Friends,
I am writing to you with a heavy heart. I am also writing to you with a heavy backside, but that’s just because I can’t stop eating bread, hey-o.
Oh, that’s terrible. Let me start again.
Friends,
It is with a heavy heart that I announce my resignation as recapper for this season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
I am currently in Los Angeles, on week two of a time-consuming, challenging, and wonderfully fun job writing for a new television show and my hours are currently such that I cannot continue my recapping duties in the manner to which you have become accustomed, and, in fact, deeply deserve.
This is not good-bye. This is merely “so long†for now, although nobody actually says “so long†unless they are singing it and they are Carrie Underwood and it is The Sound of Music Live for some godforsaken reason. But I assure you this: While I don’t know exactly when, I WILL be back to recap and dish future Real Housewives episodes and happenings for you, because that’s who I am and that is, among other things, what I do.
Bowing out of this season in the middle of its run was a very hard decision to make, because the love and positive feedback I get from readers of my recaps is so motivating and overwhelming, I feel like a grade-A jackass abandoning, perhaps, the only people who have truly loved and understood me. But I have to divide and conquer my time and resources right now.
I am honored to have a successor as mighty, qualified, lovely, funny, and overall fantastic as my friend Danielle Henderson. She is a brilliant lady, and I ask that you embrace her with arms and legs as open as the limbs you have, metaphorically, presented to me in the past. Soon, I will be back, and we will hug and kiss and I’ll whisper “shhhh … shhhh …†in your ear until I realize my shoulder is wet. I hope to God it will be from your happy tears.
But until then, my friends, continue to follow me on Twitter and listen to my podcast to get your Soft Batch fix, and I will see you in two shakes of Aviva’s leg.
Be well, and thank you again for being the best in the world.
Julie “D.J. Soft Batch†Klausner
———-
This week served up guilt trips and drunken pole dancing. And, for the first time since the 1800s, dildos were used to calm someone down.
But first, briefly, as she stated above, our beloved Julie Klausner will be taking time to perfect her brand of world domination, so I am going to be taking care of the RHOBH recaps for the rest of this season. I feel like we’ve got a good thing going on here, and I will invoke her essence whenever I can, because I know I have big shoes to fill. I’m happy to tend to this bleached, peroxided garden with glee, but I pay full deference to the amazing and talented beauty who planted the first seed. Wait, this is getting filthy. Basically Julie is the greatest and we will all miss her terribly, but we can still listen to her podcast, buy her books, and prepare ourselves for all of the big things she has coming our way. To smooth the transition, let’s all reflect on an image of Kyle holding two dildos while getting her tweeter waxed within an inch of its life, because that shit actually happened last night.
Kim’s daughter Kim is graduating from high school, so everyone decided to celebrate with a bikini wax and some mani-pedis. When I graduated high school, my grandparents gave me $100 for gas money, I went to Friendly’s for a Fribble, and then I had to go to goddamn work the next morning, but we all celebrate in our own way. Neither Kim nor Kyle have the cognitive capacity to say the word vagina, so Kyle calls hers a tweeter and Kim calls hers a wiener. I don’t trust women who can’t say the word vagina — it’s not a mythical hell beast, it’s part of your body! — but I sort of love that Kim calls hers a wiener? If she had more of a connection to reality I would compliment her for subverting the gender paradigm but she can barely put her shoes on straight so I will just mentally high-five her for making a funny. When a very patient aesthetician explained the variety of things you could do to your wiener, like bedazzle it, tie-dye it, or drape soggy vines over it for a maritime look, Kim thought she said “diet,†and then we were treated to an uncomfortable 30 seconds of Kim explaining how hungry her wiener is because it “hasn’t been eating a lot lately†and it would eat anything. Oh, boy — how do I unsubscribe from the Missives of Hollywood’s Aging Vaginas mailing list?
