Every Housewife needs a cause, whether it’s hawking her line of sickly liquor, healing her broken marriage, getting pregnant, or occasionally fighting for a charity. When it comes to charity, it’s always one that has some impact on the Housewife’s life, like abused women, animal cruelty, or sending gauzy shapewear to amorphous women in need of more structured waists and slimmer bosoms. Meghan King Edmonds’s pet cause is colorectal cancer because someone in her family died from it. Well, not really. Her husband’s ex-wife died from it.
It totally makes sense why she would want to raise money for awareness and research, but it still boggles my mind why an organization would invite her to speak as some kind of expert to an assemblage of its members. It’s like if someone asked me to give the keynote speech at the Doctors Against Genital Warts Consortium because I once took my college girlfriend to get hers frozen off. But then again, I don’t have television cameras around me at all time.
When Meghan and Heather are getting ready to go to the conference in D.C., Meghan says that she plans to just wing her speech. Inevitably, she gets up there and stutters like Porky the Pig hopped up on Adderall at Bacon Lover’s Night in your local trendy snout-to-tail restaurant. But eventually, she finds her voice. “The greatest threat that we face today, when it comes to cancer,†she tells everyone in the audience wearing blue and staring up at her with their faces as round and welcoming as summer moons, “is people pretending they have cancer when they don’t.â€
Everyone is transfixed. “Fake cancer has afflicted me and every woman that I work with in deep, profound ways that can bankrupt friendships, destroy families, and hijack the plots of reality-television programs that are struggling for relevance in an already crowded field. It is my solemn duty to root out all of these imposters by asking to see their medical records, verifying them with things that I find on the internet in the middle of the night, and then harassing them about on national television.â€
Meghan’s visit to the nation’s capital is a little bit dull, but her trip to the hospital certainly is not. Emphasis on the word “trip,†because I want whatever the hell it was they give Meghan when they pluck her eggs out of her like they’re making a Christmas pudding. She’s rambling on and all loosey-goosey, asking her mother if they can do Molly and taste some hard drugs. She even confesses that the only drug she’s ever done is weed, which is a little bit disappointing. (Also, I hate when people say they “did weed.†It’s like people who say they stand “on line.â€) I can’t believe Meghan hasn’t even done coke? Doesn’t she get to hang out with the Vanderpump Rules cast at the Bravo upfronts? I’m sure they could give her a taste of the good stuff.
Meghan’s fertility doctor is the ex-husband to Nina, Shannon’s friend who wore a sequined jumpsuit at the ’70s party and who I think sacrificed her voice to a sea witch so she could grow a tail and go under the water to find her one true love, a merman played by Channing Tatum. That, or she’s a famous soap star in Colombia. Either way, I know two things about Nina: I’ve seen her before, and I want to have the longest brunch ever with her.
This season continues to be rather odd because all of the women are off on their own, engaging in their own pursuits. Vicki continues to make sure that the world is in good hands with all of her insurances. Tamra learns how to walk sexily in stripper heels, which, oddly, is a skill that Tamra did not previously possess. Brianna, who I like to pretend is a Housewife, teaches her son how to perpetrate grand theft auto so she can afford all the renovations on the house that her mother “bought†for her. And Shannon, well, Shannon is avoiding the workout farts that her husband and chronic nocturnal-emissions specialist, David Beador, leaks out when he pumps iron.
Shannon also visits with her favorite quack, Dr. Moon, who cups her. This is a little odd because the last time I cupped someone, I ended up fighting a sexual-harassment charge for years and had to quit my lucrative career as a fast-food-franchise owner to write mean things about middle-aged women on the internet. Oh, how I miss peddling those waffle fries at Chicks-Fill-Gay. The process of cupping entails Shannon getting her back fat sucked up into little plastic nodes that are supposed to rid her body of toxins. The result leaves her looking like some kind of rare breed of old woman Pokémon. She’s like a Pokey Mom, but when anyone catches her, they just throw her back because of all the screeching and whining.
As for Kelly Dodd, well, she’s engaged in the only activity that she knows how to engage in: being the worst. I would call Kelly Dodd a dumpster fire or hot Chinatown garbage, but if I did the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock would be all up in my Twitter mentions telling me that she’ll sic “The Refuse Americans Support Hotline†(T.R.A.S.H.) on me for defaming their kind.
