This week on our favorite show, Rich Ladies Doing Things, the rich ladies did things. They went to the “pancake cake†bakery to learn that it is really called a crêpe cake, but because they called it a pancake cake on television, it is now a pancake cake and they made one after them with peaches on it. Peaches! The ladies went to lunch wearing their enormous Amber Vision aviators indoors once again — as if this is a trend they’re hoping will catch on like their model daughters. They told stories about their fathers torturing bees, which is supposed to be a lesson on, like, reliance or something. I don’t know. I’m #TeamBee.
Mostly what the ladies did was fret all about Sutton, a self-described empath. I’m sorry, but anyone who calls themself an empath is usually anything but. It’s like people who call themselves influencers or crypto billionaires. You know they’re just one errant Elon Musk tweet away from being a vibrating shell of a person lying in a gutter in the metaverse.
The biggest Sutton-related fight is with Lisa Rinna about whether Sutton invited her to the Elton John AIDS Foundation gala and whether she said “Thank you†for that invitation in a way that was befitting of someone who never received thanks for a jar of homemade pasta sauce. (As is so often the case, I wish that entire sentence were a manufactured bit of satire, but it is not.)
This all goes down at Harry Hamlin’s 70th-birthday party, which you can tell was supposed to be the opening event of the season. (Until it was derailed by the pesky burglars who dared to come for the $60,000 watches of PK — a Louis Vuitton jewelry box full toenail clippings.) This is most evident in the introduction of Diana Jenkins, the newest Housewife.
Because of the Eileen Davidson Accord, which stipulates that no new Housewife can be fully judged until her fifth episode, we will not be passing any judgment on Diana yet, but here are some fun facts about her. She has a very hot, younger fiancé named Asher, and the second I saw him, I thought, That looks like someone who is auditioning for the Broadway adaptation of Disney’s ‘Tarzan.’ Then as soon as Mauricio asks what he does for a living, he says, “Music. Mostly Broadway.†I mean, you could just smell the Aaron Tveit energy wafting off this guy. Diana’s from Sarajevo and was a refugee who ended up marrying a very rich banker and having two children with him — including a very handsome 22-year-old son whose Instagram avatar is one of those stupid ape NFTs, so my hopes are not high, but if he were to start an OnlyFans, I would subscribe faster than Larsa Pippen takes a picture of her feet.
It turns out that Diana is one of the major sponsors of the Elton John AIDS Foundation gala that is at the center of this drama, but she couldn’t give us any behind-the-scenes info to finalize the fight. Sutton says that she invited Lisa and Harry, then paid $11,500 for them to sit at her table and never got a “Thank you.†Lisa’s story is a bit more complicated. She says they were invited by Elton himself, but they said they didn’t need their tickets because they were going with Sutton. The day before the party, Sutton canceled her table, so the charity reached out to Lisa and Harry to see if they needed tickets. They did, so they did a 30-minute interview with IMDb to pay for their tickets.
What’s shocking is that at no point did Lisa ever say, “Oh, well, we’ll pay for our own tickets.†After Sutton canceled her table, I would assume that meant there were ten tickets available that were no longer Sutton’s. Couldn’t Lisa have paid for those? No. Instead, she’s always looking for a way to shuck and jive to get a free invite to a charity function that she will support with her presence only — not with the cold hard cash she makes shilling adult diapers.
While I don’t care about this fight at all, I am on Sutton’s side. There’s something about Lisa’s story that’s too chaotic and just doesn’t hold up. I believe she didn’t think that she was being invited by Sutton in some way, perhaps, but I fully believe that Sutton paid for those tickets and invited Lisa and that she did not cancel. Sutton even apologized for what she’d said, but that wasn’t enough for Lisa Rinna: Pet Detective — who had to carry this grudge even further, accusing Sutton of lying and trying to cancel at the last minute to make a charity look bad.
