This week on our favorite show Rich Women Doing Things, boy did the rich women do things! We have more to unpack this episode than a rich woman’s assistant when she forced him to transfer her entire boutique to her home for a party that was really some sort of marketing event. The rich women went shopping for a Bentley in a completely empty showroom because when you shop for couture — or cars, apparently — the only way to do it is without the rabble around. They had their doomsday prepper husbands teach them not only that shit does not go in the compost pile but also how to save a house from a California fire with a giant hose, a generator, and an above-ground pool that isn’t a pool it is actually a “reservoir.†(Is that enough to save a house from a fire that is totally engulfing a neighborhood? I don’t know. The only thing I have ever learned about firefighting comes from a calendar.) They made their friends jealous by just leaving out a $35,000 $95,000 Hermes handbag that looks like a little house or a row of store windows or something.
Speaking of that bag, it was Crystal who left it out on her dining room table when Kyle came over to her house to take her to Sutton’s Afternoon in Paris Party and In-Home Shopping Event. (At this point is Sutton anything other than the world’s richest Avon lady?) Since this is the season’s fifth episode it means that according to the Eileen Davidson Accords, Crystal’s grace period is up and we can officially judge her. I am so glad that I can finally say that I fucking love Crystal. She is just what this franchise needed to shake it up and I am so glad she is here.
We see this, yes, with the handbag. It’s so indicative of how Crystal handles herself. She doesn’t show up in head-to-toe Louis Vuitton like Dorit and accost you with the fact that she spends all this money on her clothing. No. She just leaves her bag out on the counter, waits for you to spot it, and then leaves you to drown in an above-ground pool (sorry, a reservoir) of your own drool. You know what they say, money screams but wealth whispers. That is also the B-side of “Money Can’t Buy You Class,†but most of you don’t know that.
Crystal is now my second favorite Crystal, just above The Dark Crystal but right under Crystal Pepsi which, God willing, will one day return to confuse our taste buds and eyeballs once more. She’s just such a wonderful bitch. She is firmly who she is, she doesn’t care about others’ opinions of her, and is not going to take shit from anyone. But that doesn’t mean she’s closed off. In fact, she seems like a very open and honest person who is willing to own her struggles in a way that the women of Beverly Hills rarely do.
At Kyle’s election night party (between this and RHONY I don’t want to have to type the words “election night party†ever again) after someone compliments Crystal on losing five pounds from stress during the Lake Taco cast trip, she tells everyone she is a recovering bulimic. She shares the whole story, about how she was 11 and learned about it from a video they watched in school. She talks about how she was obsessed with her weight and how that fed into wanting to be thin, white, and pretty when she was younger, something that, of course, she couldn’t accomplish. We also see her later talking to her adorkable husband Rob about how she doesn’t want her issues with food to be passed on to her daughter, and it was all so relatable and so chill and not at all played for the cameras. It was just Crystal being Crystal, offering up a level of transparency we haven’t seen on this show since the cellophane wrapping on Lisa Rinna’s blue bunny.
Kathy Hilton, our other new addition, also continues to amuse me to no end. First of all, she’s at every single event, so how is she a “friend of†and not full time? Secondly, her best scene this week is when she’s at Sutton’s store and just criticizing every inch of it because it looks like the inside of grandma’s knickers. Kathy goes around the room being like, “What’s in that closet? Do you need it?†“Kathy, that’s the bathroom.†“What about that over there? It’s ugly.†“Kathy, that’s our kitchen we can’t get rid of that.†“Well, what about this desk?†“No, Kathy. We need to work.†If Sutton didn’t recline in her chair and let Kathy clean out the cracks between her eyeteeth, she would have had an architect in there to completely redesign the place. And, to be fair, Kathy’s kind of right about everything.
While the framing of this episode is Erika finally talking to the girls about her divorce, it’s not the heart of the episode. As the action wore on, it became clear that we were going to get a lot of buildup and no payoff. It’s what the gays call edging, which some queers love but I just find a waste of time when a good 12 minutes on Cockyboys is enough for me. (You work from home now, it’s safe to Google Cockyboys.) The real beating heart of the episode is the fight between Kyle and Dorit that happens at Kyle’s election night party.
