This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They had lunch with their eldest sons and counseled them against a life in the reality-television arts and sciences. They wore a $6,000 diamond cowboy hat from their favorite store that only serves 818 tequila. They rode the mechanical bull for a grand total of 42 seconds (no, that is not a euphemism for using a vibrator). They went for dinner at the top of the Vegas hotel where Bravo put half of their talent during BravoCon, which now explains how they got so many rooms for so damn cheap.
But mostly, the rich ladies broke up into pairs in this episode. After a long night at Magic Mike Live, each woman ate lunch with her bestie. Garcelle and Sutton rode in a fake gondola in a fake canal in a fake mall and listened to a fake gondolier sing a fake aria from a fake opera, and they showed fake enthusiasm over the Ty-D-Bol water (also fake). Jesus, I hate Vegas. Kyle and Dorit went to lunch so that Dorit could play with the unraveling sleeve of what is surely a $3,000 designer sweater. That leaves Erika with her … um … her bestie … Crystal?
I really like Crystal, but even over her birthday weekend, she barely said anything, and at her lunch with Erika, she mostly just asks questions. I love seeing Erika open up in this episode, and after two years of being on edge every time she’s onscreen, it’s nice to be able to unclench and see her a bit more relaxed. She tells Crystal that, yes, she misses some things about life with Tom, but she doesn’t miss the fighting and the resentment. She tells the whole group that she still worries about money. Yes, things with Tom were nice, but having her freedom is much better. What goes unsaid is that now, when she uses her money to buy something, she knows it isn’t coming out of the pockets of widows and orphans.
Dorit and Kyle talk about the problems in their marriages, and I have a feeling we will see a lot of this throughout the season, so I don’t want to focus on it too much here. However, I love it when Kyle and Mauricio are FaceTiming and she brings up the dinner he had the night before with PK, a half-chewed wad of steak that’s losing at a game of flip-cup. He just says that it was all right. She says, “Give me the girl version,†meaning she needs to know every detail, every emotion, and every slight that might have come up at the dinner so they can ruminate over it for the better part of a week. Screw Girl Dinner, I’m here for the Girl Version.
Kyle did have some curious responses at dinner later that night when the question of whether or not monogamy is good comes up in a game. Kyle says she’s not the kind of lady who would just let her husband cheat and be totally fine with it. Hmm, that’s not what the fans seem to think. When asked if a man cheated on her one time if she would end it, she tells Garcelle she doesn’t know. This seems like a whole lot of foreshadowing. It’s not even that because we know Kyle and Mo are on a one-way train to Separation Town. I guess that’s more like two-shadowing.
But it isn’t just pairs in Vegas. There were pairs at home too. Erika and Garcelle have a rainy lunch where they talk about how much Dorit talks, which is so much that she even talks in her sleep. Garcelle says she feels like Dorit isn’t listening, but it seems that Erika is not listening because she’s tuning out whenever Dorit tells every detail of a story.
They also talk about Sutton. Oh, Sutton. This really hasn’t been her season. The big incident is when the women are all checking out of their suite and the elevator doors open to reveal Mikey, Erika’s creative director, and Davis, his partner, who is one of the dancers in Magic Mike Live. She says, “This is your chance to apologize to my friends for saying their show was shitty.†When Sutton tells them the show was great, Erika repeats it. Sutton apologizes again, and Davis says, “Maybe you can come back and see the show again.†See, her absence — and that of the other ladies — was noticed.
When they get into the Sprinter, Sutton says it wasn’t nice for Erika to put words in her mouth and that she didn’t say the show was shitty. No, she didn’t, but she sure implied it. She thought it was so graphic that she had to go sit out in the hallway and clutch her pearls. If that’s not saying it’s shitty, it’s at least saying that they should be ashamed to be in something so coochie-munching-erific.
She then says Erika intentionally tried to embarrass her, which I think is fair game. Sutton knew that Erika had friends in the show and still took all the focus (and half of the women) away from the show. She might not have done so intentionally, but she embarrassed Erika and her friends. And to be fair, Sutton owed them an apology.
However, in the Sprinter, Sutton tells them that she feels cornered and badly about how the night played out. She apologizes but says she’s not apologizing again. But we haven’t seen her apologize before. This is the first time Erika or the other ladies have heard she feels bad for the weekend. So why get bent out of shape about apologizing again when you haven’t even apologized once?
I was most impressed by Garcelle on the trip. Not only did she tell her bestie, Sutton, that she was acting unhinged, but she also expressed annoyance that she’s the one who always has to tend to crazy Sutton. As she explained to Dorit, she can’t take Sutton from a ten to a two on the Annoyance Richter Scale. Nor should she have to. Who is she? The Sutton Whisperer? This comes up again at lunch with Erika, where she says Sutton needs to fight her own battles sometimes instead of making Garcelle do it for her.
As for Sutton, it seems like she is getting set up for the “Sutton Is a Drunk†edit. Look at the interstitial scenes we get when the ladies return to L.A. First, we see Kyle going for a run without a Birkin and not in traffic. Lousy Housewives behavior. Then, we see Erika working with a trainer at the kickboxing gym. Finally, we get Sutton, who doesn’t think anyone works out anymore, pouring herself a vodka and grapefruit juice. The editors make a point of showing that it is one in the afternoon. Then we get the final pair of the night, which is Kyle going to visit Sutton, who may or may not be already sozzled. Kyle asks for tea, but Sutton repeatedly says that she wants a cocktail. Is this the same day that she started at 1 p.m.?
As soon as they start talking, Sutton seems to be going harder than usual. She is acting out Erika at the elevator, and even if you think what she did was unfair, Sutton’s parody is a little bit mean. Then Sutton starts repeating “defend your friend†to Kyle about Erika’s behavior. You can tell Kyle is already exasperated. She tells Sutton that she has a history of losing her shit, and Sutton starts saying, “Name ’em. Name ’em. Name ’em.†Kyle tells her she can’t because she won’t let her speak. Then there is a moment of silence, and Sutton says, once again, “Name ’em.†I will admit, her brashness did make me laugh out loud, but Kyle just got even more annoyed and started shouting.
I’m so glad that Kyle gave Sutton a list of the times she lost her shit, because I was already making a mental list for this here recap. Kyle brings up the “ugly leather pants†incident when she lost her shit at Lisa Rinna’s house. She reminds her of the face-roller incident in Lake Tahoe. (Both were Crystal-related.) Then she brings up the show in Vegas. I would also like to add the incident when she freaked out on the bus on the way to Teddi Mellencamp’s (say her name three times and she shall appear) “All In†retreat, where she cried in the car for no reason.
The episode ends on a fascinating note. Kyle says, “You didn’t seem okay in Vegas, and you don’t seem okay now, frankly.†By not “okay,†does she mean wasted? Is Kyle saying Sutton gets really drunk and then behaves like an idiot? Is this the story line we’re getting? As the camera pulls back and we see Sutton’s glassy eyes and bear-caught-in-a trap expression, it seems like she knows just what the implication is, and it seems like it might scare her just a little too much.