The problem is that Sutton came with receipts. Oh yes. Like this dinner is a reunion, she pulls a printed-out email from her bag and everyone gets out their readers and gawks over it like it is a fat little baby at a retirement home. The receipts don’t lie. I mean, they could. She could have very easily canceled after that email was sent, but come on. Lay this whole thing to rest. Send it to the Lucy Lucy Apple Juicy Farm upstate with the other story lines we don’t care about — like Pantygate and whether or not Teddi had the right glasses for champagne.
What I don’t love about all of this is Sutton’s attitude. No matter what happens, she acts so put upon — like she is the last of the Catholic martyrs. (I am sorry to report that based on how she’s acted my entire life, that job title has already been claimed by Mrs. Janet L. Moylan.) Sutton says what Lisa says about her is unfair. Yes, especially if it’s made up. But Lisa is right; Sutton brought this up, so it is now fair game. Erika said it last week: Sutton pops her head over the parapet in order to attack, then is pissed when she gets an arrow right to the neck in return. Either she’s going to fight or she’s not, but she can’t play Willhelmina Weakerton every time she’s in the hot seat.
Speaking of Erika, as soon as Sutton uses the word slander, Erika says, “Slander. That’s an interesting word.†She had it out for Sutton as soon as she arrived. There is a shot in which Sutton arrives at the party and says “Hi†to Erika, who returns with a look that is so cold, so mean, so evil that it started a wildfire in Ojai, ripped the ozone layer a new asshole, and destroyed what is left of the Amazon rainforest all at the same time. If that look were a person, it would be Diana’s fiancé, Asher, playing Javert at the Peppercorn Playhouse in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Erika is trying really hard to make this Sutton-and-Rinna thing about her — asking for an apology from Sutton, and Sutton saying, “You’re not getting one … because I don’t like you.†What ensues is the two of them telling each other to fuck off and shut up, and it is like two girls in the cafeteria squabbling about a note that was passed in third period. It is so petty that it is cousins with both rocker Tom and actress Lori. We have no choice but to Stanley. (He’s going by his full name now.)
It’s funny, because in the Sutton vs. Lisa fight, I think Lisa is wrong, but Sutton shouldn’t have brought it up — on WWHL or at Harry’s party. In the case of Sutton vs. Kyle, I think that Sutton is wrong, but Kyle shouldn’t have brought it up. Kyle’s problem was last week when Sutton showed up at Kyle’s house and wasn’t as sympathetic about Dorit as Kyle wanted her to be. Many commenters pointed out after last week that Kyle wanted Sutton to play in her “Oh, let’s pity Dorit†scene and Sutton wasn’t at all there for it. But I agree with Kyle; she could have been a bit more sensitive. When Kyle brings it back up, Sutton says she doesn’t deal well with break-ins or guns, because her house was robbed when she was 14 and her father shot himself in the head. Umm, those are reasons to be more sympathetic — to talk about your experience, what you learned from it and try to help Dorit by sharing that wisdom. It is not the time to talk about how hard of a day at work you had.
But also, it was Sutton’s reaction. Who is Kyle to tell her she should have acted some other way? Who are any of us to tell any of these women how they should handle anything? (Haha. JK. That is literally my job.) If Kyle thinks it’s weird, that’s not something she should tell Sutton. What does she want Sutton to do? Get Doctor Strange on the horn so that she can go into the multiverse of madness and find a timeline where she acted appropriately? Even if she did, that is a timeline where Carlton Gebbia never got fired and is now governing the country as our Witch Leader Supreme, so would it really be worth it?
Sutton ends the conversation by saying, “What would you have me do, Kyle?†And she’s totally right. She was frazzled, she reacted inappropriately, and you told her about it. Okay. Great. It’s like the ending of the last Fast & Furious movie — when everyone just asks where we go from here. Nowhere really, but the F & F will go on. It has to continue, even if it has no purpose. It will go on and on, because we keep showing up for it; we keep blowing air into it like it’s a pineapple floaty at a twink pool party at one of those awful houses in Selling Sunset. It goes on and on — over L.A. like a drone shot, out into the Pacific like a thunderhead, circling the globe like a Chinese satellite that only spreads misinformation and Instagram ads about testosterone replacement until it settles right back down in our brains, our blood, our lungs, being exhaled back into existence only to delight us once again.