Hey, guys! Do you agree with Andy that everyone will be hugging by the end of the reunion, or did you watch the same dour snipefest that I did? I’m fully expecting someone to get a Louboutin heel to the eye by the end of this.
First of all, everyone looked lovely. Kim strapped on her finest plum-colored bandages and finally did a side part, which looked great. Brandi, who looked very different in the face, and Carlton, considerably less tan and more stoned than ever, both opted for vibrant blue frocks to really bring out the women-writhing-behind-Warrant twin appeal they seem to be headed towards. (Brandi’s red lip was on point, though.) Lisa shocked no one in her pink lace number, Joyce looked like the Skipper version of an Oscar, Kim dressed like a court jester, and Yolanda now has a short bob, making her look like a confident, flawless Lego woman.
Does everyone hate Lisa now? It certainly seems so. The discomfort and sadness of the past few episodes carried right on over to this reunion, and everyone took turns registering their icky feelings before a prolonged and confusing conversation about Calabasas. Did Brandi accuse Lisa of living in Calabasas? Lisa never lived in Calabasas, she moved to Beverly Hills from France! Don’t the Kardashians and Justin Bieber live in Calabasas? I don’t give two shits about Calabasas after this conversation, and I hope it cracks off into the sea. Brandi paid $9.99 to accuse Lisa of being a two-faced liar since she always complained about having to drive to wherever Brandi was living in the valley, and when it didn’t work, she tried to pin the idea on Kyle. To her credit, Kyle deflected that shit like Voltron, having learned long ago that these reunion episodes are fuel for a very intense, prolonged fire.
Andy called into question the pair’s affinity for saying something cutting and then insisting it was a joke after hearing that Brandi made a joke that Ken was going to die soon and Lisa told her that all ex-wives deserve to be on their own planet.
Yo jumped in with her party message for the evening: Lisa did not acknowledge her enough when she was locked up in her house for two years battling Lyme’s disease, and she missed Gigi’s painting party. Yolanda literally cares about nothing else but proving to Lisa how shitty a friend she is for missing that painting party! Did you know that 1/5 of Yo’s brain is paralyzed? Did you know that even with depleted faculties, she spent the entire two years hunched over a master list of friends, ticking off names as each day went by, and moving people from the real-friend quadrant of her heart, where fountains flowed with gold, to the Hollywood-friend quadrant, where poison bubbled up like a noxious tar pit? Yolanda is the prototype for that girl from Revenge. She’s pissed that Lisa “dismissed her like it was nothing and then her life goes on.†This is the beginning of Lisa not being able to get a word in edgewise.
It’s time to shift into the Kim montage, and we get to relive her feeding squirrels, getting waxed, falling over, waving her hands around, and all the times she almost got killed by Kingsley, her dog, who will one day actually kill her. Which one of you is the Nicole who wrote in to ask that question? Kim has had a good time this year, her first year of sobriety on the show, and good for her. She and Kyle seem to have mended their relationship, even though Kyle is also worried Kim is going to be mauled to death. Even though Yolanda was grumpy with Kim at the start of the season, they’ve both bonded over the trauma of losing their daughters to academia, where they can no longer make ruin their self-esteem with fat jokes or traumatize them with blackout drunkenness. She might pray to garbage cans and wave around like one of those blow-up columns in front of a car dealership, but Kim is happy, healthy, and confident.
Next, we get to relive the glory of Joyce, the first Latina housewife of Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, after her beauty queen stock answer of how proud she is to represent her culture, we also get to relive the fight she had with Brandi and Lisa about hair-flipping, which is the most absurd sentence I have ever typed. Brandi snidely said, “I can out-talk you all day, but I don’t want to lose my voice.†Brandi has taken a turn for the supremely nasty, saying Joyce settled for her husband and she married him for his money, and even though I can’t stand Joyce’s whole shtick, it’s pretty great to see her sticking up for herself with her machine-gun sentences and fuck-you attitude. Brandi apologized for saying black people can’t swim, but she did it by saying “Some of my best friends are black, that’s just how we joke!†I called an emergency meeting of the black caucus, and nope! You’re not allowed to joke like that, Brandi. It’s in the bylaws now.
Joyce said something disturbing about Brandi’s tampon hanging out while she kissed her agent and we had to hear the next installment in the continuing saga of Joyce’s tight vagina, but hearing it once made me positively encephalitic so there’s no way I was going to rewind it to suss it out. It eventually devolved into grown women describing the male phallus as a pee-pee, and I had to play two levels of Candy Crush to get my head back in working order.
The Dream Team (Yo, Lisa, and Brandi) is still causing friction, but Yolanda broke it down by insisting the natural dynamics of groups make it impossible for you to be lovey-dovey with everyone. Lisa gave an icy death stare at Brandi when she said the Dream Team disbanded because she didn’t like being mothered, and Lisa is a different friend when the camera is on. We’re ALL different friends when the camera is on! Do you think I smile even once in my day-to-day life? Put a camera on me and I’m baring my teeth like I’m a wheat thresher.
Yo and Joyce had some back-and-forth about who was a better hostess, skirting the obvious issue of no one ever having a successful, relaxed party in the history of the Real Housewives franchise. Bickering over who is the better hostess is the vocal equivalent of polishing the brass while the ship capsizes — it all sucks, and you both lose.
Lisa finally apologized for the “joke†she made at the last reunion about Kyle only being friends with people so Maurice could sell their houses, and then spent an inordinate amount of time defending her Dancing With the Stars faint. Was her faint graceful? Absolutely. Does that mean it was fake? I have no idea. I’ve never fainted! I’ve also never had a bloody nose, but if I ever got one you can bet I’d run around like my brain was leaking out of my head. So Lisa might have fake-fainted to get out of her stint on Dancing With the Stars. I would have cracked my own tibia with a hammer to the steady rhythm of “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake†to get out of that show! Lisa defended herself with brain scans, inner-ear problems, blood pressure readings, and the fact that she was (laughably) “touch and go,†but the bottom line is that she was old and tired — either her body gave out or her wish to be thrown around a room like a rag doll did, and she adeptly tapped out. Lisa didn’t think it was funny that her integrity was challenged, but insists that she can still take a joke even though she’s not perfect. Yo picked up on the “not perfect†tip and went right back into her monologue about Lisa being a bad friend, already in progress.
What do you think — did Lisa bring this hatred on herself? Do you see now why it is absurd to think they will all be talking at the end of this reunion?
Next week, Kyle and Carlton butt heads like rams and Brandi tries to cry around her fake lashes and pinched-up nose job. ALLEGED nose job. See you then!