But before we get into that, can we talk about Dorit’s outfits for a second? She shows up at Kyle’s, where the dress code is “patriotic,†wearing what is essentially a mint-green version of the famous yellow plaid skirt and jacket combo that Cher wears in the opening scenes of Clueless. There is nothing about it that says “patriotic,†unless Dorit thinks that Uncle Sam’s nephew is the little guy on the box of Lucky Charms. Even her husband PK, a parasitic infection that makes your eyelashes fall out and shit to pour out of your toenails, knows that it’s not patriotic. He shows up in a grey sweater with a light blue Oxford shirt underneath, but considering he is English maybe an Oxford shirt is somehow patriotic.
Next she shows up at Sutton’s Paris party wearing a Louis Vuitton logo print tennis dress with a matching headband, and nothing about it says Paris except all of the Louis Vuittons on it, but I have never seen anyone in Paris wearing that many labels at once who is not an obnoxious American tourist with a Connecticut accent. It is now officially clear: Dorit cannot dress for a theme. She just wants to wear what she wants when she wants and your dress code can go bite her in the PK. (A PK is one butt cheek, but only when it is covered in shingles sores.)
Anyway, we learn this episode that on the plane back from Lake Taco, Dorit was talking to Crystal about something and Kyle wanted to comment so she cut Dorit off in the middle of a sentence. Dorit then snapped at Kyle, which made her cry. I would say that is an outsized reaction, but everything that happens when I’m on a plane will make me cry. I once sobbed open tears while watching Real Steel, the Hugh Jackman fighting robot movie. I can’t judge.
As a result, Kyle is mad because Dorit snapped at her, which Kyle thinks she wouldn’t do to the other women. Dorit is mad because Kyle always interrupts her and Dorit thinks that Kyle thinks what she has to say is more important than whatever Dorit is saying at the time. I can sort of see both sides of this argument, but if there is one thing we know about Dorit, it’s that, how can I put this delicately, she talks too fucking much. I think what made this such a big deal to both women is that it is something that has been going on for a couple of seasons now. But even when they show us the clip of when it happened last season, Dorit snaps at Kyle and Kyle says, “Well, you won’t stop talking!â€
Yeah, I’m on Kyle’s side with this one. If you just waited for Dorit to stop, you’d be sitting there all day. I feel like when you have a friend who rambles, the thing to do is to get in there a little bit forcibly and, as a person who talks too damn much, you need to be forgiving of that. But also I think Kyle needs to consider the fact that maybe Dorit snaps at her because they are closer than the other women. She feels comfortable critiquing Kyle because she’s secure in their friendship. Yeah, that’s an underhanded compliment, but it’s still nice.
While I’m firmly on #TeamShutUpDorit, I think Kyle also handled the whole thing wrong. To sit Dorit down and be like, “If you want to be my friend, never talk to me like that again,†was not the way to go about doing it. It put Dorit on her back foot. (The back foot is NEL, because the front foot is CHA.) That isn’t really the way you talk to a friend. I think that they both could have sat down and talked about how each other’s behavior upsets them and maybe could have found some middle ground. Instead, Dorit just leaves the party early without even letting her husband eat a damn meal.
Then we’re on to Sutton’s Paris party, everyone is sitting around waiting for Erika, Kyle and Lisa Rinna are wearing the same dress which, at this point, seems like something that someone’s stylist planned as some sort of practical joke, and we know we’re not going to get any Erika at all. The camera follows her on a silent black car ride up to Sutton’s house, which is really Kyle’s house but now with a bunch of antlers hot-glued to the joists. The music is out of the mix, she’s in a long red dress with a subtle pattern, a gorgeous flow, and a bow right up next to the neck like she’s an old Kim Richards confessional look. Erika opens the front door, looks to the panel of women sitting in Sutton’s reception room, and she pivots and closes the door with one hand while staring at them all in their judgemental eyes. Slam! And while I am pissed that this whole episode just teased that moment, next week can’t get here soon enough.