Last week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County ended with Meghan telling Vicki that she is old, bitter, and pissed off at the world. Like an echo-filled scream heard reverberating through every corner of Heather’s cavernous mansion – even in the luggage closet that’s behind the butler’s pantry which you can reach if you make the wrong turn coming out of bathroom #8 – Meghan’s statement results in every other woman sitting there momentarily stunned. How dare Meghan tell the truth? These women have taken a blood oath over champagne flutes and plasma-soaked safety pins that they would never reveal to the masses certain things they all know to be accurate. Nobody is to say that, in spite of her good-natured and self-effacing comments about being rich, that Heather cares enormously about being wealthy. It is never supposed to come out verbally that Tamra’s son Ryan looks like a serial killer who keeps a dead family in his basement. It’s just polite to pretend when speaking that Vicki is physically lovely and totally emotionally balanced and that Brooks is positively dreamy. And one should never say that Shannon is a walking, talking, and vodka-guzzling shell of a person who is married to another human being who is also currently just a rattling collection of bones and regret because those are the kinds of things one simply doesn’t say unless it’s behind that person’s back.
I just have to say something: I have no idea why someone would choose to become a Real Housewife at this point. It was different in the beginning, back when the franchise was just a colorful daydream in the mind of Andy Cohen as he sat in his living room and pretended that he was a talk show host by chatting with his dog and his plants. Nobody could know back then what exactly they were getting themselves into as they allowed cameras into their bathrooms and into their bedrooms and into the parties they threw for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that a producer dying to get a raise said something like, “Why don’t you invite everyone over for a Game Night?!” Nobody back then could be entirely sure how the massive amount of footage would eventually be edited. Certainly nobody could possibly fathom how the behavior that once seemed – at best – mildly bipolar in some of the participants would eventually morph into a cottage industry that has allowed rudeness to become acceptable and rampant cruelty to become simply part of a never-ending storyline. And definitely not one woman involved so much as considered the afternoon when it would hit the press that her husband’s name appeared on the hacked list of Ashley Madison clients.
Has it already been a year? Can it really be that time when the original Housewives – the ones with the really blonde hair who wear the really tight tank tops emblazoned with the really sparkly rhinestone crucifixes – land back on the airwaves with a resounding thud? Did my bargaining session with God not work nearly as well as I thought it had?
(Dear God: I know you’re incredibly busy and all with the rampant rising racism spreading through our cities and the growth of ISIS and the reboot of Full House, but I’m a very sweet girl and I only tell people who really deserve it to fuck off and I even recently started running so I’d live longer and look better in a bikini and I think that very clearly illustrates just how hard I try to be a good person. Anyway, I don’t mean to take up your time, but if you can see to it that the Orange County Housewives never return to our airwaves, I’d really appreciate it. And – as a contingency plan – should you have already bartered with Sir Andy Cohen the way I believe you must have and the show is once again a go, could you maybe fling Vicki Gunvalson into a bubbling volcano before production officially starts? Because I’ve waded my way through painful deaths of people I love and confusing levels of heartbreak and accidental viewings of that new Bravo show about the tit-enhanced women of Long Island that the network snuck into the sneak peak of The Real Housewives of New York, but I’m not sure that I’m really strong enough to watch Vicki discuss her love tank ever again and – just in case reincarnation is real – no version of me in any other lifetime will have the strength either. Thanks again, God. And thank you for the blessings you’ve already bestowed unto me, such as knowing how to be loyal to those I care for and for having my own set of tits that need no enhancement whatsoever. Please tell my dad and my grandmothers that I said hello. Amen.)
The Beverly Hills version of the Real Housewives series has always struck me as the platinum standard of the franchise. Sure, the women from New York own spacious mansions in the Hamptons that come complete with tennis courts and perfectly manicured sprawling lawns, and the women from New Jersey live in homes stuffed with the largest Baroque-style of furniture ever measured by modern man. Not to be outdone, the ladies from the O.C., who first brought this televised aspirational version of Dante’s hell into our living rooms, have the largest breast implants of all the women combined, but those distinctions simply do not matter. Because it is the group whose zip code is 90210 or 90210-adjacent who bring the real glam to those of us who watch the program while wearing sweatpants.
It seems important that I tell you that I have watched every single episode of every single season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I haven’t been able to fully commit to the other incarnations of the Housewives phenomenon, one that I firmly believe began as a fever dream in the mind of a flu-ridden Andy Cohen, but the Beverly Hills ladies have always had my undivided attention.
There exists a world, it seems, where the highest aspiration one can possibly dare to dream is that one day you will become a server Sur, a Los Angeles restaurant that I think serves Mediterranean cuisine, but the only thing I’ve ever seen anyone order from the menu and then consume is a fried ball of goat cheese.
Now, I’m not a crazy person; there’s probably nothing more delicious than a fried ball of any kind of cheese, but I’m also pretty sure that it would be to the benefit of your immune system to never nibble from a morsel of food that has ever been handled by a few of the servers at Sur who also moonlight as the stars of Vanderpump Rules.
It’s official: Lisa Vanderpump has risen in my mind from ABSOLUTE WALKING PERFECTION to THE DEITY I WILL FORCE MY MINIONS TO PRAY TO IF I EVER START MY VERY OWN CULT – and here’s how I know it: on last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she discussed at the dinner table that she does not trim the hair that covers her nether regions, and I did not want to vomit while listening to a woman who has lived for over five decades discuss her bush. Not only did I not feel even slightly nauseous, I actually gazed at my television set as it was graced with her supreme divinity and thought to myself, I’ll bet even this woman’s pubic hair is fabulous.
