We’re ba-ack! Well, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are back, anyway, and that means that we’re back to recapping the show after taking a knee for a little bit. We missed last week while we were still getting back up and running after the hurricane, but fret not, my cable is back in (mostly) good working order and I’m back from my extended Housewives hiatus. I mean, it’s Beverly Hills – I just couldn’t resist the drama.
We started with Kyle, who was out shopping with Adrienne to advise her on birthday presents for Portia, because apparently in Beverly Hills, it’s not awkward to supervise your friends while they spend money on your kid. All of these little shopping dates are really just setups to do some kind of expository work for the show that won’t fit in anywhere else, though, so naturally Kyle brought up Lisa and why, exactly, she and Adrienne no longer get along.
They’re still fighting over the nastiness at the last reunion, and although Adrienne seems to feel like she’s owed an apology by immature, obstinate Lisa, I can’t exactly remember anything particularly nasty that Lisa did. Just because two people got in an argument doesn’t mean the two people are equally at fault or equally wrong, but that’s the sort of complex idea that has no place in the heads of reality show stars. What I doremember from the reunion, though, is plenty of transparent, second-rate scheming on Adrienne’s part. She really should have hired a consultant or coach or something before she tried to match wits with Lisa.
We then followed Kyle to Taylor’s house, where she was helping to suss out the subtle differences between Mexican food and Spanish food before Taylor served one or the other (we’re not quite sure which) to Kyle, Mauricio, Adrienne and Paul. Taylor claimed to have cooked the feast, but it all came out of giant catering dishes, so maybe she “cooked” it insomuch as she lit the little butane warmers. All by herself! That’s applying heat to food, which might actually fit the loosest of definitions of cooking, which is really all that’s required to be considered the truth on Real Housewives.
Everyone then sat down to eat, and all I heard was Taylor asking people to run a race before my Time Warner Cable service started being extra, EXTRA Time Warner on me and freezing every thirty seconds. The next thing I knew, Adrienne was leading Paul into what can perhaps best be described as a drag queen supply store. I missed all of the shoe buying experience except for the giant Gwar moonboots dunked in silver glitter, which I guess is a manly shoe relative to the other probable options. When Mario saw them later, he complained that they weren’t really heels, which would be cheating. I guess he can take that up with the High Heels Race Standards and Practices Board.
Our next stop was to visit newbie housewife Yolanda, who is clearly used to being seen and not heard and should probably stay that way, at least based on her repeated, tasteless comments about wanting to prevent her teen-model daughter from looking Chinese at a photo shoot. Yolanda’s daughter is gorgeous, naturally, which was precisely Yolanda’s intention since her birth. Modeling has an expiration date for every woman, and mama made no bones about wanting to vicariously extend her career through her offspring by providing “advice” and “guidance” and nosing her way into wardrobe meetings. For her daughter’s part, she seemed to think that her mother was as annoying as any 17-year-old girl would, but this difference was that Yolanda’s daughter was right. Most people’s mom’s aren’t actually that tiresome.
Over at Kyle’s house, preparations for the series’ latest over-the-top child birthday party were underway. Kyle was irritated that the party vendors had not found actual unicorns to bring to her house, at times seeming apparently unaware that unicorns aren’t, and even when they are (like for the sake of a little girl’s birthday party), they’re actually just horses with horns strapped to their heads. The horse wrangler seemed to be tuning out the entire thing as best he could while still managing to remain an active participant in the conversation, probably because Kyle was the third entitled housewife to yell at him over the inherent fictitiousness of unicorns that week.
Elsewhere, Mario and Paul were running down what appeared to be some sort of suburban side street in cheap shoes in some vague attempt to help Taylor end domestic violence and gain more camera time. Unfortunately, that meant that they missed seeing Lisa lead a llama through the middle of Kyle’s house while Kyle scurried behind them, protesting the entire way. Once the llama had been turned over to the professionals, Kyle sat Lisa down to try and convince her to let her get involved in the Lisa-Adrienne drama, and naturally, Lisa didn’t want to have any of it. There’d be a lot less drama if all the Housewives refused to let camera-seeking costars hold amateur Camp David talks out by the pool.
Lisa then exited the party (not atop the llama, much to my eternal disappointment), at which point everybody else that we’ve ever seen on this entire show came out of the woodwork. Camille, Dana-Pam, Yolanda’s driver with a giant teddy bear that was meant to distract everyone from the fact that she didn’t bother to show up. Brandi also arrived, despite the fact that literally everyone else at the party wants to yank her extensions out. Things were so bad that Kyle, who didn’t even intend to invite Brandi to the party in the first place, was the one giving her a pep talk and encouraging her to stay and mingle and try to pretend that there wouldn’t be any weave-snatching. Instead, Brandi bolted and everyone gathered around to question Kim about the whereabouts of her ex-boyfriend. (Whereabouts: Unknown.)
After some drama over horse poop, we got on to the actual bullshit – Taylor sat around telling everyone a second-hand story about how Brandi joked to Yolanda that she had slept with every guy in Beverly Hills. Anyone who halfway paid attention to the show last season would understand that Brandi’s sense of humor is just kind of off-color and dirty, and she tends to be particularly self-effacing about her own sexual exploits. Why Taylor thinks that retelling a joke that Brandi told about herself constitutes any sort of triumph is anyone’s guess, but my personal theory is that Taylor is so desperate to feel superior over anyone, given all that we know about her grifting, that she’ll take any opportunity she gets. Brandi is probably the easiest target, considering that most of the other women don’t like her and her flaws are pretty apparent, but Taylor failed to remember that it’s pretty hard to make fun of someone effectively when they’ve already made the joke about themselves.
