There are times when I just enjoy the hell out of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Sure, these women are silly and vapid, but gosh darn it, after a few glasses of pinot grigio they can be an awful lot of fun. Then there are times like last night, when I think I’d have no qualms about personally water boarding a few of them past the point of drowning. Not all of them. But some of them? Definitely.
As we know from last week, the girls are taking a much-needed (according to them, mind you — it’s simply exhausting bossing around kitchen staff and having to sit still long enough to get a good pedicure, dahling!) vacation in Ojai, and it takes about, what, two hours before the whole trip melts down into a big puddle of crazy. Brandi has told Adrienne to shut the bleep up, Kim has left the table in tears, Yolanda can’t figure out what the hell is wrong with these women, and Lisa looks like she’d start texting someone she actually likes if it wouldn’t seem insensitive.
Brandi, hoping to maintain the fragile detente she’s established with blubbering Kim, follows her into the bathroom, whispering the kind of conspiracy theories that probably made Kim drink in the first place. “A lot of the people at the table want to see you fail,” Brandi promises, and I’m half expecting her to hand her one of those tiny vodka bottles you get in your hotel minibar “to make the hurt go away.”
It’s probably a good thing Brandi runs after Kim, though, because once she’s left the table, everyone else decides it’s time to rehash Brandi’s Inappropriate Use of the F-Word. About twenty seconds in, I’m ready to smack Kyle in the head with a serving plate. Kyle feels Brandi was inappropriate! When Lisa points out that Brandi liberally sprinkles the F-word around like Emeril and his heavily marketed bam spice, Kyle jumps all over her. How can she DEFEND her? She was INAPPROPRIATE! Shut up, Kyle, really. Lisa is defending Brandi, but, as she points out, Brandi might need the help. Sure, Brandi’s her own worst enemy, but until recently she was the new girl in the group, plus she’s definitely not as rich as the others and the unspoken jealousy over her model bod is always bubbling under the surface like the mossy witches’ brew in some Disney movie.
For a while, Kim, Brandi, Yolanda and Taylor (hey, I almost forgot she was still on the show, didn’t you?) huddle in the women’s room. I never really understand the reasoning behind hiding out in the restroom, because if you’re hiding from other women it’s not like they can’t go in there, too. Plus, it doesn’t usually smell that great and there’s always a poor stranger in there trying to pee. Eventually Lisa ducks in to tell Brandi she needs to suck it up and apologize for yelling at Adrienne, and though she doesn’t say it, she tries to hint that an uprising is in the works at the table — and if she doesn’t grovel a little, the girls will conspire to break a bottle over her head and strangle her with her thong underwear.
Finally, Brandi sits down, apologizes gruffly for using the F-word (but not for telling Adrienne to shut it) and a bitter silence falls over the table like so much dryer lint. So, time to change the subject, right? Brandi mentions that she just got a book deal. This good news is met with… well, I wouldn’t even call it faint praise. More like grunting. You can actually hear people chewing for a few seconds. Taylor, though, has to take deep breaths and meditate. Brandi assumes this is because Taylor can’t stand to see another woman succeed, but wait! That’s not it! Or, at least not all of it — though I’m sure that’s part of it. Taylor thinks this is all about her, you see. Remember how Brandi gave her a hard time about taking a book deal shortly after her husband committed suicide? So, this relates to Brandi’s book deal… not at all. That was about Taylor showing a lack of tact by writing a book about her abusive marriage and her dead husband seemingly moments after the coroner carted him off. Brandi didn’t care that Taylor wrote a book. Brandi was probably impressed that she wrote a book, because that implies Taylor is able to see past her enormous, inflated lips well enough to type on a keyboard.
Screaming commences, and Yolanda wants everyone to move on. “It’s like the wild, wild West!” she says in her interview, seemingly incredulous that she comes across as perfectly sane compared to some of these crazy bitches. Adrienne eventually point out that she got a book deal, too. Brandi is amazed, because she thinks Adrienne isn’t particularly smart. Maybe it’s a children’s book. Zing!
The next morning, Camille talks about “exploring Dmitri,” Brandi and Lisa accuse one another of snoring, and finally the girls all rush out for a refreshing game of badminton. Because apparently that’s what classy people do. Or, really, people who are being bossed around by reality TV show producers. I mean, c’mon, who plays badminton? Anyway, the girls pile into two ridiculous-looking designer golf carts, and Lisa tries to pass Yolanda’s cart, and Yolanda tries to pass Lisa’s cart, and Kyle squeals that this is VERY DANGEROUS and it should stop right away! This would be the episode when I realized Kyle was (and is) probably the most annoying mom at her kids’ schools, running around with hand sanitizer and holding her daughters’ hands as they go down the slide very, very slowly.
