First, I’d like to give a big thank you to Brian Moylan for covering Curse Gate last week, and for doing such a fabulous job of it. Second, Carlton is officially your emotionally disturbed friend from fourth grade who told you to how great you looked in L.A. Gear sneakers one day, only to declare L.A. Gears the ugliest of ugly shoes the next day, Melissa Gorton. I cannot keep up with the come-here-now-go-away attitude she serves up each week, and even though the bile is rising in my throat as I type this, I … just this week …
I’m on Kyle’s side this time.
WHAT SORCERY IS THIS? WHAT DARK CURSE FLOWS THROUGH MY VEINS LIKE HOT KNIVES? Kyle was right, Carlton is an asshole, and I will never forgive her for making me side with Kyle.
I spent most of this week in a Cumberbatchian haze since discovering that he has done a few audiobooks, and the only thing that snapped me out of my aural reverie was hearing Lisa give a grown man instructions on how to run a vacuum. It’s Ken’s birthday, so her micromanagerial button was set to PUNISH. Kevin “She She She!†Lee, who sleeps in a coffin full of milk and had all of his bones replaced with Slinkys, is planning the party, which is somehow a joint extravaganza with Maurice even though his birthday was a month ago. Everyone on this show should be slathering their skulls directly with sunscreen the way you would a toddler to prevent things like basic math from leaking out of their head under the force of the sun’s powerful rays. Kyle shows up to help plan, and her only contribution is that she wants it to be a classy, black-tie affair to counter the effects of Carlton’s orgiastic, genital-wart-infused, chlorinated daytime sex dungeon party from last week. Lisa agrees to have two servers and two bartenders from SURRRRrrrrrrrrrr handle the drinks and food, and then they cackled over who was and was not invited to the tiny affair. Yolanda will be going to her stepdaughter’s wedding instead of a party celebrating Ken’s ability to balance his full weight on both hips for another solid year, and both women bitched mightily about their lack of an invite, even though they can barely drag their bones through Yolanda’s lemon grove when invited and have probably never met this girl. Not everything is about you!
Brandi, who may have found Chica this week, shot the cover of her book with a photographer that looked like Where’s Waldo? on a bender, but the highlight of the day was meeting her editor, Nancy, a thick-heeled hellion in ruffled tartan plaid carrying a dog with PTSD. Nancy hated everything about the photo shoot and let Waldo know it, from the ridiculous cleaning gloves and rolling pin they slapped in Brandi’s hands to the ugly black dress they wanted to fix in post. Nancy was having none of this patriarchal bullshit, and even though Brandi looks constipated and confused on the cover of her book, she isn’t holding an iron or rubbing the skid marks out of a pair of boxers, so high five, Nancy! I guarantee that for her next book, Brandi will be on the cover revving a chainsaw and riding a tiger — Nancy does not fuck around.
Carlton met Joyce for lunch to really drive home how much they dislike each other, only this time, Carlton got to yell at Joyce for insinuating she would ever place a curse on children. Everyone knows Carlton practices white magic (how dare she — and during Black History Month!), which only affects the sphincter. They ate chicken crepes, which sounds like a gastronomic abomination, and we learned that Joyce knows neither what flippant means nor how to pronounce it.
Next, a weirdly comparative montage of Yolanda and Gigi packing for college, and Kim and Kimberley getting matching butterfly tattoos for college. I desperately want to cap on Clan Richards for living in Mariah Carey’s mind-palace, but it was sort of nice the way they supported each other through the pain, which is nothing if not familiar. It’s sweet that Kim wants to be a butterfly when she dies so she can always fly over her children, but I feel like she’s already living that version of her afterlife every time she stares at something for more than ten seconds. Come back to us, Kimmy! Yolanda and Gigi, who live inside the gleaming whiteness of a Mr. Clean ad, packed and cried just long enough for us to believe they’re actually going to pack that room themselves, and then Yolanda revealed that she would be turning Gigi’s room into a creepy shrine once her daughter leaves. I would support a Kickstarter fund for the psychological care of any child who appears in the Housewives franchise without hesitation.
