It looks like the Real Housewives are about to go on another trip. Do you know what that means? Volcanoes will erupt, tectonic plates will shift, tsunamis will swallow up small dinghies in coastal towns all over the world, Rosemary will give birth to her baby, and the seventh sign will finally be broken, leading us to one of Demi Moore’s underappreciated classics. Yes, it is going to be a disaster. Why do these ladies even go on the trips? That’s sort of like someone inviting to you to a picnic at Chernobyl. It sure sounds nice, but when you get home and you’re neon green and your hair is falling out in clumps, it’s not going to be so cute.
Before we get to the trip, however, we have to get to David Foster (Wallace)’s charity event. And before we can get to that, we have to get to the scavenger hunt. And before we get to that, we have to take care of a special announcement from the Real Housewives Institute. In last week’s recap, I expressed my disbelief that Lisa Vanderpump was having her 54th birthday. Lisa reached out on Twitter to let me know that she wasn’t lying and that my comments were mean-spirited. Here at the Real Housewives Institute, we try to make it a policy not to pick on the way the women look. How they dress, behave, do their hair, and other activities within their control are one thing, but they can’t be held accountable for their physical characteristics. As a result, I think that my comments about her age broke that policy, and I would like to issue Lisa a formal apology for being a little too cruel. Now can we talk about her pink pussy-bow shirt? Just kidding, it looks lovely.
Thank God she didn’t wear that on the scavenger hunt, though. Personally, I think that a scavenger hunt would be quite fun, but I also don’t think that I would want to run around in the midday sun of Beverly Hills, especially because anyone on the sidewalk in Beverly Hills ends up looking like a deranged hobo, no matter how nicely he is dressed.
For this little game, Yolanda enlisted the help of St. Camille of Grammar, who rode a paddleboard down from on high to join the mere mortals. You know she can’t pass up an opportunity to wear athletic gear in public. Also to balance out the team was some blonde lady named Lynn. I have never seen this person before in my life. Was Faye Resnick busy, or something? Did Dana Pam pass out in a plate of half-eaten nachos again and miss the call? Was Joyce, a lone sneaker dangling from an electric wire, too busy burnishing her tiaras? Was Adrienne, Queen of the Maloofs, a race of mole people that live under the mountain, away on official state business? Was Taylor dead? I mean, what could all of these other people have been doing that they had to get Lynn, some very-nice-seaming but totally inconsequential lady, to be on the show? I mean, she didn’t even say one word or do anything. They might as well have put a Dream Team shirt on the blow-up doll that someone gave Brandi for her last birthday as a joke and carted that around for the afternoon.
Everyone thought the scavenger hunt was really dumb, and I don’t blame them. The best part was that it was all centered around food. What do these women care about food? Yolanda organized this activity, and when she showed up at the ice-cream shop and had to drink a milkshake, she was all, “Can you make me a shake out of an organic lemon wedge, some cardamom steam, and a little bit of cayenne pepper?†Like Yolanda was really going to drink a milkshake. Lisar was griping about how crazy it was, Kim invented some sort of knee ailment that she got when Bette Davis broke both of her legs for surprising her when she wasn’t wearing a wig, and Lisa, well, she’s just too damn fabulous for all of this.
The only good part of the whole race was when Lisa, Lisar, and Cult Jam (in this instance, Cult Jam is Yolanda Bananas Foster) jumped on a Hollywood Tours bus and some lady named Linda from Skokie lost her damn shit right in their faces. She started hyperventilating and taking pictures with a digital camera that does not have a phone attached, and she is going to tell all the other phlebotomists at the hospital that she was just on a bus and Lisa Rinna from television got on it and they took a selfie together. Linda’s vacation was just made. I hope Lisa gave her a free meal at SUR or something.
At the end of the race, the big prize was that everyone gets to go to Amsterdam to spend a week in Yolanda’s mother’s condo. Haha. Just kidding. I hope she doesn’t let these crazy land-wraiths anywhere near her ailing mother. Who would take these people anywhere? They’re just going to get wasted and brawl, which is sort of what these women do no matter which corner of the globe they go to.
Back to David Foster (Wallace)’s charity event. His charity supports the families of children that need organ transplants, and it’s raised like $8 million, and that is all very noble. Mostly David Foster (Wallace) did it by singing a version of “I don’t care how you get here, but get here if you can†to a liver that a 13-year-old needs to survive.
Since they were going out of town, you knew there would be unrest, and the unrest started on the plane. Brandi told Kim that Lisar had been talking about her sobriety, which, I think, is a fair thing to tell Kim. However, Kim, being an unhealthy person, does not bring it up to Lisar. She just decides to passive-aggressively shun her until Lisar has to ask what is going on, and then Kim active-aggressively yells at her on the plane. Now, I think this all went down kinda wrong. I think Lisar was talking to Brandi to ask advice about what they should do, if anything, about Kim. It makes sense because Brandi is currently selling herself as being the closest to Kim. But what got telegraphed to Kim was that Lisar was somehow disparaging her. Kim should have taken it up with Lisar, like an adult, and said, “I heard you were talking to Brandi about my recovery, and if you have any questions, you can ask me.†She did not. She just yelled at Lisar and told her that she should never ask any questions about Kim or her personal life or her recovery or anything. It was really harsh … still, the meanest thing on that plane was the lighting. Yeesh!
I think this sort of defensive behavior for Kim is part of what has everyone so worried. If she had been like, “I go to this meeting once a week and I have this sponsor and I see a shrink and here’s what I’m doing,†then people would leave her alone. When she screams at them that it’s none of their business (which, it kinda isn’t), she’s just making it look like she’s not doing anything and she has something to hide. Kyle wasn’t much help on the plane, either. She was cowering under some used rain poncho with a look on her face that said, “I told you bitches not to start this with my sister because it would end badly, and look at where we are right now!â€
Kim puts on a happy face for the charity function, which, well, it seemed pretty nice and fun for a gala in Calgary. I don’t know, a gala in Calgary sounds a little bit like a film festival in Burbank to me, but what do I know? Anyway, Babyface was there, and so was Steven Tyler, who looks more and more like Sigmund the Sea Monster with each passing day. He sang “Dude Looks Like a Lady†and dedicated it to his allies in the LGBT community, and then he kissed Kyle Richards square on the lips and she queefed out a little pile of glitter. It was all real fun.
The next day they flew to Holland, and Kim and Kyle fought about something totally ridiculous, and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills California 90210 displayed to the world that they do not know how an escalator works, and a Dutch woman named Elsa had to extricate them before they broke the whole airport. If you are ever lying in your bed at night, wondering: This, right here, is why they hate us.
Eileen wasn’t with them because of her shooting schedule. She was flying business class on American direct from Los Angeles, and she took a Xanax because she was flying without her son for the first time in about a decade. When it wore off and she emerged from that pit of total drug-induced darkness that lurks in the back of her skull, she looked out the window, which was still open. It was night over the Atlantic, and all she could see was a somewhat rippling blackness stretched in every direction. Was it the ocean? Was it the sky? Was it the top of some clouds that she couldn’t quite make out below her? She wasn’t sure, but it made her uneasy, like getting off of a roller-coaster and knowing that you’re not going to puke, but that it’s going to take several moments until the whooshing in your brain slows down. That’s what it felt like, but somehow made emotional. She put some Luther Vandross on her iPad and put on her headphones. She cozied up to her American Airlines blanket, closed her eyes, and felt like that feeling was leaving her body out the tips of her toes, just as the darkness that was still lurking in the back of her head came back and put her to sleep by grabbing her eyeballs in its fists.