Nothing happened in the first 15 minutes of this program. I say this as a compliment. Nothing happened — no drama, no fighting, no accusations, no story lines — and it was some of the most entertaining Housewives we’ve had in a long time. This is just further proof that, yes, RHOBH and RHOSLC are in the middle of amazing, chaotic seasons, but when you really want to relax, when you really want something light and fun that still delivers, it’s our girls in Miami who are running the game.
Just look at everything we got in that time. The weird crew who works in the house wakes up and lights all the candles — and you know they are expensive because they have three wicks in them, just like the Grande Dame ordered. All the ladies sit down to breakfast and Lisa tells them they will play a game. I sighed because these shows keep being like, “Okay, I have a game. We’re going to go around the table and say the person who is the fugliest. I’ll start. It’s all of you.â€
No, this was a real actual game. Lisa broke the group into three groups of three for a scavenger hunt. Each team got a list of things to find or do in the house and a Polaroid to document all of them. Immediately the most fun trio is our Cuban ladies: Alexia, Marysol, and Dr. Nicole. They go outside and slug down a shot, Marysol gives Nicole a lap dance, and they crawl around on the floor like sexy animals. Then they go into Kiki’s room and start looking through her bag for either a tampon, red underwear, or lip gloss. Instead, they find her dildo, or as the Cuban Teresa Giudice mispronounces it, a “dildu.†Dr. Nicole is on the slut-shaming tip and says, “Who goes for a girls’ trip with the intention of masturbating.†All of them should! Masturbation is like the merry-go-round of the body and everyone who isn’t riding that shit daily (for free, minus any porn subscriptions) is really missing out.
Team Cuban Sandwiches dominates the competition so thoroughly that we don’t even see what the rest of the teams are up to. But it’s dwarfed by a really sweet moment between Marysol and Nicole post-hunt. Marysol decides that after two years of being on the show, she’s finally going to cut Nicole some slack. “You were good. You probably hate me a lot because I was such a pill,†she tells Nicole, who agrees with the sentiment. Marysol admits what we all intuited: The legacy ladies didn’t trust the newbies and were hazing them for at least the first full season and perhaps even the second. They have a nice laugh and an apology, and, for a change, I love to see Housewives getting along.
Then, as if that weren’t enough, Marysol and Alexia try to get the shade down in their room by jumping for it, getting Marysol to climb on Alexia’s back, and conjuring up an ancient voodoo spell. Finally, after they’ve given up, Alexia finds the switch. They were automatic all along. If Alexia is here, then Franklin Lakes is missing its Teresa. And then on the car ride there, we found out that the only threesome that Kiki has had is with two dildus, and I didn’t think I could love Kiki more, but I somehow found it.
That’s kind of it. That’s the whole first act, which we called the thing before the first commercial break even though no one watches with commercials anymore. I loved it. I don’t need the fighting, I don’t need the yelling, I just needed to have a fun time. We have plenty of fun in the rest of the episode too. What about when the ladies all go to play croquet in matching vintage convertibles, and one of them breaks down and six of them have to pile in one car like they’re the Olympic Gymnastics Team returned for a ticker-tape parade? Nothing is happening necessarily, but I LOLed. Or what about Larsa talking about Lisa charging $10,000 a month on Instacart, mostly by ordering makeup from Sephora? Amazing. This is what I love. I could have a whole show of this.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t drama and conflict. This is what I love about the ladies of Miami. Find you a cast that can do both. All of the major conflicts happen at dinner. After all of the fun, Marysol says that she and Adriana need to engage in the great Housewives tradition of addressing the elephant in the room. (Seriously, who keeps letting in the elephant and why doesn’t it know its own address?) She says that she doesn’t like who she was when she was yelling at Adriana in the Sprinter van on the way to Larsa’s charity basketball game. They cheers and get over it.
