This week on Rich Women Doing Things, a bunch of rich women did things. They went to New York; they embarrassed their teenage daughters; they shopped for watches; they cleaned out their dead mother’s house and then went to therapy; they even had a dance rehearsal for their music video “XXpensiveXX†with two capital x’s on either end. (The second two are silent.) That is what the rich women did and I, somehow, must find a way to report it.
It’s getting harder and harder to recap this show for the faithful visitors to the Real Housewives Institute because nothing at all happens. There is nothing to talk about on the macro level because there are no real events or story lines. It’s also nearly impossible to talk about on the micro level because these women are all such professionals that they don’t even wear embarrassing things, make horrible statements, or behave in ways that would make Emily Post want to come off her perch and slap someone across the knuckles with a ruler. They’re all just kind of rich and fine.
I mean, I would never, ever, ever in my life want to be caught dead in the Kyle by Alene Too van, but does that one-eyed, one-horned, driving purple people eater really concern us that much? I just feel bad for the poor marketing intern that Kyle isn’t paying who has to drive it around as Housewives fans all over New York honk at her and try to take pictures as she hides behind enormous fake designer sunglasses she got for $27.95 at Century 21 and a scarf that she stole from the office.
Oh, yes, Kyle was in New York scouting out the third location for her store Kyle by Alene Too. (Does that make it Kyle by Alene Four? I’m not sure how the line of succession actually works with shoddy designer boutiques.) Kyle took her daughter Sophia on the trip. Kyle says that Sophia is the most like her, and by that, she means that she is a whole foot taller than Kyle but has Kyle’s original nose. They visit the retail space, make Evita arms on their enormous terrace on the Lower East Side (not very convenient to her store on the Upper East Side), and then go for a walk on the Highline. That is all they do. In New York. I mean, they couldn’t even see Blue Man Group or Sleep No More? They couldn’t try to buy knockoff bags on Canal Street or take a gentrification tour of Northern Brooklyn? Or hit on 50-year-old men with girlfriends at home at Beautique? Nope. Not this trip. I mean, this is what all of us New Yorkers do. Live like a local!
Lisa Rinna is also in New York with her two daughters Fake Gigi and Fake Bella. I shouldn’t make fun of them because Delilah and The Other One are actually pretty fun and charming and wonderful. I don’t know why they don’t have their own web series on Bravo TV Dot Com right now. As Lisar likes to point out, her narrow birth canal didn’t just turn them both into deformed cone heads, it also gave them the ability to say what is on their mind in a way that is very compatible with the reality-television arts and sciences. Basically, this is what they were made for.
Sadly, I think that Delilah’s hopes of being the next Gigi Hadid, complete with getting her start in CR Fashion Book, will eventually be dashed. She’s pretty and she could definitely be a working model, but Gigi is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon and there just isn’t room for two of them. Also, even with her elongated cranium, Delilah is still only five-foot-six on a good day, standing on her tippy toes with her hair teased up two inches. That’s just not enough height to make it to Gigi level. Pun intended.
Meanwhile, Eileen was cleaning out her mother’s house after she died of dementia and it just broke my damn heart. Eileen, the youngest of seven (10 exclamation points and four baby emojis), has lost three siblings, her mother, her father-in-law, and several other close relations all over the course of a few years. I would hate to insinuate that Eileen Davidson is carrying the plague or something but, um, that sure seems like a lot of death. The scene of her cleaning out her mother’s house is pretty gosh-darn sad. Oh, poor Eileen. I just want to wrap her up in a loose cardigan and feed her herbal tea and housemade granola until people stop dropping around her like secretary of State nominees in the Trump White House.
Also, Lisa goes shopping for a watch for Ken and she buys one and gives it to him and, man, is it something. I guess the watch is fine? I don’t know. It’s not my style. I prefer something cheap and plastic rather than something huge and gaudy that looks like what Shia LaBeouf wore on his wrist in the second Transformers to call a shape-shifting robot alien to his side when he needed defense against Starscream.
One thing I will tell you, as a former professional gift wrapper, never wrap something in glitter paper. Glitter paper is the absolute worst. Not only will it coat every surface it touches with intractable dust that will never be rinsed off, it also won’t allow tape to stick to it. I don’t know if you noticed, but the paper was entirely held together with a ribbon so it looked all bulgy and slack, sort of like a full diaper. For a $10,000 watch, you could do a whole lot better than glitter paper. You could feed it to one of those mini ponies and have Ken wait until it comes out the other end. That would be quite the wrapping job.
There is only one actual incident in the whole episode. Erika Jaynerardi, a noted flamteuse (that is the French word for “flamboyant chanteuseâ€), did not wear underwear under her Mugler dress, which — next to Kyle’s unoriginal nose — was the best work of art on the whole program. We discover this because, for some reason, Kyle Richards allowed another organization in these United States of America to throw a White Party, a name and theme that she has copyrighted and whose protection she values as much as her youngest daughter’s curls. Kyle, however, made the mistake of wearing dark underwear that was visible under her white dress. When Lisa Vanderpump put her hand up Erika’s skirt to find out if she had knickers to lend Kyle, she discovered that she was as bare as Giggy the Pomeranian’s ever-growing alopecia spots.
This all would have been dropped if it weren’t for PK, Dorit’s husband. First of all, never trust a grown adult human who uses his initials for his name, especially when he looks like a thumb without a fingernail. We still have two episodes left before we can judge Dorit, but the jury has a verdict on PK and he is disgusting. This is a grown man with two young children who drinks Red Bull–and–vodkas on a weeknight like he just took a tab of ecstasy at a foam party in Ibiza. His spirit animal is an origami fedora made out of old issues of Maxim.
The next day, PK tells Dorit that he could totally see all up in Erika’s Jayne, but his story doesn’t check out. He’s all like, “It was gross. I was embarrassed for her. I wasn’t turned on at all.†But at the same time, he’s all, “I’m a man, of course I looked. And I enjoyed the view. Then I couldn’t look away.†Um, which one was it? Probably the latter. He was totally titillated by it, but couldn’t tell his wife because she will be offended that her husband was staring at another lady’s flower. Wouldn’t a gentleman say something very quietly to Erika so she wouldn’t be putting herself on display for the rest of the guests? Yes, he would. That gentleman is not PK, who instead acts like a boarding-school kid who’s fingering the model of a uterus they bring into health class to teach sex ed.
So Erika got up to leave, the accusations of her being cold and aloof hanging there like a skin tag over an armpit. She didn’t care. She was off to the White Party, with one arm coated in black and her ass coated in absolutely nothing. The skin from her rear rubbed up against the fine Jersey, giving her little sparkles of sensation, little tastes of freedom as all of those around her are encumbered, confined by their clothes. Not Erika, she is one with them, speaking through them and with them, unafraid to express herself, unafraid of her body, unafraid of her sexuality, which she could use to wound and disarm everyone around her. Erika just pushed her long hair back over her shoulder and it created a little draft, just a small tuft of air, that washed across her bare backside like a magic spell.