The thought came to me while I scrolled through my Twitter feed and saw all of the unironic cry-face emojis reacting to Theresa Giudice’s reunion with her square-shaped husband after spending some time in jail: I’d make a really terrible Real Housewife.
To be fair, I did not watch Theresa’s triumphant return home because I’ve sworn off the Jersey ladies in much the same way I’ve also sworn off carbs. As I see it, the only real difference between the two – both of which are terrible for you and leave you feeling sluggish – is that I still crave one of those things desperately, though I can promise and swear that the thing I miss did not create an offspring I’m fairly certain is from another species entirely. What I’m trying to say (besides that I think little Milania will one day help to usher in the apocalypse) is that my reaction to hearing about this woman coming home was different than I think it was supposed to be. I did not cheer her homecoming. I did not pour myself a celebratory glass of Fabellini. I did not tear up and I did not tune in.
I’m sure Theresa would say I don’t like her because I’m jealous. Calling someone who hates you “jealous” is a very Housewives thing to do. Over in New York City, Luann is all but making commemorative tees that proclaim how jealous everyone on the planet is of her joy and she will shoot those shirts from a cannon while she performs one of her hit songs at her upcoming wedding. It appears that you cannot be a Bravo Housewife and not wholeheartedly believe the root of someone’s discontent with you is always predicated by a hungry green-eyed monster. It also appears you cannot earn a paycheck from the network without having to continually associate with the very people you can no longer stomach and you must do it while wearing a rather hideous jewel-toned cocktail dress.
Being on a reality show means you have to get dressed up and go hang out with people who plot against you like you’re all still in the eighth grade. You have to attend theme parties. My standard answer to a probing question I don’t much feel like answering Yeah, I’m not talking about that – probably wouldn’t go over all that well at one of those parties and definitely would not fly at the Reunion. However, using the answer I employed the other day when speaking about someone I know well – She’s behaving this way because she’s an asshole – might very well get me a raise on one of these shows. That line would probably be used in the coming attractions for the season, but it would be misleading because I’d never actually get into it with the asshole. Assholes, you see, very rarely realize they’re assholes, even when provided with a color-coded flowchart that maps their asshole behavioral history. Not being on a reality show means I get to ignore assholes most of the time. But if I were an OC Housewife, I’d have to endure that never-ending conversation (yet again) as the asshole before me mimes the crucifixion (yet again) while both of us wear the closest approximations of polyester chic we were able to locate so we can fit right in at the seventies party neither of us particularly wanted to attend in the first place. It all just seems exhausting.
Speaking of total assholes who exhaust me, I look at Vicki Gunvalson and I cannot believe she has been on this show for eleven seasons and has seemingly learned so little about herself and rational human behavior in the process. It also stuns me that she hasn’t started to dress differently or mastered a new way to shriek so every Schnauzer in the neighborhood will not begin to howl whenever she gets angry. And it’s most difficult to believe that after going through a divorce and watching her friendships implode into a smoldering pit of ruins, she still doesn’t long for just the tiniest bit of privacy.
Vicki is the perfect Real Housewife because she never learns a blessed thing.
Here are some places I’d rather be than inside of a car with Vicki Gunvalson on a long road trip:
· A hot yoga class that I’ve run to in order to get a brief respite from the brutality of a humidity-drenched heat wave in late August, one that caused a cataclysmic weather crisis that simultaneously led all air conditioners in the region to explode at the very same moment that Duane Reade and CVS ran out of every form of deodorant including carpet deodorizer.
· Sitting in Biology class on my first day of 8th grade when my hair was newly lobbed into some hideous asymmetrical style, all the better to show off my frosted pink 44 lip-gloss. It hurt just looking at myself in the mirror.
· Standing on line in Nordstrom when I’m in a massive hurry while the person in front of me returns a dress so awful that, not only should she never have purchased the item in the first place, but some designer should have thimbles rammed into his ears and nostrils just for creating it. By the way, this return will be conducted by a Nordstrom employee who just started working at the store an hour ago and nodded convincingly when her supervisor asked if she understood the return process because she didn’t want to appear like an idiot on her first day and now the supervisor has left and the new girl has no fucking idea what she’s doing.
· Hell.
