There was only one point in last night’s episode when two Real Sorority Sisters of Delta Delta Delta (Can I Help-Ya Help-Ya Help-Ya) were in the same room at the same time. That is when Kim Richards, wearing a one-shouldered muumuu from the Mrs. Roper for Sears collection, got into Brandi Glanville’s bed to watch an episode of Eddie & LeAnne: I Know That My Heart Will Go On: An E! Original Production by Ryan Seacrest. Otherwise, everyone was off on their own. Yes, everyone was sending their children away to college.
This season has been doing that a lot: scattering our women to the four winds so we don’t get to see them interact. It was sort of like the season of The Walking Dead after the prison blew up and they were all wandering around the Georgia wilderness trying to find each other. That is just what this season of the Real Housewives is, except that these women do not grapple with complex emotions or questions of morality. Real Housewives is exactly like The Walking Dead if The Walking Dead focused entirely on the monsters.
Kyle and the whole family took her second daughter Stevia to the University of Arizona so that she could get a degree studying man’s relationship to animals. Kyle cried a lot, even though her daughter is just going to school like a state away. Both Kyle and her husband Mmmm aren’t worried that their daughter won’t do well; they know she’ll do well, they’re just worried that she won’t be at home enough. Seriously? Is this a concern of any parent, ever? I’m not saying parents don’t feel it or want their children around, but don’t they realize that at some point their children have to leave and become their own people and learn what it’s like to live in the real world? No, not the MTV show, but the actual real world, where there are no cameras, and representatives from the university don’t come to meet you and your camera crew your first day on campus.
The only interesting thing about this was how Kyle kept talking about how she didn’t go to college. (In fact, I don’t think any of these women went to college, which, well, whatever.) Kyle said twice that she really wanted to become a lawyer. Ha. Can you imagine Kyle Richards, Esq.? I can only picture it as an ’80s TV show where she has a Lucite-and-chrome desk on which she perches while wearing silk prints with huge shoulder pads and bows somewhere around the neck region. Actually, I would pay a ton of money for Kyle and Kim to remake Partners in Crime with Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter. Kyle thinks she would have made a great lawyer. I think she wouldn’t have had much work because she would only accept cases that were also somehow about her.
Yolanda went to New York to see Bella off to Parsons, which felt like a repeat because she did the same exact thing last year when Gigi went to NYU. It’s like Yolanda is raising another generation of Kim and Kyle, doing slightly different things, but totally the same. One blonde, one brunette, two tons of trouble. Maybe Gigi and Bella should remake Partners in Crime.
Yolanda hired an interior designer to remake an apartment just for the girls, and then she walked around the sidewalks of the city wearing skintight jeans and a varsity jacket and looking so chic that all the fashion gays at Parsons fainted simultaneously, and when they all woke back up, they were like, “Girl, what happened? Either I huffed too many poppers again or there was a disturbance in the Fierce!â€
Yolanda talked a lot about Bella’s DUI and how she had to forgive her for her crime and hope that she taught her daughter right from wrong. I don’t know. I couldn’t really pay attention. I was still hung up on the fact that there was a designer for what is essentially a girl’s dorm room. Do you know who designed my dorm room? The 13 half-eaten boxes of General Tso’s chicken that littered the floor next to my roommate’s bed that would always get in my way when I was trying to borrow his bong. That’s who designed my dorm room: Moldy General Tso.
Eileen, the leftover points on your meal plan that don’t roll over to next semester, saw her two stepsons go off to college. They are the same age as most Abercrombie models, so I don’t feel that bad when I sit on my couch at home and wonder what they look like wearing basketball shorts and no underwear, but that is the only thing that made these scenes interesting. (Speaking of which, a lot of you guys think I don’t like Eileen. That is not true. I think she is a fine, nice, completely wonderful person; she just feels a little bit bland and replaceable. She’s like the fourth-best apple pie you ever had.)
Lisa’s kids are all grown and out of the house, but she’s having some drama with her adopted son Max because he is undermotivated. He decided he didn’t want to go to college, so Lisa is forcing him to wash dishes in her restaurant. I think this is the best education that any of these kids are getting. Lisa is right: Max will really see what it’s like to work in a restaurant, how the things are built from the ground up, so that if and when he takes over the restaurants, he’ll know what goes into every job, what it takes to do them well, and how they all interact. That experience is priceless, and if it can teach him the value of hard work, then let’s hear it for Max. Get him a freakin’ cap and gown and call him the smartest man on Earth.
However, Max won’t smog-test his car. Now, I have never lived in Los Angeles, I have never lived in California, I have only dreamed desert dreams where the cactus roots wrap around me when I sleep and call out to shamans long dead, but what is the big damn deal about having your car smog-tested? He’s driving some sort of BMW. I assume it was produced since the Kyoto Protocol; it’s not like it is belching out huge plumes of poison. It’s not Brandi Glanville. ZING!
Speaking of Brandi, she and Eddie might go back to court. She did that, and she hung out with Kim. That’s all she did. At least she managed to not look like too much of a jerk.
What about Lisar? Her children are too young for college, what could she possibly do? Well, she could make the first movie by Penn Jillette, The Best a Man Can Get. Oh, that, and she can run away from a bee. That’s all she had to do.
But she didn’t know that bee was a messenger. That bee had flown over the hills and the crags and the dusty expanses and the heat-suffering asphalt of the highways. That bee made a long journey from Arizona, where it was born. That bee was hanging out in the parking lot of the Loewes Villa and Suits in Arizona, where it watched Kyle say good-bye to Stevia, crying and crying — not with anxiety about her child, not with fear that her spawn would not succeed. No, Kyle was crying because she had gotten old, because her daughter was doing something she didn’t do, and would be wiser than her. She was crying because everything was passing on, and because things were happening without her. Pretty soon, her children would be marrying and having children of their own, and her opinions, her orders, her tears and sobs and petty cackles, would be nothing but empty noise that annoys. That bee came back to California with that message for Lisar. It wanted to tell her that is what was coming for her when her children were old enough. That bee couldn’t talk, it could only sting. That bee could only warn Lisar with pain.