Can we give it up for Martin, the butler at Pirate’s Paradise, for all he has suffered through? Every morning, he has to get up, put on a surely scratchy white polo shirt, and prepare an ice bath for Kelly Killoren Bensimon’s face. She sticks it in for ten seconds like she’s Joan Crawford, unaware that the freezing point of Restylane is much higher than it is for water. Just like your mother said when you stuck your tongue out, if you keep doing it, one day your face is going to freeze that way.
Then Martin must go into Ramona’s room and turn on her shower because she never figured out how, even after five days. While doing this, he has to ignore Sonja Tremont Morgan, of the Aleve PM Morgans, who does not want to be disturbed before 10:15 a.m. unless it is for the return of the Pirate himself and then she will be ready and waiting for more garden anal. But then Ramona will just shout at him all day no matter what he does: “She is still testing me. I am a bit exhausted, yes.†Oh, Martin. You think you’re exhausted? We’ve had 15 years of this woman! She has exhausted the Bravo fandom so much we could all Rip Van Winkle.
Oh, and what about Sonja’s bathroom odors that he must clean up? They’re so bad that Luann comes into the main house saying that it smells like shit. She tells Ramona to tell Sonja to keep the bathroom door closed. Please — Ramona usually shits on the floor and we think she’ll be concerned about pooping with the door open?
Then after all that, Dorinda makes him plan a scavenger hunt with a bunch of props from old RHONY episodes so that the women can find them. As he’s explaining the rules, the women ask what the prize is. “Seeing Martin in his birthday suit,†Luann, always playing a long game, proposes. Okay, we would all like to see this, no? But do we say it out loud? Do we sexually harass the staff? If you’re a human, then no. If you’re a Housewife, then yes.
Speaking of harassing the staff, Quentin and Hugo, the adorable 20-something surf instructors, don’t even rate an ass grab. Maybe the women only limit themselves to objectifying men who clearly have a 401(k). We learn that some of the ladies are better at surfing than others. Dorinda learned on an ill-fated trip to Mexico that we all witnessed, and Luann still doesn’t remember. Kelly says the last time she was surfing was for a movie she was in called Innocence, in which she plays a writer who is a surfer who disappears. Crazy enough, it actually exists.
Kristen makes a big deal about how she has been on many surfing vacations with Josh, her husband, who is a world-renowned history buff. However, when she gets on the surfboard, she’s just as bad as everyone else. However, if anyone experienced trauma on that beach, it was Kristen and, well, all of us. Her toenail comes off right there in the sand, and we have to see the medic pull it off and cut it with a scalpel. Well, all of you did. I did not. I winced and screamed and covered my eyes and walked away from the television and curled up on myself and threw up all over the sofa and then I just lay there, heaving, wondering what it is like to have sand all up in your recently de-nailed toe. Then I vomited again and it looked just like a movie I once saw called Innocence.
I sort of love that Kristen is on this trip, because it’s comically wonderful that all the women ignore her. She’s two chairs over having something akin to surgery while Sonja, Luann, and Ramona lounge on chaises, cracking jokes about her. “It’s not like she’s giving birth,†Ramona says about Kristen’s screams. “She likes the attention.â€
Kristen asks for someone to hold her hand and Ramona gets up. Sonja tells her it’s nice she’s going over. “I’m not going over; I’m going to get ice,†Ramona says, worried more about her cocktail than her co-star. When Kristen is hobbling back to the van, she sarcastically says that she doesn’t need any help; everyone can just keep walking. Kelly then stops to take a selfie, totally oblivious that Kristen just lost an entire appendage.
Now it’s time for the scavenger hunt. Martin hides in his quarters while the women split into two teams. It’s Kelly, Kristen, and Sonja versus Luann, Ramona, and Dorinda. They have to find all sorts of things throughout the house: Alex McCord’s Herman Munster shoes, Aviva Drescher’s fake leg, the plastic wineglass Ramona threw at Kristen, Sonja’s teeth that are always falling out of her face, the Jovani dress Dorinda heckled Luann over, Sonja’s diapers. What a walk down memory lane that ends in the interminable indignity of a phone call to Harry Dubin, who has the final riddle for them to solve. Kristen does it, her team wins, and they all get a $100 gift card to the Regency.
This was a fun, cute game, and I loved all the flashbacks to some of our favorite incidents. However, this is peak RHONY: Glue Factory. It is like all their best times are behind them. We’re not in St. Barts to make new memories; we’re just back here reliving old times. This game seemed like something a group of fans would play on a Bravo-themed bachelorette, not something for the Queens of Cameo to do on their own.
I have enjoyed some of the conversations the women have had about what it’s like to be a Housewife and how they feel now that their show has essentially been canceled, but I want this show to go into the future for years to come. Aviva’s leg under a pool lounger is hilarious, but I also want more for our girls. Put them back in New York, where they belong, and follow them for three whole months, cowards.
That night at dinner, we are treated to two revelations: Luann in giant ‘80s hair like she’s about to pose for a Nagel and the fact that Ramona needs to be at the center of every photo and dining experience during the whole trip. To combat this, Luann, Kristen, and Dorinda, who are in a different van from Ramona and the other girls, show up at the restaurant and book it for the table. Dorinda and Luann put themselves in the seats of honor. When Ramona sits down defeated, she says, “I was going to give you the center tonight anyway.†Sonja says the only reason she said that is because Luann already had the seat, so she gets credit and doesn’t have to give anything up. Yup, that’s our monster.
During dinner, all the women tell how they met the men they eventually married. Well, that was supposed to be the game, but then Kelly tells us about when she and Gilles Bensimon got engaged, and it has to do with an engagement ring ripping her finger to shreds. Now we’re all telling engagement stories. When it’s Sonja’s turn, she’s doing both, telling a 20-minute tale of her first date with the bank, not the banker. There’s poo involved and a ring in the poo and a ring out of the poo. Other highlights include Sonja getting engaged before having sex with the guy, her getting pregnant the first time they tried, John John, Madonna, Gstaad, an updo, a yacht, a Nigerian soccer team, and a toaster oven that never happened.
It’s pure Sonja, both living in the past and living in a fantasy. After the long-ass story, the women get up from the table to relieve themselves and get some space. They say they know that Sonja embellishes; they know that she has a, ahem, gift for fiction. But Dorinda isn’t stopping her anymore like she did in the past. None of them are. At this point in their friendship, they know they can’t change it, and they don’t want to upset Sonja. It’s sort of like how you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker because they might inadvertently hurt themselves. It’s the same with Sonja and her delusions. We aren’t going to disabuse her of them, so we might as well let her enjoy the sunset.
As sad as it was to see my Favorite Floozy try to impress everyone with a rambling story full of half-truths, the saddest thing is when Ramona tells a story about butterflies. She says she heard about a man who watched a butterfly come out of its chrysalis. It has to fight and squeeze its big beautiful wings out of a small opening to take flight. They actually need this. The resistance is necessary for the butterfly to be strong enough to make its migration.
Not knowing this, the man decided to make the opening in the chrysalis bigger so that the butterfly could plop right out. But then it landed there, on his desk, still sullied in its own goo, making a spectacle of itself as it tried to fly repeatedly, only for its wings to end up back on the desk, sticky and glued to the surface with its own juices. The man loved watching this. He loved watching butterflies struggle, arrested from their final form by his own machinations. He laughed and joked and invited his friends, and they all laughed and joked, and this went on for years and years until there were hundreds of would-be butterflies arrested for our own amusement. That man’s name is Andy Cohen.