May you, one day, have a group of friends who will pass your FaceTime around a dinner at a luxury hotel while they all give you advice about handling your immediate and pending divorce. When Lisa calls a dinner in Key West, Julia tells her that she should cut off all the sleeves of his shirts and then throw them in their black-bottomed pool, which makes the rockin’ world go round. Marysol tells her that she should start posting pictures of herself with her kids on Instagram so that when he’s spotted out with his new girlfriend, he’ll look like an asshole. Adriana, with the simple but effective answer, says to change the locks, and if he gets aggressive, call 911. Finally, Larsa, whose very real and not artificial at all behind is stuffed with platitudes, tells her to prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
What an assortment of actions Lisa can choose from. The worst part of the phone call, though, was when she asked everyone if she thought that Lenny, a case of back-ne so bad that it creeps around to the front, is fucking the girl who shared a meal and two glasses of wine with him in their home movie theater. Um, you think?! She posted a picture of the $100,000 watch he bought her. He’s not giving her that for heavy petting and a few kisses on his bald spot. She is giving it away like she’s the sample girl at Costco.
I loved Marysol’s response in confessional, “What does she think they were doing? Playing tiddlywinks?†Marysol had another great line in her confessional —where she’s wearing no makeup and sitting on Alexia’s lap like a ventriloquist dummy — when she says of Lisa’s soon-to-be ex, “I never liked him.†Yeah, of course you didn’t. Who likes a UTI that is so searingly painful it makes you turn your whole hand into a cranberry? Because that is what Lenny is.
We’re going to wade even further into Lisa and Lenny later on. Before we get there, we have to talk about the end of the fight between Julia and Alexia on the bus, where Alexia says, “I’m always going to be in the spotlight because I was born a star,†which is like an on-the-fly Housewives tagline. She should have had Marysol, her amanuensis, write it down in a little black book. This is the way that we need our Housewives to think, of course, but it’s such an eye-rolling way of putting it.
Guerdy, our chief face maker, turns up her grimace at this, and Alexia doesn’t like it. When Guerdy brings up at lunch that no one should think they’re better than anyone else, she tries to explain it in this confusing metaphor about microphones. I have no clue what you are talking about, Guerdy, but I am totally on your side.
The women settle in for lunch at Havana Cabana, where they make mojitos and roll cigars and only make penis jokes during one of those activities. When they all sit down to eat, Julia asks where they go from here, which is a legit question. Alexia just called her a prostitute, accused Adriana of sleeping with married men, and pissed off Guerdy by saying she’s a bigger star than anyone else. But don’t get her wrong; Alexia is a feminist. She supports other women by calling them names. Ugh, she infuriates me because she’s always so awful and wrong but also, you know, really fucking good at her job. She is truly the Teresa Giudice of Miami.
In response to Julia’s question, Alexia says, “Are we still talking about this?†Yes, bitch! You pissed off half the people on the bus. If this were Rich Women Doing Things (a.k.a. RHOBH), you would be relitigating that one comment four reunions from now. Alexia says, “I apologized. What else do you want me to do?†Um, how about for you to mean the apology? Recognizing what you did wrong would be a good step, but the only thing Alexia can recognize is a sale on cat-eyed sunglasses.
As the women (sans Dr. Nicole, who has the realest job in the whole franchise and had to go to work) head to dinner, Adriana gets a call from Thierry, the guy she’s dating that Alexia says is married. He tells her, with Julia and Guerdy present, that he separated from his wife five years ago and has been divorced for probably three years. She gets to the table and tells everyone — it’s really meant for Alexia, who has made this a huge point — that her man isn’t married.
Alexia’s response is a perfect example of why she drives me insane. Alexia then pulls up his marriage license that says he is still married. Okay, that seems damning, but evidence without context is worthless. As everyone around the table said, maybe it has been updated since Alexia called her gay Jonny and told him to get to Googling and find all the dirt on Adriana so she could have it at her fingertips. (What is Jonny, an Alexa with cornrows?) Of course, Alexia did research and has receipts. The worst part, though, is she says she did it for Adriana’s benefit. Sister, do not bullshit a pile of male cow turds such as myself. You did this because you want to look good on the show and/or hate Adriana and don’t want her getting more popular than you. This is why I can’t stand Alexia. If you are going to be nasty, just be nasty. In the words of Lisa Rinna, own it.
Back in Miami, Adriana wants all of the women to be in her music video, the follow-up to her 2012 hit. Um, ten years later, is it a follow-up? The only one who shows is Kiki because “friends of†are always going to help each other, and they get paid per day of filming, so why not. The rest of the women are off at lunch, laughing about the insanity of this music video. I mean, Julia didn’t even show up. That’s like your conjoined twin not attending your graduation party.
Larsa is out to lunch with Alexia and Marysol, and she drops a bombshell: her friend saw Julia making out with a dude. We’ll get to that next episode, it looks like. But the bigger bombs are about her time out at the club with Lisa when they ran into Lenny, a walking autoerotic-asphyxiation accident, at the club, which readers of the Housewives Institute Bulletin already knew about.
Even better, Lisa is sitting down with her mother-in-law, Marina, to talk about how awful her son is. This is a woman who has hated Lisa since season two back in 2013 but is now taking Lisa’s side. Can you imagine being so awful that even your mother disowns you?
There is nothing new that we learn in this meeting. She ran into Lenny at the club, and he was awful to her; she asked the new girlfriend why she is so evil, and she didn’t respond. Then Lenny’s mom finds out about it and says she supports Lisa 100 percent, and I never want to let this woman off my television screen.
There is a funny discussion at the Larsa lunch where they think that maybe Lenny has been telling Lisa this was going on for weeks or months, and she just didn’t fully understand it. They use the evidence that Lisa didn’t think they were sleeping together to say that she was naïve, but I think they have it wrong. Why would Lenny be filming romantic dinners with her just a week before the big divorce announcement? If he was trying to drill into her head they were over, he would never have sat down for that. He totally deluded this girl right to her ruin.
As the episode ended, I was brought back to their trip to the Keys. After dinner, all of the women retire to a firepit at their (barely-populated) resort, and they get ready to visit a shaman. I was about to freak out. Shamans, healers, and psychics of any kind are usually a sort of kryptonite to Housewives, like going on boats or renewing their vows. Instead, we get Fernando, a man dressed in all-white with a mane flowing like one of the members of Nelson. He goes around the circle and gets the women to unburden. Julia doesn’t know how to handle her marriage; Marysol still isn’t over her parents’ deaths; Alexia has a son named Peter who is the worst human on the planet; Kiki is scared (probably of Alexia); Larsa can’t find a man; Adriana wants to support the ghost of her cuckolded mother; Guerdy has a little bird that taps on her window every day telling her to work harder, and it’s really her brother, and she doesn’t know how to kill the bird without killing her brother — holy shit now I get why the women say listening to her is like trying to decode a Rubik’s cube.
But it’s a nice moment; this shaman teaches the women to see in the dark. If only Lisa had been there. If only he could have led her to look past her husband and his mistress. If only he could have shown her how to squint her eyes and see the difficult path before her, to give her the strength to carry herself with dignity and grace, if only he could show her that she is taller and stronger standing on her own. If only he could have shown her, with her feet digging down into the cold granules of the beach, that the waves will keep beating, the gulls will keep screaming, the earth will keep spinning. And, one day, that spinning will feel like the best amusement park ride in the world. If only, if only … instead she’s stabbing at her shakshuka with her mother-in-law, wondering how she can get the black magic to flow through her veins.