It seems like another nice, light Miami moment, and then things start to really turn on Marysol. Julia, Adriana’s ride-or-die, says that many of the problems in the group are Marysol’s fault and she is the reason the group can’t move on. Julia’s problem, for instance, is from last season, when Marysol started the rumor that Adriana’s man was married. When they debunked it, it was then Alexia who took all the heat for Marysol spreading rumors. Nicole also pipes in and says that Marysol is also the one who started the rumor about her sleeping with someone else at her hospital, and again she came hard at Alexia.
Then, shockingly, Alexia enters the chat. She immediately renamed the chat “Alexia and the Girls†and made the icon of the group chat a picture of her cleavage. She goes against Marysol for possibly the first time ever, saying that Marysol stirs up the shit, disappears, and then everyone vents their anger at her instead and she’s sick of it. Marysol acknowledges all of this and says she shouldn’t have done it. Good steps.
Then Julia sounds really out there and asks Marysol if she ever hired a private investigator to tail the women. She didn’t have to. She just waited until she met Meghan King Edmonds at BravoCon and let her do the dirty work. While it seems like an insane question, Nicole says that someone definitely followed her husband and was taking pictures of him at a work happy hour. Oh, that wasn’t a PI. That was someone working for Secret Bear magazine, which takes photos of hot hairy men in their native habitat.
Julia also says that she talked to someone who said that Marysol wanted Adriana dead. Marysol knows immediately that it is her ex and that they had a very contentious breakup. Julia lets us know that she has been hanging out with him and they’re quite close. Why is it that I can only picture Julia hanging out with women and goats? I can’t imagine her in the company of men at all. But, yeah, that’s really shady. The next day, Adriana and Julia are talking about this and Julia says the ex has all sorts of allegations against Marysol, starting with stalking and spying and ending with straight-up voodoo. Adriana even invokes the name of Lea Black, and we know where she got her last name. Black magic. That’s right.
The relationship between Julia and Marysol’s ex seems like it’s going to derail all of this forgiveness, but before we can really delve into it, Lisa says, “If you guys ever wanted to go to dinner with Lenny, I would be very uncomfortable with that.†Yes, as always, she turns the conversation to Lenny. Kiki, for one, is no longer having any of it. She says that Lisa is 10 percent “Jody, Jody, Jody†and 90 percent “Lenny, Lenny, Lenny.†Based on what we’ve seen so far this season, nine out of ten statisticians agree. The tenth is Lenny’s cousin, so he doesn’t even count.
Lisa immediately breaks down and says that she is in the thick of a messy divorce. Yes, sister. We all know. How? Because you won’t shut up about it. She asks the group how it affects their lives, well, because they have to hear about it and Lisa never shuts up about it. I get Kiki’s frustration. She says she wants to hear about what Lisa is up to. They all see her repeating the same mistakes, having her identity defined both by the man that she’s leaving and the one she’s running to. I think what Kiki wants, which is probably what all of the women want, is for Lisa to really turn into the butterfly she keeps talking about after listening to too many Mariah Carey albums. They want her to succeed on her own without a man. They also probably want to stop hearing about Lenny.
Later in the episode, when she’s trying to figure out what her personal scent should smell like, Lisa says it’s not just about the physical scent. She wants women to hear her story and be empowered by it. Which story is that? The one where she was tortured by the Boob God during her contentious divorce? I don’t know if that’s as empowering as she thinks it is. Tyler, the regional gay in charge of Aroma360, is living for it, but Dr. Nicole is not. She wants to know, just like all of the other women, what they need to do to get Lisa to the next chapter. Lisa says she first needs to stop feeling anger and resentment toward Lenny. Can I suggest, I don’t know, a therapist? They have to listen to you talk about all your inane shit for hours at a time. This sounds like a good compromise.
While she’s on the couch dealing with Adriana and Dr. Nicole (because Larsa, her bestie, wouldn’t go with her ’cause she wanted to play croquet), the rest of the group is sitting around talking about how they are too young, too ethnic, and too female to be playing at the National Croquet Center. They’re not letting Lisa or anything get them down. They’re enjoying the sun, the cocktails, the breeze that smells like adult diapers and Ben-Gay. They’re living their best lives, and I’m just so happy for a tiny bit of that sunshine to reflect on me.