This week on our favorite show Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women only did one thing: got drunk. And boy, do they ever. They weren’t just a little bit drunk, they were “white people in Murray Hill on Cinco de Mayo†drunk. They were “random date who knows no one at an open-bar wedding†drunk. They were “Countess Luann running around in a negligee on the eve of going to rehab†drunk.
The only one who stays mostly sober throughout the day is Erika, who wakes up not only with an emotional hangover from the dinner the night before, but also a migraine. It’s obvious she wants nothing to do with this day, and anyone who has suffered through a shift at work while feeling under the weather should feel sympathy. However, she puts on her best hot pink Chanel beanie, gets in the helicopter, and heads off to the wine tasting like a sport.
Jérémie, the hottest helicopter pilot in all of France, drops them off at the vineyard, where the ladies sit around in an autumnal field and go through glass after glass of rosé. Erika is taking a sip of each wine, just to be polite, but she’s sitting on the end of the table, mostly silent and ashen as the rest of the women carry on. None of these girls are messing with the swirl-and-spit method often employed at a wine tasting so that participants don’t get hammered. They’re draining each glass and then depositing one or two drops into the big silver buckets on the table just for show.
Just as this scene started to get grisly, I realized that Teddi and Kyle were wearing matching felt fedoras and that Teddi seemed to have on the same one that Kyle wore when Lisa Vanderpump screamed at her in her old kitchen. I immediately had a PTSD flashback and decided to self-medicate with MDMA, because apparently that’s how they treat it now. Don’t blame me. Blame science.
Leave it to Lisa Rinna to turn the beat around (love to hear percussion). After tasting a blend that she really enjoys, she gets up at the end of the table and starts QVC-ing the shit out of Rinna Rosé, a brand she says she prefers not only to Whispering Angel, but also to Vanderpump Rosé. As she says this, she does a short impersonation of Lisa Vanderpump, the ghost who used to haunt this show. The women decide that the best thing for a table of mediocre actresses to do is to impersonate each other.
They actually do a pretty good job. Lisa pretends to be Kyle running around trying to avoid a bee. They all do Dorit yelling after her son, just screaming “Jaggy.†(What they all needed to do to make this really believable was to put some stupid accessory in her hair. There is nothing more Dorit than overdressing above the neck.) Kyle does a great impersonation of Teddi, with a walk that looks like a bottom leaving Berlin’s notorious Horse Market. Dorit does a crack Camille, where she’s saying nice things to a person’s face but then mean things behind her back. Kyle does an impression of Denise Richards’s confounded face, which looks like a stoned person taking a leak in a Jacuzzi with at least one other person in it.
The trouble for Erika starts when Kyle does her impersonation and it’s an icy Erika saying, “Honey, we’re good. I’m good. It’s good. This is a good time. I’m all good.†That is Erika when there is conflict around. She would rather remove herself from the situation and just ice everyone out than get into some insane row. Well, it’s either that or she’s chopping someone’s head off. Neither one is her best look. The best Erika, of course, is “having fun†Erika, when she gets to be on her own turf and just have a blast. Anyway, she meets this impression with a cold stare, which might indicate that she’s annoyed by what is going on, but might also indicate that she is showing Kyle how to do a dead-on Erika Jayne. She even admits that Kyle, even though hammered, hit this particular nail on its particularly extension-heavy head.
While Erika and Rinna use the bus ride home to rest, Kyle, Teddi, and Dorit decide they’re going to keep drinking wine. Kyle said on Twitter that this is the most wasted she’s ever been on the show in nine seasons, and it really shows. When everyone arrives for dinner looking chic in all black, Kyle is wearing what appears to be yoga pants and a green blouse. She looks like a college freshman getting dressed for a first date during finals week. She is also so drunk she has this blurry look on her face that is sort of like the mottled colored milk left after all of the Lucky Charms have been eaten.
At dinner, Erika opens up about how she’s never had a group of female friends before and feels like now that LVP has left the group she can be a lot more open with everyone. This leads Teddi to say that she felt Erika was irritated at dinner the night before. Last episode, Teddi and Kyle asked Erika if she was annoyed when Lisa played Erika Jayne at Halloween. Erika said she was not, but the two of them kept pushing her on it.
When Teddi asks again if Erika was irritated, she says that she was because Kyle and Teddi were trying to make something out of nothing and she feels like they are in cahoots to get her to say something that she doesn’t feel. Erika continues to say that she was not annoyed by Rinna, but Kyle and Teddi still won’t let it drop. In not her finest moment, Erika gets up from the table to walk to the bathroom and yells at them to stop making shit up as she slams the door to the bathroom.
At this point, they all need to go to bed. Nothing but bad things are going to happen. Dorit is so wasted that she can’t even remember Teddi’s name, which I think is hilarious. I love this Dorit. She needs to hang out a lot more often. Dorit is the only one wise enough to know it is time to turn in before she completely embarrasses herself.
When Erika goes upstairs to bed, Teddi is downstairs talking to Lisa and says, “It was uncomfortable last night and it could have been resolved if she had just told the truth.†This is the problem with her and Kyle’s whole interaction with Erika, who was telling the truth when she said she wasn’t offended by Rinna. They can’t see her perspective, and instead of respecting that they turn it on her and make it out like she is lying to them or withholding. I literally have no conception of anything else that Teddi is trying to say in this conversation. Trying to transcribe it is like trying to write a sonnet with a Cheese Doodle as a pencil.
I understand when Kyle and Teddi say it seems like Erika isn’t have fun with them. That is another issue altogether. If it’s something they feel all the time, that is something they should address with her. (As Erika tells a bleary Kyle, they should really talk about it in the morning when everyone is more sober.) However, if they just think she wasn’t having fun the day before, well, that’s because she wasn’t, and that has to do with the fact that two of her friends refuse to believe her when she tells them something that is completely reasonable.
The night ended with the women erupting into peals of laughter as they wandered around the château disturbing the ghosts by shouting each other’s names up and down the hallways. Finally Teddi and Kyle, the new Bobsey Twins, tottered toward their respective bedrooms, leaning on each other like two entwined cobras vying for supremacy. They twisted their way, giggling, toward a restless and sweaty sleep, and it seemed like everything — the paintings, the chandeliers, the glints of light from the gilded clock on the mantle, the fine shine on the waxed floors — was rolling its eyes at them as they creaked each floorboard on their way upstairs.