner so unexpected that I felt a thud in my stomach and I think we have just seen the signs of where Erika’s storyline will be taking us next season.

And now we’re back again with Kyle and the only thing that makes it even more distressing is that she’s having lunch with Adrienne and Adrienne’s new eyes that reside somewhere in the middle of her forehead. Adrienne almost immediately brings up Kim and Kyle is more than able to discuss things with her, probably because Adrienne pretended to like Kim and Kyle knows she won’t hear anything negative. I can understand that the only thoughts she wants to have as she rebuilds a relationship with a close family member are positive ones. What I refuse to understand is that she compounds her problems by being on this show and deals with people who annoy her by threatening to reveal things that she heavily alludes to but doesn’t say because her mother once taught her to never reveal full threats in public because then the extortion part of the plan might not work.

Over at Lisa Rinna’s house, something profound is going down. She has found some poems her sister wrote before dying of addiction and she wants to share those writings with her daughters and speak with them openly and honestly. I could only commend her more if she had done it off camera.

On the day of Erika’s barbeque, she invites her gay village over to dress her for an afternoon in her backyard. They swathe her in a tiger-print caftan and stick a necklace that has a tooth dangling off it around her neck and send her onto her expansive grounds so she can take her proper place as the Queen of Everything. Lisa Rinna hops into the back of a limo with an S&M styled Eileen who owes her new look to having just gone shopping with Erika. I’m calling it now: Eileen is the Eve Harrington to Erika Jayne’s Margo and, by season’s end, she will have stolen that fucking catsuit and will have been elected mayor of Erika’s gay village. I can’t wait to watch it all go down.

Since it’s in their contract that they all have to pair off to get to Erika’s, Yolanda rides with Kyle and they’re both in jeans. Yolanda also wears barely-contained rage. Seems she’s still angry that Lisa Rinna mentioned Munchausen’s around her because she had her paid health advocate look up the meaning and she really doesn’t appreciate Lisa planting Munchausen seeds throughout the world where they will break through the soil like the devil’s flowers and infect her babies with their toxins. Then – through a flashback – we see one of my favorite kinds of Housewife moments in which one of the Housewives (in this case Yolanda) says something specific and cruel about another Housewife and then congratulates herself for not throwing out that incendiary information in public. Basically what happened was that Yolanda told Eileen that she was deeply disturbed when Lisa almost decapitated Kim at the table in Amsterdam and she could have used words like “deranged” to describe her – but she didn’t. It’s just like how my best friend’s mother used to call her after they’d spent a Sunday together to say, “Aren’t you proud of me that I didn’t bring up the fact that you’re single even once?”

Yolanda is playing this game all wrong. Lisa Rinna was all prepared to grovel about ever having used any word that starts with the letter M in the same sentence as the name “Yolanda,” but Yolanda has ignored Lisa’s apologies and has allowed her anger to grow and now Lisa is annoyed by all that Yolanda is insinuating. Something tells me that a major brawl might go down next to the churro stand in Erika’s backyard that Lisa Rinna will stand near so she can smell those things and pretend like she’s eating one.

The backyard is stocked with men in bathing suits and junk food served on sticks and that means that I would like to go to there right now. Kathryn, Donny, Kyle and Yolanda arrive next and everybody hugs hello and Lisa breaks into a hot flash at just the sight of Yolanda. Lisa, Ken, and Mauricio show up in time for the carnival games and Yolanda gets out some rage by heaving beanbags at a stack of aluminum cans, which is probably the most sense one of her treatments has made in a long time. Then they all sit down together for a second but nobody says anything and Eileen looks like there’s a chance that she might explode right out of her outfit with all of the cutouts from all the pent-up frustration she feels about not exploring the core of a conflict in public.

“Is there anything we need to talk about?” Yolanda asks directly when Lisa Rinna and Eileen join her at a table. Kyle is sitting there too, her hair beginning to sparkle in the sun. Yolanda asks everyone to sit so they can all have the conversation at once and the husbands are left to have a spontaneous grown-man playdate while their wives prepare to argue in circles on a patio. Lisa Rinna begins the conversation by telling Yolanda that she should know that they all love her and Yolanda sort of smirks and busts in to shame Lisa for all the Munchausen she has put out into the universe. Apparently, Lisa Rinna doesn’t just have a following on QVC. No, Ms. Rinna is the next Deepak Chopra and her words alone are enough to change the foundations of nations and Yolanda will never forgive her for using her considerable influence against her. It doesn’t matter that Lisa apologizes another f*cking time. “Sorry doesn’t work,” Yolanda bleats, and then she puts on her glasses so she can read the inflammatory definition to the group one more time before telling Lisa again that she is labeling her unfairly, just like she once labeled Kim Richards. First, that’s a really faulty argument because Lisa was absolutely correct in her labeling of Kim Richards. Second, Yolanda doesn’t know what the f*ck she’s talking about. Lisa never said that Yolanda has Munchausen’s; she said that other people gossiped that she might. Those are two vastly different statements and I’m sorry that Yolanda has been sick for a long while, but she is being a total assh*le here and her debate skills suck and I’d love it if she’d just go lie in a cryotherapy chamber until she calms the f*ck down.

Before any freezing can take place, Erika demands to know the name of the person who first uttered the word “Munchausen” to Lisa Rinna, and being a decent person, Lisa doesn’t want to reveal that name. The person is not there to defend herself – and that’s when things get loud and her posse by the pool begins to fear that it might be hard to get blood spatter out of a Roberto Cavalli tiger-print caftan. But Eileen and her calming tone get in there before things turn into an inferno and she explains to Yolanda that things have gotten convoluted and Lisa and Yolanda finally stand up and hug one another and all is right again in the world and it’ll stay that way until next week when they all decide to start threatening one another again out of sheer boredom.

Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon.com in paperback and for your Kindle. Also be sure to check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.

Leave a Reply