This episode of The Real Housewives of New York begins the way every episode of this show – and every single day of my life – should always begin, with a Deep Thought By Luann: “When you’re in love, everybody tries to rip you down!" Luann wails the sentiment, and it's probably because she has no idea who she really is or how people really view her. She’s a woman so blinded by her massive and spiking levels of self-worth that she cannot see that it’s actually her insufferable arrogance that is causing these women to turn on her, not the jealousy that only she can see. Also? Whenever someone above the age of twenty-three insists upon using the word “soulmate,” the wise people in their midst need to be given free reign to snicker and start forming brackets or perhaps an entire gambling ring that will monitor just how long it takes for this relationship to implode since the people in the relationship are clearly currently clouded by overwhelming lust and dollar signs that smell like lube.
We are still at Dorinda’s dinner party, the one she threw because she’s contractually obligated to do her part in getting this group of women who would never actually see one another on their own volition into the same room every once in a while. Having heard quite enough about which of her fellow castmates Tom has seen in just a thong, Luann finally gets up and walks out. She runs into the smokers on her way to freedom. Dorinda and Jules implore her to stay, but Luann’s had it. She is going home, dammit, to the penthouse apartment with the fucking terrace and she will stare into a hand mirror until she feels better about herself while she reclines on a chaise that allows her to stare down from Tom’s rooftop at all of the little people who just want to be her.
If I have to listen to one more human being – or whatever species wants to claim Ramona Singer as one of its own – so much as murmur that Sonja Morgan has any sort of right to claim that all of the other women around her were wrong and innately cruel to have had doubts about the validity of Sonja’s clothing line and that it would actually become a reality and was not instead simply a long-running hallucination festering in the mind of crazy woman, I’m going to strangle that person with one of Sonja’s jodhpurs, which I’m imagining are being sold on her website and will be eventually shipped to my home by her Mailing Intern, Francois. Let’s just look logically and empirically at all that’s gone down. Was there clothing on the bodies of the models at Sonja’s fashion show? Yes. Was the clothing decently designed and styled well? Yes. Did every single person with whom Sonja had interacted with prior to that event have several exceptionally good reasons to doubt that those clothes existed in the first place due to the fact that Sonja seemed to have no clear idea of what her line was about or where it would be sold and because nothing else she has ever attempted on this show in the name of business has ever fully come to fruition? Fuck yes.
It’s Fashion Week on The Real Housewives of New York and that means that we will all be privy to exquisite beauty and unadulterated elegance and we will gain access to the elite of the elite and…I’m sorry, what’s that? Oh, Ramona Singer will be there? Then fuck elegance and class because all Fashion Week on this show really means is that it’s time once again to tread through the bargain basement of blonde muck, but we needn’t despair because once we emerge, we’ll be treated to a New Beginning.
On the night I turned twenty-one, a nor'easter swept across the eastern seaboard and blanketed every single street and every single car in hills and heaps of stark white snow. When I fell into a heavy sleep tinged with just a little bit of vodka-influenced unconsciousness, it hadn't yet snowed even a fleck so when I woke up just six hours later and looked outside and saw a blizzard, I thought I'd been asleep for a year. It was jarring, the whole thing, but the actual snow didn't impact me all that much. See, I wasn't going anywhere due to a mild case of alcohol poisoning that I mostly blamed on the Mind Eraser I’d sucked quickly through a straw. What's in a Mind Eraser? I have absolutely no idea, but I'm pretty sure it's both Lucifer's and Donald Trump's favorite all-time beverage.
But even though I spent most of the next day curled into a fetal position on the tile floor of the bathroom, I wasn’t the one in the house who was having the worst time. Turns out that my friend Melissa was dealing with far worse because the random guy she brought home from the bar the night before was now snowed in with us and, because we weren’t living inside of a shitty romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson, she’d already realized that she hated him. His car, which I could see from the bathroom window I’d lift open now and again so I could convince myself through a freezing blast of air that I was in fact still alive, looked like it might need to be professionally excavated – and it wasn’t like anyone could come pick him up because all of the roads were closed. For the foreseeable future (which for me I thought only meant another hour or so because I was certain that I was dying), the guy was going to be our newest roommate unless we all banded together and murdered him – which would have been a very bad idea in real life but, now that I think about it, a very good idea for a movie.