Kyle was busy with her own wiener, anticipating a painful bikini wax, so when the waxer said, Hey, I’ve got something to help you ease up a bit, Kyle, like me, was probably thinking she’d be handed a Koosh ball, or a lovely lavender mist would waft through the room. Instead, the new hero of my life pulled out two dildos and told her to squeeze. I’m surprised the overachieving Kyle let this go as a joke — I fully expected her to grab them both and start doing splits on them to prove how great she is at everything. She made it through the waxing (our great national nightmare is over), Kim had her nose hair pulled out, and then Kyle smugly reflected on how great their relationship is now. I’m glad they’re getting along, I just don’t want to hear about it and give Kyle another reason to gloat about something.
Elsewhere, Carlton shows up to a pole-dancing class three sheets to the wind, wearing boy shorts that say “fuck off†across the ass. You could weave Avril Lavigne’s spindly limbs around every single Fall Out Boy and not come up with someone trying as hard to prove their badass street cred as Carlton. Her friend Tara is there to talk like a late-developing toddler, and Brandi is there to prove how well she can work a pole. Carlton humps, licks, and clinks her Fredericks of Hollywood heels on her pole while Brandi twirls around like a Sit n’ Spin until she makes herself sick. Then, in their greatly incapacitated state, they decide to go directly to Kim’s for the graduation party, with Carlton wondering why she can’t bring alcohol to the home of an alcoholic.
Kim tried so hard to micromanage the crew at her house, but it was as if everyone knew they couldn’t take this nerve-damaged problem factory seriously. Eventually a very nice white-haired man gave Kim a squeeze, and said, “Shhhh, you go sit down now, we got it, little bird.†She continued to flap around like the Chicken Lady and talk in riddles about planning the party at Coachella until her sister Kathy had to go to Buckingham Palace, and then she wound down like a robot and fell asleep in a corner.
People start showing up, including the still-drunk Carlton and increasingly sick Brandi, who found a burger truck (that I think was hired for the party?) and started chowing down. Someone sent Brandi a dick pic, and that was enough to make her sick for the rest of the evening, while Carlton did her best sideways stumble walking all over the place. Kyle showed up and gave them the gas face for sitting outside RUDELY instead of going inside DRUNKENLY, and I officially love drunk Carlton forever for barely being able to mask her contempt as she eventually made her way into the house. Joyce showed up wearing a long pink gown from the Mrs. Roper collection with a deep V that caused her double-sided tape to work overtime, and a flower crown the size of Colorado. Carlton pointed out that Joyce wore this loud outfit because she needs attention; I agree, but I also thought she looked nice. Kim made a very emotional speech, Kyle complimented Kim for being a good mom, and Kim Jr. cried when her siblings presented her with a slideshow. It was all fairly standard until Brandi ran inside to puke, and Carlton, trying to soothe her, talked to the wrong door for a solid minute. It was the funniest thing I’ve seen on this show all season. When Brandi finally emerged she decided to just leave, and she and Carlton got in a cab and sped away.
Then, Lisa bossed her housekeeper Rocio around while Rumpy Pumpy, her puppy, chewed on every hot-pink crinoline in sight. Lisa is donating her old dresses to a foster home for prom, and roped the other ladies into coming over to donate their old dresses, too, but that’s not the story here. The real thing I want to talk about, just to be sure I heard it correctly, is that Ken called Rocio privileged. Rocio picked up a dress and said she wanted one, and Ken said, you don’t need one, you’re privileged, right? He said that to the woman who scrubs his shit out of toilets? I don’t know what they’re paying her, and there is a very good chance she is making more money than twelve of us combined, but hearing her referred to as “privileged†just left a sour taste in my mouth. How out-of-touch are Lisa and Ken, on a scale of one to they couldn’t tell you the price of a rotisserie chicken if their lives depended on it?
Lisa called everyone to make sure their privileged servants were digging through their closets to find dresses to donate. Brandi was also ready to donate an earful to Joyce, promising Lisa she just had a few things she wanted to say to her and then she’d be done, causing to Lisa roll her eyes hard enough to cause a seismic shift in the tectonic plates.
