This week on our favorite television program, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women played pickleball because it is the year of our Lord 2023 and we’re all just stuck in gym class trying to exorcise those demons from the President’s Fitness Challenge. They talked about how neuropathy leads to amputation and how tiny esophagi can make you push your food around your plate. They talked to their managers about returning to the stage at Lance Bass’s gay bar, and didn’t even stop by Sutton’s boutique, which is literally around the corner. They joked about selling it on the street, but they only meant lemonade. Lastly, they dared to hold a dog in front of their children, which was neither Lucy, nor Lucy, nor Apple Juice(y).
Speaking of Dorit, I need to put off discussing the rest of this amazing episode to confess something so wretched, so vile, so disgusting that I don’t really know who I am anymore. Okay, here it goes. I agree with PK, a … Let’s try that again. I agree with PK, a jellied eel who … Sorry. This time it’s going to work. PK, a … Dammit! I’m so confused about agreeing with the man that I can’t insult it. I mean him. I mean it?
It happens because of the one scene Dorit shares with her husband where she says she wants to homeschool her children until age 14, when they’re currently 6 and 9. That’s another five to eight years of paying for a private tutor when you could be sending them to school for free! We know the Lord of Surely Rented Manor has already done this math in his head. I get Dorit’s point. The kids get a “personal touch†at home with a teacher who can give them individual attention. Dorit also claims that whenever she asks if the kids want to go to real school, they get very upset. Of course they do! They don’t know anything else. If you told me at age 6 that I had to fly “business class,†I would think that meant I had to work and go to school at the same time, and I would have cried about it.
PK is … PK is … PK is … right (ugh). Those kids need to go to school, have friends, be socialized normally, learn how to share, get in fights, fall on the playground, and not have their mother there to call them sweetheart so often their ears fall off. Homeschooling is never a good idea. Know who was homeschooled? Kim Richards! And now she’s a shut-in who is just scribbling on the walls with crayons like some serial killer who has been left in solitary too long. She’s like the Joker if he loved turtles. Meanwhile, Kim is like, “I told Paris I would do a mural for the baby.†The only thing worse than homeschooling is raising your kid in a nursery with a Kim Richards original guaranteed to give you nightmares or your money back.
Okay, now we have to get back to the Dinner Party From Hell Part 2: The Reefering. The new fight is one between Denise Richards and Erika Jayne. Well, not really. It is between Denise Richards and reality. I don’t know what is wrong with Denise when she showed up at Kyle’s, but if I had to guess, maybe she took a Xanax for nerves before she left the house and it went sideways in the car on the way over? I don’t know. Regardless, her slurred speech, her jerky movements, it’s all very odd and not what we’re used to.
When Dorit tries to change the subject away from Kyle and Sutton’s fight, she asks Denise what it’s like to be “back with the group,†meaning back on television. She says it’s great, but she has an issue with Erika. She slurs and stammers to let us know that Erika was very sweet when Denise started on the show, but something changed the next season. Denise wants to know what she did to Erika to make her hate her.
Erika, very calmly and politely, asks Denise what she is referring to. “You know what you did,†she says like her mouth is an ocean. No. She doesn’t. No one does. They’re trying to get specifics, but Denise just keeps saying Erika knows what she did in the vaguest of terms. Denise! We have no clue! “Go watch the show!†she screams at Erika. I not only watched it, but I recapped it, and I still have fewer clues than a $2,000 Jeopardy answer. It was also cute of Crystal to be like, “What show?†Come on. Telling Erika to watch the show is the only thing Denise said that made even the remotest sense. Finally, she admits that it wasn’t an incident; it was a whole thing. Erika apologizes to Denise, though it is clear she has no clue what she is apologizing for, just that she wants to put Denise back into whatever genie bottle she came out of.
While watching this scene, I thought I knew what Denise was talking about. I thought she was trying to get justice from Lisa Rinna through Erika. I thought what she meant somewhere in her lizard brain was, “My first season on the show we were cool, then Lisa Rinna turned on me, outed my affair with Brandi Glanville, and you were both super-mean. What the hell did I ever do to you to deserve that?†I thought this was a reckoning. I thought this was Denise unsuccessfully trying to settle a score by asking a tough, if pertinent, question.
The next day, when Denise meets Crystal, Sutton, and Garcelle for lunch, she is clearly much soberer. The women never ask her what she was on (inquiring minds want to know), but they do ask her what she meant. She says she was talking about when she had a dinner party at her house and Erika brought up three-ways within hearing distance of her children. THAT is what she’s mad about? Some weak-sauce argument from, like, four years ago? Oh, I entirely misjudged this whole thing.