Fortunately, I can see no scenario – including one that takes place in the fiery confines of Hell – in which I will have to ride shotgun as Vicki Gunvalson literally drives me to a full mental breakdown. Briana doesn’t have it so lucky. She is heading from Oklahoma to California, and it’s all because Vicki prayed so hard to her BFF, Jesus, for Briana and her family to live close enough that Vicki can pop by to borrow some brown paint, should she ever eventually run out. Actually, the truth is that Briana wants to be close to her team of doctors because there’s a lot physically going on with her. It’s a shame such a young woman is facing these medical issues. Her husband has to stay behind for a while and Briana cries as she says goodbye to him and to her house and to any future privacy she ever hoped to achieve now that she lives just a hop, skip, and a whoo hoo from her lunatic mother.
For those of you too caught up with watching the recent scuffle between lunatics who want to continue to allow people on a No-Fly list to purchase automatic weapons and decent people who desire some change and chose to squat on the House floor until a vote could transpire or the chaos rumbling through the financial cosmos because of the Brexit vote, I am very sorry to tell you that you missed some other essential news this week. Yes, it was reported just the other day that Vicki Gunvalson – a woman who makes me want to secede from the human race in general – claims to have lost over twenty pounds! And how did she manage to shed one of those thighs? Well, she used a wise diet that included gnawing on grapefruit and lettuce for breakfast (because who doesn’t crave lettuce at dawn?) before skipping lunch entirely and then tearing into an ounce of chicken when it grew dark outside. In other words, Vicki used a diet plan called “Starvation” to achieve her goals and though I’m repulsed that she put such information out into a world where impressionable people might decide to follow in her bullshit footsteps, I’m even more upset that her dramatic weight loss did not result in her vocal cords depleting to just a hanging thread of nothingness.
Turns out that Vicki can still speak because the world is just not fair. It also turns out that we start this week’s episode still on that boat where Heather would like to know why Vicki didn’t call everybody immediately after the Brooks-faking-cancer-and-doctoring-medical-records debacle to say, “Holy shit, you were all right! I was dating a lying sack of total horseshit who was so repulsive that he lied about having cancer.” I feel the need here to say that, whatever Vicki’s response to Heather's question, that answer matters far less than the fact that she waited until the motherfucking cameras were following her again before she even attempted to craft an apology to any of these people and that kind of scheduling tactic makes me scoff at any of her impassioned pleas for forgiveness. By the way, in this context, “scoff” means flinging something at a wall and wishing the wall was Vicki’s face.
There are just some people whose absence in your life feels nothing short of palpable. It’s not even the lack of their physical presence that creates the smoldering void, but all of those damn associations you stumble upon – daily, hourly. If you’re anything like me, you find yourself tripping dangerously over song lyrics. You bang headfirst into television commercials that advertise products you once would have purchased just to see that person smile. You fall with a painful thud down a whirring rabbit hole that’s been lined with a tarnishing silvered memory and land, totally disoriented, into a pit of what you are certain must be simmering regret. When you wake up in the morning, another name pops into your fatigued brain, even before you wipe the cloudiness of sleep from your eyes, even before you remember your own name.
You finally understand why just the syllables that make up the word “longing” sound so incredibly hopeless.
I have not experienced any of the above emotions during the many months that have gloriously stretched by since The Real Housewives of Orange County has graced my television screen. I have not missed a single one of those ladies or the bedazzled tank tops they wear without even a hint of irony. And while I suffer from the terrible affliction of always wanting to give a person a second (or a nineteenth) chance to prove he or she is not a total asshole, my opinions are already rather solidified when it comes to some of these women who have suffered continuously due to the exposure and stress being a part of this show brings into their lives – and yet they still always come back for more, more, more.
What’s even left to say anymore?
That Brooks really has cancer or that he never had cancer?
That Shannon's marriage has legitimately been repaired or that it's currently being held together by a very loose Band-Aid with emotional puss threatening to leak out from all sides?
That Tamra is a reformed sinner or one just taking a break from sinning due to sheer exhaustion and the recommendation of a PR rep she met while standing on line at her local CVS buying generic antifungal cream?
That Heather might or might not petition the United States Postal Service to get her very own zip code for her behemoth of a home?
That Meghan believes that her terrifyingly chilly husband truly loves her or that she just got temporarily dazzled by a proximity to fame and ended up in over her head in a marriage that reads like a Grimm's cautionary fairytale about a once-blonde woman who was swept off her feet by a psychotic baseball player?
That Vicki is a pathetic asshole?