Joyce filmed an ad for the Friend Movement, which seems to be a campaign that tells people how to say “fuck you.†Their whole campaign against bullying and “racial names†is someone giving the middle finger, which seems incongruous with Joyce’s holier-than-thou image. Lisa threw an entire bucket of shade on Joyce by saying, “Oh, yeah, the bully thing? I did that already,†but that didn’t stop her from scowling into the camera and giving the most complicated middle finger ever — stick your thumb out! Hoist your shoulders up! Put the middle finger behind your knee — JUST THE MIDDLE ONE, THOUGH! The Friend Movement guys shouted directions until they were practically aroused, and when she was done they ejaculated all over her middle fingers. The best part of this scene was learning that Joyce used to be called Spaghetti and Meatballs in school because her body looks like an orange on a toothpick.
Finally, all of the ladies were invited to breakfast at Lisa’s palatial estate to organize their donations. Joyce turned up first, and Lisa dragged the dresses out without even making eye contact. Kim brought what she could, but she probably had to sell her things to pay for a life-insurance policy to care for her kids after her dog kills her. Kim immediately starts in on Lisa for not going to the graduation party even though Kim’s hairdresser saw her at SURrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Lisa tried to defend herself, but finally realized she does not give a zippity shit about defending herself to Kim. There was a repetitive back and forth — “I was in Missouri!†“You were at SUR!†— before Lisa realized she had actually changed her ticket to arrive a little earlier, and probably was in L.A. at the time of the party. Oops! Am I the only one who thought Kim was wrong, wrong, wrong? Lisa and Ken were clearly out of state on business, and they both RSVP’d and sent a gift (Tiffany’s, no less!), so Kim should have backed off. But Kim being Kim, she didn’t back off, and she got her feelings hurt immediately when Ken said, “There are lots of things Kim didn’t turn up for.†Kim freaked out, ratcheting her voice up ten octaves to say, “That was uncalled for!†while Ken shrugged and moved on.
Brandi brought her wedding dress over as a donation item to drive the final nail in the Eddie Cibrian coffin, and Ken almost lost his mind having to sit across from Kim and her passive-aggressive remarks. He shuffled inside the house and tried to run away, but Lisa snatched him by the mullet and made him sit down. Joyce and Brandi ignored each other until Kyle came over with her dog, and then everyone was busy trying to make sure the dog didn’t eat Jiggy. When both of the dogs were taken away with their owners, Brandi pointedly told Joyce that she says stupid things but is not a racist, she may be a bitch but she is NOT a bully, and getting drunk on vacation does not make her an alcoholic. Joyce listened with glazed-over eyes, waiting for her chance to talk, before telling Brandi that her comment was racist but, eh, maybe Brandi wasn’t, and then tried to launch into her “I’M A BLACK PERSON†speech again. I’m not bothered that Joyce tried to defend herself, I just think she blows things way out of proportion. The two bickered back and forth until Brandi said, “I don’t like you, you don’t like me, let’s call it,†because if she were a bully she would have “knocked Joyce’s teeth out by now.†Both women pouted that they were owed an apology they did not get, and Carlton showed up right in the middle of the fracas to take Brandi’s side without having heard any of the actual fight.
Joyce went into machine-gun, rapid-fire talking mode when Kyle asked why she didn’t speak up for herself in Palm Springs and Carlton said you’re in no position to put labels like “racist†on anyone, causing Lisa to say, “The only way I get a word in edgewise is when Joyce takes a breath.†Lisa convinced Brandi to apologize, which she did by saying, “I’m sorry … but it’s rude for you to judge me … but I’m moving on.†I guess that counts as an apology for Brandi? Joyce declared herself woman enough to own her mistakes, which was her version of an apology? Joyce hugged Brandi, Brandi said “Ew!†and the non-apologies were recorded on stone tablets to be brought out and made fun of the next time these two are at each other’s throats.
What did I miss? What was your favorite part?
This week was VERY boring, but next week Joyce shoots a gun, Kyle gets kicked in her wiener, Brandi cries and resents Lisa’s mothering, and Yolanda almost kills a man by putting him in a headlock, so I CANNOT WAIT.