We interrupt your regularly scheduled episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to bring you the surprise season premiere of everyone’s least favorite reality show, Rich Women Doing Things. This week the rich women did things! They tried and failed to make a smoothie with their husband’s assistant to keep him from getting type 1 diabetes. They hung from large draperies to do yoga and worried that their fresh Botox might somehow leak into their brains. They had date nights with their husbands and screwed their diets by eating truffle pasta that was mixed right in a giant block of Parmesan cheese. They remodeled the kitchens in their homes that look a bit like a museum gift shop but with even more expensive scarves (none of which are for sale). Oh, these rich women, they did things.
Mostly they talked about Lisa Vanderpump and how she’s cut everyone off in the wake of her big blowup with Kyle last week. I don’t particularly agree with the way she and Ken are framing the discussion. Ken says that Kyle was “after†Lisa. That can’t be true at all. Kyle went to tell Lisa what the women were saying and to get Lisa’s explanation for it. That is not being “out to get her.†If she was out to get her she would have just talked shit about Lisa behind her back with the rest of the women. Or she might have, you know, leaked a story to the press.
This week, Lisa finally delivers the line that we have heard in the trailer so many times, about how she’s not going to say what a giant bitch Kyle was — oops, there, she said it. I don’t think that Kyle was being a bitch. She could have shown up Brandi Glanville style (say her name three times and she shall appear), dropping F-bombs, calling her names, and probably ruining a sofa or two on the way out. Lisa might not have liked the message, but Kyle was never overly cruel in delivering it.
Kyle tells the rest of the women the next day at some sort of cocktail event that is never explained. Why are they there? Whose party is this? Was Lisa even invited? Why is hunky Aaron the only one of the dudes invited? We will never know. We just see Kyle explaining the fight to the other women, them being shocked by it, and Erika delivering her already classic line: “That’s not friendship. That’s bullshit.â€
Lisa hasn’t talked to any of the women since Ken created a meme by shouting, “Good-bye, Kyle.†As Dorit explains — hold on, hold on, hold on. We need to talk about Dorit. Practically every time she appears onscreen with one of her myriad blunt-cut wigs, I get a feeling in my stomach like one of my organs has turned into the sarlacc pit. This episode she debuted two all-new confessional outfits and they are two of the worst of all time. The first is a pink dress with some sort of cap sleeve and a little bit of black mesh around the boobs, but what’s worse is the styling. She has long extensions, with her hair swept up on one side in a diamond barrette (Dorit is not happy until she has accessories all over her scalp), and these enormous hot-pink rhinestone earrings that are like hoops except they’re square. Every time she comes onscreen wearing this, I think that she’s dressed as Brandi Glanville (say it one more time and she shall appear) going to a Real Housewives drag dinner party on Fire Island.
The second looks like J.Lo during her Fly Girl days. There’s a black mesh dress (is black mesh her thing now?) over a black bandeau top and a matching fat black head wrap. The worst part, however, are the long, dangling rhinestone earrings, one that says CHA and the other that says NEL, like her earlobes have knuckle tattoos. Funny enough, Cha and Nel are also two of Erika’s backup dancers. Someone needs to remind Dorit that throwing on a bunch of expensive accessories with name brands emblazoned across them like caution tape does not a style make.
Sorry, we were talking about Lisa’s friendship. Both Dorit and Kyle explain that Lisa punishes people by “holding her friendship hostage.†She won’t talk to anyone until she’s forgiven them, and that won’t happen until she’s punished them with an epoch of silence. This is usually accompanied by her delivering biting “jokes†about people to their faces in group settings, but Lisa isn’t attending any group events, nor is she really being invited, it would seem like. That’s what happens when the whole cast is against her.
In classic Lisa style, she rests all her hopes on ingratiating herself to the new girl. Denise is the only person she invites to her birthday party. Read into that what you will, but it seems to me to be what she always does, make the person without any history with her think she’s great and then, in a season or two, she’ll figure it all out and strike out on her own. I do commend Denise for not really taking sides and hoping that there is some way for everyone to come back together, though at this stage, it seems highly unlikely.
The only other gathering of the rich women in this episode is when Lisa has everyone go to the L.A. outpost of Lower East Side puke-on-your-going-out-top emporium Beauty & Essex, which is also the only bar that I have ever been kicked out of in my life, and that is because my friend Chris tried to use a strand of pearls from a chandelier as a necklace while lip-syncing to “Vogue.†All of the women (minus Erika, who’s at rehearsal) put on their best black outfits to celebrate Denise marrying her big-dicked surveillance expert Aaron, a man who will always have a seat as long as I have a face.
The star of this particular gathering is St. Camille of Grammer, who seems to have reverted to her first-season shoulder-slouching self to talk shit about Lisa Vanderpump and her teeth. That is just a low blow. Making fun of British people’s teeth is like making fun of the hair of the collective peoples of New Jersey. It’s just a low, cheap blow. I was much more excited for Camille to talk shit about her ex-husband, saying that she doesn’t remember being in bed with him and intimating that it was possibly less than stellar. That’s the kind of shade I like. Throw shade not on our sisters, no matter how poorly they might have treated you. These are the people with us in the trenches, those who have been through something that so few others can understand. Don’t cast easy aspersions at their expense. That serves no one. Instead tell rich and powerful men that their penises are small and no one wants to see them. Maybe then so many women will be able to live in peace and make enough money that they’ll be able to get veneers when it matters: when they’re good and young.