Shotgun, motherfuckers.
Let’s just – for the sake of nightmares – imagine what life would be like as a citizen of Ramona’s World. The temperature on the perimeter of that purgatory would probably hover somewhere around ninety-two degrees day and night. Men and women both could be hauled off to jail for committing the transgression of getting the Queen’s hair wet. The national anthem would be performed with an accompanying choreographed dance that ends with a few random spasmodic swivels before requiring that the performer then straddle the woman closest to her. The currency is in the shade of Ramona Blue and a picture of her with a massive curler in the front of her hair is splayed across it. The flag, hung high outside of every government building and day spa, has Ramona’s face on each side, but they are two very different pictures with two very different expressions so that the way the wind blows actually dictates the Ramona one gets to see at any given moment. And over on Turtle Time Avenue, behind the gates made out of melted down religious jewelry and over the moat where the Prime Minister of Ramona World, Sonja Morgan, likes to take in some sun while she’s hung way over, the Queen resides and each Thursday she addresses her loyal subjects from a balcony while wearing the Herve Leger dress she once stole from Bethenny Frankel, the woman she had to permanently banish from Ramona World after Bethenny finally realized that Ramona is not actually a seven year old and therefore shouldn’t be pardoned for acting like a total asshole.
After the dinner and the beginning of an intervention that didn’t quite take – after the first round of tears and immediately before the second river began to flow from another set of designer tear ducts – Carole and Heather find themselves in the spacious linen-covered room of their cool marble villa.
“I love Sonja, but man, she’s a lot of work,” muses Carole.
Amen, sister.
The (dilapidated) House of Morgan is toppling down in a spectacular fashion – if “spectacular” means public and embarrassing to one who is capable of feeling such an emotion – but we shall get there in due time because first we have other unplesantries with which to deal. In the olden days (you know, when Alex and Simon were on the show and Alex tried to convince us that she was an in-demand model and Simon tried to convince us that he was heterosexual), the first ten minutes of conflict within this episode would have been stretched out for an entire program, but those days are now dead and full of decay and the hostility exhibited before the first commercial break was really just a light amuse bouche made out of imitation crabmeat that sat on a countertop for too long.
I don’t know which part of the first ten minutes of this episode of The Real Housewives of New York is most likely to nestle itself deep within the stickiest part of my psyche and forever remain there unless I can figure out how to order a self-lobotomy kit from amazon.com:
Whatever happens – no matter how many silk charmeuse gowns from her collection she promises you and no matter how hilarious the producers insist the experience will be – nobody take Sonja Morgan gardening. I mean, if she is able to find a makeshift dildo during a cupcake decorating class usually intended for children, can you imagine what she could do while surrounded by actual hoes and fields that literally need to be plowed and cucumbers and carrots and – God forbid – an eggplant?
But at the cupcake decorating excursion, Sonja can only rub herself against an instrument intended for rolling out fondant and there seem to be no toasters on the premises that she’s in danger of straddling and so she keeps herself pretty much in check and all of the ladies get along swimmingly, but that’s probably because only four of them are there. Bethenny invited Ramona, Dorinda, and Sonja to join her in creating edible masterpieces that not one of these women will actually take a bite of – not even if they throw it up later – and Ramona actually reveals that she’s giving her cupcakes to her doorman, which might sound kind of dirty, but only if Sonja said it.
Here are some of my all-time favorite birthday memories:
· One year, my mother rented out a chocolate store and some of my best friends and I dipped marshmallows that were on sticks into whatever flavor of chocolate we wanted and then we coated the entire thing with pastel sprinkles and made molds of our initials out of creamy white chocolate and no fifth grader has ever had more fun than I did that day.
· I turned sixteen wearing a red gown and white opera gloves that looked dramatic as hell and felt sweaty as fuck. And I danced for the entire night and looked across the room and saw everyone I loved writing on a message board with sparkly paint pens and I really wish I had that message board still, but I’ve always been really bad at saving things.