After we establish that the girls put the bad in badminton, it’s time to get naked and slather on mud. Yay. I appreciate that, while the point of this mud slathering is to open pores and hydrate skin, everyone but Kim and I think Yolanda is wearing full make-up and, in most cases, false eyelashes. It looks like the Disney princesses mud bath ride, new at Disneyland! Kim clucks that “you can’t get any closer than taking off all your clothes together and reaching up,” which probably makes sense to someone but just sounds like a gross innuendo to me. Spiritual Kim is freaking Taylor out, and I can’t blame her, even if I think Taylor is trying desperately to say things to make herself relevant to the show.
So, the fully made-up ladies slather on mud and sit around, hoping their towels don’t flip up. Adrienne does not find this relaxing, and Yolanda thinks it’s lesbian-looking (her word choice), and then a hand towel/water fight breaks out. If you’ve ever been twelve, you’d recognize this — lots of screaming and squealing and running around. Kim and Camille wisely decide to sit out the melee, probably because Kim is too emotionally fragile for heavy exertion and Camille got her fill of looking like an idiot on national television in season one.
Later, there’s dinner, which is beautiful and farm-to-table and introduced by Chad, the executive chef. Chad is probably a very important person, but he’s asked to carry little dishes from the buffet for the girls, which someone is surely going to tease him about later. Oh, and the ladies drink a bottle of 1996 Nicolas Feuillatte, which is only interesting to the gals because the bottle was designed by Gaultier. They could be served swamp water, but as long as the bottle is from a name designer, it has to taste good!
Dinner is relatively pleasant, except for Brandi asking everyone whether they had C-sections or vaginal births, which seems like a fairly gross topic to cover while people are eating. Plus, Camille used a surrogate. She never had the pleasure of having a child ripped out of her body! She can’t relate. Oh, woe is Camille. Anyway, everyone starts hitting the booze pretty hard — everyone, that is, except Kim and Yolanda. Yolanda broke her back when she had her son, so she has a chronic pain problem which requires she get shots of fetal lamb cells in Europe. Yeah, that happened. So, she can’t drink after she gets shot full of baby meat cells. I’m surprised anyone can eat or drink after this part of the conversation, but Yolanda doesn’t care, as she’s off to bed. It’s no fun hanging out with drunks. On the other hand, Kim would love to hang out with drunks, but she knows she’s just one cocktail away from some sort of horrifying bonding session with Kyle, and the thought of that should be enough to keep anyone sober. She also heads to bed. I think Camille must slip away at some point, too, because I don’t remember seeing her in the whole mess of stupid that follows.
Let’s just say there’s lots of screaming, laughing, drooling, arm wrestling, back flipping, and I see more of Taylor’s ass than I ever wanted to see. Also, Lisa apparently wears some kind of full-body Spanx which I just didn’t need to know. Also, Adrienne needs fresh underwear for some reason, and someone actually gives her some. She then proceeds to shimmy into the thong (thank God, she’s wearing a maxidress) and, as I’m watching this sober, I just want to call everyone a cab and get some sleep myself. Drunk people are exhausting.
The next morning, no one seems terribly hung over, but for all I know they could have started filming at 4 o’clock. Yolanda, of course, has already gone for a run and is looking forward to getting home to her kids. She also feels the need to tell Kyle that she finds nothing more unclassy than drunk women. I’m not sure Kyle is really the right audience for this conversation, but hey, it’s taken this long for Yolanda to realize the women on this show bring the crazy. I’m wondering how long it will take her to realize that, if she intends to stay on the show, she needs to bring the crazy, too.
Everyone packs their bags and piles into a big ass Hummer limo, most of them overflowing with warm fuzzies for the drunken vacation bonding they’ve had. Camille doesn’t seem to find it the least bit ironic that Kim pulled this vacation together to celebrate her sobriety (now that I think of it, maybe all the many champagne toasts weren’t such a grand idea), but then, I don’t think Camille was one of the girls getting hammered. The warm fuzzies dissipate quickly, though, because Kyle decides to bring up Shut the F Upgate AGAIN. Because she really wants to shove Brandi’s nose in it just a bit more. Brandi concedes that she could have said what she said differently, but she wasn’t happy with how Adrienne was behaving. Adrienne doesn’t understand what the big deal is. Finally, Brandi suggests that she and Adrienne have a conversation ALONE to sort things out. Brandi doesn’t think it will happen, and I get the impression that there is something much bigger and uglier beneath the surface between Adrienne and Brandi — Brandi talked about how Adrienne and Paul wanted her to defend them in a Twitter battle, which further convinces me that these girls are all emotionally 12 years old — which only promises more screaming next week.
I’m sure it will be fun. But really, if these girls keep flip-flop fighting back and forth, I’m going to need a vacation myself. Let’s just hope somebody remembered to bring home some Ojai mud to sling.