As we head into part fucking three of a Reunion that could have been covered in half the time if they’d just left out the colonic montage, what we do know for sure is that nothing will be resolved. The questions we have will never get answered despite my guess that every single one of these women will be back next season, even Vicki. It probably won't matter that there’s an epidemic of rumors floating around that the rest of the OC Housewives are threatening to refuse to film with her in the form of a reality TV fatwa or that she has been exposed to be foolish, hysterical, cunning and naïve (hard to pull off both at the same time, but then again, Vicki is special), friendless, and the kind of mother who chooses a man over her own kid. She'll still be back. She cannot stay away from any kind of attention. But it’s not her fault – God made her that way.
On the snowy twilight of my Sweet 16, I twirled across a dance floor wearing a red dress that had poofy shoulders and a tight bodice. The neckline showed off my newly burgeoning chest and gave a strong hint that I'd probably need to buy some serious bras with some serious built-in underwire by that summer, but I was too busy that night to pay any attention to the changes taking place beneath my undergarments. See, I was laughing with my friends and singing along to The Cure and dancing with the boy who would be the first one to feel those newly-hatched breasts that upcoming summer while we reclined on some stranger's front lawn. But before any adolescent groping could transpire, I had a Sweet 16 to enjoy and the events of that winter party were entirely innocent and full of real joy, marred only by the white opera gloves I wore for the entire night that made my palms so sweaty that I left little marks on the shoulders of the people I danced with.
Even at sixteen I loved me a touch of the dramatic.
What I'm saying here with this Just Like Heaven-sponsored boogie down memory lane is that I know the meaning of a big day. I know how an outfit can matter and how glorious it feels when people take time out of their lives to celebrate you and that's why I feel able to understand just how big a day it is for Tamra. No, strike that. It's not a big day; it’s a huge day! Today she will be baptized. She will prove her commitment to God and embrace the strength religion has given her to be less of an asshole on a moment’s notice. She will wear white and – based upon her holy decree – so will her guests. And then she will drink wine next to a gorgeous pier because that’s what she thinks Jesus would have done if he’d been born in Orange County.
Life in the eighth grade just wasn’t easy. I don’t allow my present mind to flutter back to those days all that often, but every now and again a song will come on the radio and before I can even stop it from happening, I find myself conjuring up terrifying images of the unflattering short haircut I was talked into getting by friends I now believe might really have been very stealth enemies. It was a look defined by the kind of uncontrollable frizz that could have potentially toppled an empire and it was smack dab on top of the head of a girl whose self-esteem was already quaking due to the braces plastered across her teeth and not nearly enough Champion sweatshirts hanging in her closet. It was a rough time and it was made exponentially more difficult the day my mother announced that she was marrying a man I knew full well was a putz. For the purposes of this little tale, I am going to call him Bill – because that’s his real name and I see no need to protect the anonymity of a putz.
It’s not that Bill was a terrible person, but he kind of made me sick to my stomach. He wasn’t particularly smart and he definitely wasn’t funny and he took up space in a home that already felt rather crowded after stuff like a divorce had gone down. He wasn’t cruel to me in the slightest – he bought me a black and white cookie every time he went to the corner store to buy the newspaper, so there was some kindness there – but I could tell that he was threatened by how successful my mother was in her career and that kind of reaction revolted me. The distaste I had for him spread quickly, like a particularly fungusy outbreak of athlete’s foot, and it didn’t take long for me to decide that I hated the following things about a man who lived in my house:
1. I detested the way he ate pasta. There was no delicate twirling of a noodle and certainly no quiet slurping ever went down. Instead, it was Bill’s face and his mouth and a plate of food engaging in what looked and sounded like a full-contact sport and thinking about it even now might have finally put me off carbohydrates forever.
2. I loathed the way he snored. My bedroom was upstairs in those days and the bedroom he shared with my far more tolerant mother was right beneath me. I heard the rumbling of his snores through my floorboards each and every night, and I’d tell you that I’m ashamed that I sat awake often and contemplated how to frame someone else for his death, but that would be a lie. I felt absolutely no shame for anything except for the fact that I never made it a priority to devote my time to making some friends who were far less morality-minded than I was and had a basement where one could hide a body.