I always thought Denise went too soon, and while I am ideologically opposed to bring-backs, I always thought we could get more out of her than we did. I just didn’t think it would be as Slurry Spice at Kyle’s marijuana dinner party. But the two best Denise moments weren’t even part of the fight. The first is when the clearly straight stoner chef leaves the table and goes back into the kitchen and says, “Dude, Denise Richards is fucking wasted.†You know she was the only person there he recognized, and he is just the right age that Wild Things was firmly in his teenage spank bank.
The other best moment is after dinner when Dorit approaches Denise to tell her something is off with her jacket. It seemed like that way from the back, like it was cut way too high or something. It turns out she has the thing on upside down and that’s why it looks like a totally different jacket after dinner. While Dorit tries to help her, Denise says, “I don’t give a flying ass fuck about my jacket. Stop it. I know what you’re trying to do.â€
But the real after-dinner action is the continuation of the fight between Kyle and Sutton, where they both want to say something about the other but won’t. Dorit starts it when she tells Kyle that when Sutton came back from the other room before dinner and someone asked where Kyle was, Sutton said, “In denial about something.†Kyle, the Über-producer, swivels on a high heel and shouts, “Sutton, what am I in denial about?†Sutton says that she doesn’t know anything; it just seemed like she was.
This is what drives me crazy about this fight. Sutton is taking all of these digs at Kyle and trying to bring things up, but she won’t just say it. At least Kyle finally said that Sutton is a drunk, in her opinion. But what Sutton clearly meant this whole night is: We have been reading in the press that your husband is cheating on you and that you’re sleeping with a lesbian country singer. Is any of this true? That is what Sutton keeps insinuating but is too chickenshit to say. She won’t even try to get Garcelle to plant some tabloids so that everyone will talk about it like Lisa Vanderpump once got caught doing. (Can you believe that was ten years ago? We’re so fucking old.)
As the conversation continues, Sutton says that she doesn’t like Kyle saying she drinks too much or doesn’t eat. Sutton says that she has an esophageal condition that makes it hard for her to swallow. I was ready to be all like, “Sutton is so full of shit. No one ever heard of that before.†But I did the most cursory of Googles for “esophagus conditions†and found peptic stricture, which is the narrowing of an esophagus that makes patients feel like the food is sticking in their throat. Wow, sounds like Sutton might be telling the truth. But another quick Google showed that one of the causes of peptic stricture is, wait for it, alcohol use. Stop telling on yourself, Sutton.
The next day at lunch, Sutton is talking to the other women about Kyle saying she has a drinking problem when she is the one who always does the hair helicopter at every party for decades. She and Garcelle laugh about Kyle dragging her coochie all over the dance floor doing the splits. I’m sorry, but this is a specious argument. There is a huge difference between whooping it up at parties and doing your two dance moves and being drunk by yourself at home in the middle of the afternoon.
When criticizing Kyle at the weed party, Sutton says, “You already lost two sisters; do you want to lose another one?†Okay, that blow is so low that even those creepy twins from Selling Sunset are taller than it. Kyle starts telling Sutton to fuck off, and Sutton tells her that she’s being mean. Kyle’s being mean when Sutton just roasted her failed relationships with her sisters, something that even viewers know is a touchy subject for her. Yes, Kyle was rude to Sutton all night, but even she didn’t deserve that.
And with that, Sutton knows that it’s time to leave. Honestly, as soon as Denise’s jacket lost all sense of gravity it was probably time for everyone to pile into their Escalades, but now it was really time. Kyle sees them out, but you can tell she’s been asking them to leave since before the dessert course. After they’re all departed, Kyle goes upstairs and takes out her long diamond earrings. She unzips her dress, takes off her face, removes the clips and pieces from her hair. She’s disrobing, putting away her armor. She slips into a shower and hangs her head over her body, her long panel of hair sending sheets of water crashing at her feet. She puts on a bathrobe and pads down the hallway to Portia’s room. When she opens the door, Portia is hunkered over a textbook at her desk, her giant headphones the biggest thing in the room. She takes them off and looks at her mother, calculating the gulf between them, the quiet behind her mother’s eyes, and the slight downturn around her lips that always spells trouble. “Did you have friends over or something?†she asks, only half-caring.