Kevin showed up to Lisa’s house dressed as Beetlejuice, and Kyle stood around while he and Lisa planned the entire party. This party will have everything — gray curtains, red roses, crystals, and something called water dancers. Kyle understood nothing, and just wandered around slack-jawed after they shot down her idea of hiring a psychic. The show must go on!
Do you think we’re going to see a 12 Years a Slave—style book from Lisa and Ken’s housekeeper Rocio in a few years? I feel like she was definitely kidnapped. While they were getting ready for the party, Lisa made Rocio grab two hair barrettes that were in a drawer six inches away, and Ken made her dress Jiggy before deeply insulting her by saying, “Lisa decides what I wear, I decide what Jiggy wears, and Jiggy decides what Rocio wears.†I would let it go as a joke if it weren’t for every other disgusting time I saw them interact with her, or the way they make her wear those paper slippers over her shoes. Rocio is the hardest-working woman in show business, and someone should seriously contact emergency services on her behalf.
The party is awful from the moment it starts. Newly engaged SURRRRRrrrrrrrrrr server Scheana breaks her own wrist trying to show off her ring, Carlton is officially allergic to Kyle, Brandi is doing a vodka-soda cleanse and shows up with J.R., her real-estate agent-cum-fuck buddy, and Kyle showed up wild-eyed and without a bra. It only got worse when Lisa tried to make Brandi congratulate Scheana on her engagement, and the water dancers ended up being wayward beachgoers with no rhythm. Ken OD’d on his blood-pressure medication and fumbled through a speech (“This is my buddy … it’s his birthday … I want to wish him a happy birthdayâ€), and Brandi seethed when Kyle and Lisa appeared to be friendly again. A man with a guitar serenaded Ken and Maurice with a song about their wives fucking them specifically to work in the phrase fuggedahboutit, Brandi congratulated Scheana while simultaneously telling her that marriage is a heaping pile of rat-infested NYC garbage rotting on a summer sidewalk, and Ken asked Kyle and Maurice to “do one of their Jewish dances.†Is this feeling like a frenzied Cirque du Soleil at your racist uncle’s house yet? Because that’s what it felt like watching this!
But we’re not done! After Brandi joined in the Jewish revelry by singing the Dreidel Song, Kyle interrogated her relationship with a fraught metaphor about breaking her hand and putting up walls. Brandi should have popped Kyle in her MOUF like Stassi did to Katie last week on Vanderpump Rules, but instead she acquiesced and let Kyle have her philosophical moment. Pandora gave her dad a painting of his one true love, Jiggy, everyone talked about three-quarters of a nipple that Lisa joked about forever ago, and then BLAM! Kyle referred to Carlton as “her†instead of using her name, and all hell broke loose.
The basic gist of this fight was that Carlton felt disrespected, and Kyle couldn’t understand what she had ever done to hurt Carlton. Kyle gave her a necklace! But she also said Carlton’s bathroom was gross. Kyle was enthusiastic to compliment Carlton’s new tattoo, even though it looks like the pentagram your eigth-grade boyfriend carved into his blue-canvas Trapper Keeper! But she mistakenly asked if it was a Jewish star. Basically, Carlton is finding reasons to dislike Kyle, up to and including hating her for something she said in a dream. Not even Stevie Nicks holds grudges like that, and I’m pretty sure she lives full-time on the astral plane. There are so many reasons to dislike Kyle Richards — why struggle to invent new ones? As much as I hate to admit it, Kyle really delivered a great zing when she said, “ If you don’t want to be judged as a Wiccan, don’t act like a witch!†But then she immediately ruined it by calling Carlton anti-Semitic. Carlton took her ball and went home, and Brandi agreed that Carlton was just acting ridiculous. At least no one’s butthole got cursed this time.
Next week, Carl tells Kyle and Maurice they can’t come to her party, Carlton cries and tries to blame her weirdness on growing up in South Africa during the apartheid, and Brandi feels like Lisa has manipulated her, which she blabs to the Sisters Richards. See you then!