There comes a point during each and every year when the leaves turn from a bold green into a way less vibrant shade of dark yellow, when Oreos, M&Ms, ice cream, and lattes become available in pumpkin spice, and everyone in the vicinity begins to smell vaguely of nutmeg. The sun sets a bit earlier each evening and I fall asleep pondering the age-old question of exactly when I’m supposed to break out my boots or if I should continue to wear sandals while hoping my fake tan is continuing to fool anyone who isn’t blind.
It’s the time when the networks release their newest shows after hyping them nonstop for months and it’s also the time when I’m afraid to watch any of them because I’m reluctant to get hooked on another show, lest the day come when I choose to never again leave my house because I’ve become too emotionally attached to my twelve remotes. It’s the time of year when all of my favorite candy begins to appear in what some marketing moron coined a “fun size,” as though a smaller Milky Way could possibly be more fun than one that’s the size of a beer truck. And it’s also the precise moment when horror movies enter the theatres and I consider making some new friends who aren’t such wusses.
Yes, I have reached the point in my life where nobody I spend a great deal of time with wants to watch scary movies anymore. I understand that not everyone wants to pay to experience an abject burst of stinging fear, but I wish there was at least one person I could drag with me to see Goodnight Mommy, an Austrian film that is rumored to be the most terrifying hour and forty minutes that has ever graced a movie screen. I need to see it, but I also know that I’m too much of a chicken to watch it alone so I am currently compiling blackmail information on all of those nearest and dearest to me in the hopes of swaying someone to accompany me to the theatre by promising never to reveal that he has peed in his bed while in his thirties.
With horror movies taking hold of my mind and the darkest secrets of my loved ones filed away in a fireproof safe that has a combination of 666, I have begun to imagine the horror subgenres our beloved Housewives would be most likely to star in and I’ve come to some conclusions:
Like anyone with a hint of a pulse and a semi-decent attention span, I was quickly drawn into the first season of Mr. Robot. Even the commercials for the show were intriguing; they gave away almost nothing about what the eventual plot turned out to be, but there was a style to them that I responded to immediately. The show looked like it was going to be gritty, like it had been shot by some genius in 1973 before the studio system decided to sign him to a binding contract and then required that he trade in his testicles and his taste for some pure mainstream appeal that came with pure mainstream profit.
Only two minutes into the pilot, Mr. Robot managed to remind me of Taxi Driver and Fight Club in terms of having an unreliable but charismatic antihero protagonist and the lush wide shots, off-kilter pacing, and Elliot’s voiceover that came out like a drug-numbed drone settled deep within my head. I focused on the characters and their interactions and I was swept away to a very dark place that I happily crawled back to week after week. As with many series that have interwoven plots and mounds of developing characters and questions that have been alluringly dangled like a bunch of bright green grapes over the course of a season to ravenous viewers who just want something to chew, it was the penultimate episode of the first season that felt the most rewarding to me. Answers were offered and theories were somewhat resolved and so the actual finale fell a little flat for me because it would have been nearly impossible to follow up the gripping hour that preceded it. Still, there was something eerily magical about the conversation Elliot had on the street with Joanna in that last episode. The whole thing was shot in a hushed kind of manner and so much was not being said between them and all of the empty and dense space behind them in the frame managed to look almost menacing and it was just about perfect. For me though, the most perfect part of the entire episode was not that street scene, but a line spoken by Elliot in voiceover when he saw the mania created by the repercussions of his choices and his actions: “So this is what a revolution looks like.”
I couldn’t help but think about the Mr. Robot revolution line as I watched the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County because it certainly seems like a battle is about to burst forth, one that will be fought on the expansive grounds and inside the tacky parties thrown by women who should really know better than to expect normality to govern their lives anymore. I think maybe that’s what actually offends me – that any Housewife still has the audacity to feign surprise that 1) the other Housewives are talking about her and 2) that they are saying only very shitty things. What does surprise me, though, is the darkness this franchise as a whole has descended into. The conflicts used to revolve around lies rich women told one another for sport or people showing up to events for which they had never sent an RSVP or any other minor calamity from which an hour (or seven) of dramatics could be squeezed, but we are not in that place anymore. The conflicts have been upped and the fallout has become massive. Now our Housewives face things like incarceration. They fail publicly and spectacularly in alleged quests for sobriety. They are embroiled in lawsuits for screaming across the airwaves that another Housewife’s vagina smells like rotten fish. Depositions are actually scheduled for some of the other Housewives to comment on the record about what they have heard about the alleged scent of another woman’s vulva.
