Happy Thanksgiving Week, fellow RHOBH watchers! Are you thankful for the crucial addition of MORE KIM on this week’s episode? I certainly am. Will you be serving her gigantic chicken salad this Thursday, in lieu of turkey? Of course you will not! There is simply not enough mayo in the world.
This week’s episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills began with a scene in which Kim “Jerri Blank meets Baby Jane” Richards obsessively stirred a huge chicken salad while her youngest daughter, Kimberly, got ready to go to prom with somebody who looks related to Kroy from RHOA. The editors were as happy to dwell on Kim’s return as we were to watch it; there were those extra-pregnant pauses around batshit things Kim the Elder said; a long, lingering look at Kimberly Jr. getting her eye makeup done while Kim Senior tossed pounds of walnuts with poultry in the background; and the devastatingly sad shot of Kim clearing the gargantuan silver bowl of untouched chicken salad moments after her own bird had flown the proverbial coop. Am I focusing too much on the chicken salad? I am not. I want that chicken salad to have its own introductory shot in the next episode’s opening credits. The bowl can turn toward the camera with attitude and say something like, “I may be chicken, but I’m never afraid to say what I think.”
After that, we had the first of what would be many scenes with Malibu’s finest lying butler. You see, in California, if you are a British person able to call perimenopausal rich women “young” and “very gorgeous” with a straight face, you are fit to buttle. And it looks like the market is good, since there’s only this one chap — I’ll call him Dr. Belvedere, since it seems like he’s been at it for long enough to warrant at least a Bill Cosby degree — and he’s been running a monopoly out there, apparently sucking up all the jobs like it was medium-strength Darjeeling.
Yolanda was planning a dinner party, so she paged Dr. Belvedere and as soon as he had finished a few pages in his diary concerning his unsavory thoughts about young master Wesley and a tray of puff pastry with goat cheese, he came over to discuss some of the foods Yolanda planned to serve to dinner party guests in her 12,000 square foot home. “Oh, good idea, madam!” bleated Dr. B, and “How many square feet is your home again? You haven’t said as such for a few moments.” “Boy are you young and beautiful.” “Truly, not at all aged and creepy!” He also remarked that some of the single women in attendance would likely want to get married after they saw Young Yolanda and her creepy husband, David Foster, embody the very institution of marriage in front of their youthful and not at all cataracted eyes. That not only made a ton of sense, it didn’t even take into consideration the legitimate point about how much practice Foster has had with marriage, considering all of the wives he’s burned through in the past ten years alone.
After a whimsical scene in which Kyle taught her daughter how to drive, relaying in the process a truly stupid and disturbing story about the time she left “Aunt Kim’s” Ferrari running on the street because a bee had invaded her personal space during her “Coolio Impersonation Private Time,” we had a mandatory check-in with the Lisa/Adrienne freeze-out situation. Lisa had come over to Kyle’s to steal her dog biscuits (?) and joke about the time she led a llama through the place, and Kyle wanted to tell Lisa how disappointed she was that Lisa hadn’t confronted Adrienne at Portia’s birthday party. Lisa said she wasn’t going to talk to Adrienne until she got an apology for the accusation that Lisa had sold stories about her to the tabloids, and we were treated to plenty of flashbacks in this scene, because nothing really happened in it.
Then, we got to watch Yolanda talk to the camera about how much she loves to be a hostess, and how she should have been Martha Stewart’s daughter. Somewhere, Alexis Stewart was like “It’s your funeral, bitch.” Otherwise, Yolanda bragged about getting flowers flown in from Holland (what’s global warming?) and complained about having too many lemons in her yard. As a side note, I hope models watch these shows and know that they, too, one day can have fulfilling, after-their-prime careers as supervisors of watermelon salad construction, picker-outer of rose petals, delegator of candle-lighting times, and blower of ancient music producers who totally give me the creeps. It gets better!
Across town, a limo picked up Kim Richards, who teetered to the curb hilariously. Adrienne and Paul traveled with her to Yolanda’s place, and in the process, the Malooves used poor demented Kim as a sounding board for their problems with Lisa, whom they were about to see at the dinner party. Kim just sat there like “Uhhhh … Virgo … Relationships … ” clutching her tiny bottle of water, and Adrienne and Paul went off about how Lisa actually owes THEM an apology, a ridiculous notion that Paul had the poor judgment to expound upon in his to-camera testimonial. While I had respected Paul earlier for rolling his eyes when Kim said the reason she hit it off with Yolanda had to do with her being a Capricorn, here he truly lost me. Paul actually said with a straight face that Lisa owed his wife an apology because she made fun of Adrienne’s “incredibly beautiful shoes,” and, later, called their dog Jackpot, “Crack Pot.” This is a thing a real adult man who’s paid to take scalpel to human flesh daily said out loud, knowing cameras were running and pointed at him. Oh, Paul.
Then, we were at Yolanda and David Foster’s sprawling home, where water runs from infinity pools instead of taps. Yolanda was talking to Chris Botti, “the most famous trumpet player in the world” and somebody who prays to God every morning that he be more like Sting. Yolanda said that she’d worked so hard to design her house, she had “killed her brain” in the process. R.I.P. Yolanda’s brain! While Chris Botti thought about Katie Couric naked to keep the grin on his face, Yolanda talked about how unreliable contractors are. For example, she said to Chris Botti, sometimes construction guys would tell her that they would be there at 8 a.m. Monday, and then they wouldn’t show up, and that would cause her to experience “disappointment in humankind.” Cool story, Yolanda! Way to know what words mean.
