Perhaps I’m simply feeling nostalgic because of last week’s Real Housewives of Orange County retrospective, but last night’s episode felt like some good ol’ fashioned Housewives drama to me. They shopped for wedding dresses! They instigated fights! They revealed things about each others’ personal lives! They exposed lies! Thankfully, after the better part of a full season of television that’s supposed to be full of juicy drama, we got an episode that didn’t drag through its requisite 44 minutes of manufactured meet-ups and parties. Let’s hope that we can swing this momentum into next week, but for now, let’s have a recap.
1. Tamra and Eddie’s enormous dog is adorable. I would like it if we saw more Dogs of the Real Housewives in general, actually. Where are the pups? Bring me the pups! Maybe I’d like these women more if I saw them with their pets.
2. Heather got another acting job. The show is a show that I’ve never heard of, but it apparently stars Reba McEntire, who I loved when I was a little kid (so much so that I had a poster of her in a yellow fringe leather jacket on my bedroom wall), so J’APPROVE.
3. Lauri’s Valentino Rockstud bag in leopard. I approve of that too, even if I think it should probably be wrestled out of her clutches and given to someone who will do it justice.
4. “Even though I’ve been married before, every other wedding dress was a maternity dress.” Tamra, with a pretty solid argument for why she should go whole-hog on the dress for her third wedding if she feels like it. If regular maternity clothes are so heinous, I can’t even imagine how irritating it is to choose your wedding dress from only those that will accomodate a belly. Twice.
5. If you want to insult someone, don’t call them a “girl.”. Being a girl is not a bad thing. It’s not an insult. Not to a man, not to anyone. The experiences and behaviors of girls are not less valid or less meaningful. You know what is a bad thing? Being Slade Smiley. If he’s gossiping and saying mean things and critiquing others’ bodies, he’s not being a “girl.” He’s being an asshole. And, perhaps most importantly, he’s just being Slade. He does that stuff so often that I don’t know how we can think those behaviors are still unique to girls or women. Slade’s walking, talking proof that people of all ages and genders talk behind others’ backs and snark on women’s bodies. He shouldn’t be considered too good to do that stuff because he’s male, but because he’s an adult.
6. Taking a note from Vicki, Gretchen made some attempts to make the wedding dress excursion about herself. She didn’t agree to show up until the day before, and when she did deign to join the group, she wore her engagement ring from her dead fiance, which she hasn’t worn in years. Naturally, that caused everyone to ask if she had some news to share with the group. She did not.
7. Never question the power of a corset. Corsets are like real-life Photoshop.
8. Not to be outdone, Vicki tried to commandeer the day by starting a fight between Alexis and Gretchen. As many annoying, pot-stirring things as we’ve seen Vicki do, I was a little surprised that she’d actually try to start a fight at someone else’s wedding dress appointment. Thankfully, Alexis mostly didn’t take the bait and thanked Tamra for standing up to Gretchen instead of uninviting her. (Also, Vicki is a hater who didn’t like any of the dresses that Tamra looked objectively amazing in because she knows she wouldn’t look nearly as good and also she is not getting married. So there, Vick.)
9. In a bid to be the worst person of the day, Lauri brought up the porn star Brooks is/was banging. At first, Vicki was ok with the subject of conversation because they had officially broken up and have long had an agreement to be non-monogamous, but Lauri pushed on to mention the age and employment situation of the woman in question. She even pretended as though she hated to be spilling any of those secrets, and she made Vicki pull the information out of her slowly but surely in front of several witnesses. Lauri was yanking the wings off a fly, more or less, even though it’s hard to feel more than half a moment of empathy for Vicki. Still, if I were ever to feel it, that was the time. I mean, she bought Brooks new teeth and everything. Lauri then took great pleasure at telling the rest of the ladies the sordid story while Vicki was outside taking a phone call at dinner.
10. Heather then cheered up Vicki by telling her that Gretchen is a lying liar. Gretchen went around telling everybody that she was offered a part on the same show that Heather now has a spot on, but the people at the show didn’t know anything about that. Kind of like when Gretchen told Alexis she had been “offered” her news channel gig last season and turned it down, remember? Maybe Gretchen “turned down” this role too. You know, so Heather the professional actress could have it. How magnanimous of her.
11. “Heather was fancy-pants before, but now she’s fancy-outfit.” Lydia is adorable.
12. Lauri is offended that Vicki is calling Gretchen a liar because Vicki is also a liar. Well, I mean, they can both be liars. Vicki can be right about Gretchen and also a loathsome liar. They’re not mutually exclusive. These are not complex ideas, even by Housewives standards.