Kelly calls up Shannon and asks for an “attrition lunch.†This call is stipulated in Section 4, Article 3 of the Real Housewives Code of Conduct and must come within 72 hours after an epic altercation at a theme party. Shannon, however, acts like she was just invited to put an apple on her head while Kelly shoots it off with a missile launcher. But, following the Code of Conduct, Shannon shows up for drinks and is immediately interrogated by Kelly about her involvement with Jaci I’d Like to Buy a Vowel Please, Pat. Kelly isn’t there to apologize or set the record straight; she’s there to get more ammunition against Shannon.
Given what goes down and what Meghan tells everyone she heard at the party, I firmly believe that Shannon set Kelly up. If she didn’t set Kelly up, she at least had some people talk trash about her to get it on camera. The thing about Kelly is that she’s such a mess you can’t embarrass her with tales of her own misbehavior. Everyone in her life already knows what a disaster she is, and they don’t seem to care, so it’s not like she’s going to turn anyone against her but the public.
Shannon doesn’t even need to do that. She just needs to let Kelly be Kelly. Just like a dog will always eat its own shit, Kelly will eventually ruin herself. Look at what happened at coffee with Shannon: Kelly merely had to show up, then tell Shannon, “I feel like I was set up and I reacted poorly, and I’m sorry for that. However, I feel like you were coming after me for some reason, and I’d like to get to the bottom of it and work it out with you.â€
She doesn’t do that. She shows up, interrogates Shannon, calls her outfit ugly, calls her friend ugly, insults her husband and her party, calls her a liar, and generally acts like a deluge of horse bile mixed with sheep diarrhea that rained down from a hollowed-out horn of Satan himself. The crazy thing about this argument is that Kelly is clearly in the right, but she totally undoes any justification she has by behaving like a member of the Duck Dynasty after a lobotomy and an overdose of Spanish fly.
Kelly tells Shannon, “You’re supposed to accept apologies. That makes things better for everyone.†But see, the thing about apologies is you have to think that the person feels bad about what they did and won’t do it again. There is a 100 percent chance that Kelly will get drunk and call people ugly again. She does it again at the table. So why, exactly, should Shannon forgive her?
To cap it all off, Kelly says, “I can’t stand negativity.†What? She just justified calling a woman ugly with the fact that she is, indeed, ugly. Is that positivity? Does Kelly live in an alternate universe where every day is opposite day? Is she some sort of Mister Mxyzptlk with bad plastic surgery? I hope that’s true, if only so she can go back to her own universe where insults are positivity, a sharpened nose is not looking like every other person in Newport Beach, and Batman v Superman: Something After a Colon was a movie you’d want to pay money to see.
Shannon didn’t have to go back to her home planet, she just had to go home. She walked to the car fiddling in her purse for the plastic block that is her car key and fumbled her large hobo bag, dropping out the Ziplock bags of supplements, the crushed-up Kleenex, and a half-eaten bag of kale chips. She got down on her knees onto the hot pavement of the parking lot and scrambled them up into her clutches as the rage vibrated throughout her body. Her breathing was labored and her head pounded — not like a vein was going to explode in her brain, but like someone was repeatedly hitting her in the back of the head with a skillet.
She stood up and felt a bit light-headed. She braced herself on her heels and couldn’t remember where her car was. All she could think about was Kelly, the things she should have said to her, the insults she could have dropped, the perfect rejoinders that would have ruined her soul and crushed her like a box of graham crackers at the bottom of a grocery bag. She walked along the aisles, scanning for her car and not finding it, the sun beating down on her and her purse all in a shambles.
Suddenly she stopped, not because she found her car, but she realized that she couldn’t. She could never. She would never ever find it and get home and find a safe place, and she would never ever go back to being happy and anonymous again. She would never ever be able to spill her purse in the parking lot and not make an absolute fool of herself. Just then the sky seemed to open up and a beam of light hit every cell of her body as if it was pulling her apart, cell by cell, and Kelly just stood there, tilting her head back and letting the strong spring breeze carry her away one molecule at a time, like a fading perfume.