Taylor, Kyle, and Mauricio pulled up, and Taylor was already acting blousily. Soon she would be drunk, but somehow still less awful than Yolanda’s husband. I’m not defending Shana (Defending Shana, Monday on Lifetime), but I do feel confident about taking her side in the Foster Wars that came a bit later, because Mr. Yolanda sucks such a big weenie.
But first we toured Yolanda’s insane refrigerator, and Kyle made a point of saying that she’d recognized the butler from Camille’s house. I also wonder if she had to say that out loud to make sure that she wasn’t the only person who could see him, and therefore he wasn’t a ghost. Later, Kyle and Lisa played “Is the butler stalking us?”/ “Let’s acknowledge the help,” and it was a lot of fun.
Finally, Adrienne and Paul arrived, and Lisa blanked them. That rubbed Paul the wrong way, even though I have a hard time believing that he wouldn’t have done the same thing. And Yolanda mentioned that she seated Chris Botti next to Taylor in hopes of setting her up — a horrifying notion.
Then, David Foster — who, if you’ll remember, hit Ben Vereen with his car — graced us all with his presence; hair, dumb face, older man jeans and all. He asked Kim and Kyle if they were related, and forgot Taylor’s name, even though she had been good friends with one of his 75 ex-wives — the one who used to be married to Bruce Jenner, because bitch knows how to pick ‘em. And in Foster’s testimonial, he voiced his disgust at women who can neither keep a good home nor entertain a dinner party without being “Frou-frou.” Then, David Foster, who is behind the treacly, pompous, overwrought, baroque, and dog shitty music of Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, and Josh Groban actually said, “I hate frou-frou.”
And at the dinner table, while Chris Botti bragged about getting a ton of Botox all over his weird blond face, Taylor got tipsy on white wine and said, over and over, how Brandi had told Yolanda that one time how she’d slept with every man in Beverly Hills. Yawnzoes. Move on, Ducklips. You can’t slut-shame a hot slut. Also, where was Brandi this episode? I missed her.
After that, Foster skeevily toasted his “bride” by using the word “ever” a thousand times, and then sat down at the piano he keeps at a perpendicular angle to his dinner table and tickled his ivories while a man from American Idol in a tiny hat sang along on cue, after being prompted, line after line, by Foster. It was creepy, like Foster was a circus person, and the man in the tiny hat was a monkey, scared of the whip. Kyle was moved by that song because it was from a John Travolta movie her mom liked, and David took that as a cue to go back over to the piano and tell a really long story about Boz Scaggs.
Then, Yolanda threatened, every party that she and David Foster throws ends with a jam session around the piano. Foster dropped Oprah and Kenny G’s names in his testimonial as victims to the aforementioned ritual, and then everybody was around the piano and Kyle said, “Let’s sing ‘Amazing Grace’!” And that was a bad idea, but it wasn’t embarrassing YET. A few of the Housewives began to sing, and they sounded pretty bad. And David Foster was like “Shut up, you cows I’ve never been married to, as far as I can remember.” And Taylor was like “Excuse me?” and I was on her side because that guy is a total pig. Then, on piggy’s cue, the American Idol in the tiny hat began to approximate what sounded to his own tiny ears like soulful belting. And a woman of color who’d entered toward the end of the meal joined him, and then, sure enough, Botti broke out his brass horn and tooted on it, all while the room swelled with the most awkward rendition of “Amazing Grace” I’ve heard since Howard Stern used it as a criterion on his show in a round of “Guess the Black Person.” It was a nightmare. I had to watch it with a cringe in my face and a clench in my jaw, through my fingers like it was a horror movie. I loved it.
After “Amazing Grace,” Foster and the Gang likely barreled through a host of other songs that were in the public domain and therefore fit for air, from “Camptown Races” to “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Those were affordable, you see. But before the dinner party ended, as all dinner parties do, with a traditional conga line set to “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Botti, Foster, Tiny Hat, and Woman of Color couldn’t resist jamming the fuck OUT to “Danny Boy.” And that song bummed out Taylor, because I guess her husband shot himself while he was watching Miller’s Crossing? Not my favorite Coen Brothers either, but still.
Yolanda was horrified that her party guests weren’t staring, bobbing, weaving, and nodding in reverent silence while her husband made everybody uncomfortable by acting as the ringleader to the somehow whitest — even with a person of color involved — jamboree I’ve ever borne witness to. And she expressed the concern that perhaps the ladies who had the nerve to chatter while her awful husband ran his womanly hands up and down the keys of a pee-yanny, hadn’t “gotten the memo” about shutting their earthworm holes while cheesy people made cheesy sounds in a 12,000-square-foot private home. Yolanda clearly thinks her husband is not a cretin. I am sure that will work out well for her.
Finally, the great Adrienne-Lisa confrontation we were taught to expect this week was merely alluded to, annoyingly. We got to watch Lisa put hot rollers into her hair and discuss the upcoming showdown with Ken, who seemed more lucid than usual. And then, Lisa and Adrienne sat down in an empty restaurant under flattering lighting, and that’s when the show abruptly ended.
Fine by me — by then I was already toot-toot-tooting away at the head of the two-man conga line comprised of my cat and me. As his paws cinched my waist with the tenacity of somebody very scared, we luxuriously snaked around my apartment in repetitive figure eights, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in two-part harmony, as a ghost butler, nude from the waist down, appeared, from the corner of my eye, and lowered his trousers as though he were about to do something terrible to the watermelon salad.
Did I miss anything good? Please tell me in the comments below. Until next week, fair friends! And Happy Turkey Day.