Viewing entries in
vanderpump rules

ASS TATTOOS AND HATE CRIMES

ASS TATTOOS AND HATE CRIMES

On a street right near my house sits a church with a sign on its expansive front lawn.  I’m not sure who actually changes the letters on the sign or at what time of day the newest message to the public is thrown up there, but I do know that every few weeks new words appear.  I’d think maybe it’s God himself, but sometimes things on the sign are spelled incorrectly and my guess is that God’s got fact checkers and editors and at least three wise men up there who would never let a “your” pass for a “you’re.” 

The messages on that church’s sign are usually vaguely threatening, at least the way I read them.  They are always blunt – as I guess a sign should be – and they involve commands like, “Kneel.  He wants you to,” and I cannot help thinking in return, “But are you sure he wants you ending a sentence with a preposition?”  This week the message on the sign is far more tempered than I’ve ever seen.  There’s no verbal insistence that, “He died for your sins!” up there right now.  Instead, the church just wants to remind all of us that we need to put the “Christ” back in “Christmas” and I’d probably be far more okay with that command if it didn’t remind me of the kind of thing Kathy Lee Gifford used to say back when she hosted that old morning show with Regis and she had her former face.

It is with those staunch instructions about Christmas and what it should mean in my mind that I entered the salon I go to at a quarter to nine a few nights ago.  I figured that just as we ought to put the “Christ” back in “Christmas,” I also should probably put some highlights back in my hair.  When I moved a few years ago, I realized that I would need a new pedicure place and a new dry cleaner and a new Trader Joe’s and a new vet and I called my friend Shannon every time I needed to know where I should go.  “Where’s a waxing place that’s located near a bar so I can get a drink to numb the pain of having hair pulled off my nether regions with either hot wax or sugar?” I’d text her – and she would send back an address and a reminder to exhale through the pain.  And since she steered me in the right direction when it came to hair removal, I figured she might be just the person to recommend someone who would tend to the hair I actually want to flash to the world.

Andrea did Shannon’s hair and she started to do mine also. The first time I sat down with her, I laid it out straight:

“Listen,” I explained slowly, seriously.  “I don’t like major changes with my hair and I really don’t like inches being hacked off that we didn’t discuss for hours prior.  Once I called in sick after a bad bangs experience.  I don’t really bounce back from hair-related trauma very quickly.”

She nodded confidently and flung me around in the chair to take a look at what she was dealing with in the moment.  My hair hung far too long down my back and there were seven greys at the top of my head – and I know that because I’d counted them that morning with tears in my eyes.

“Can you give me three inches?” she asked assertively, which was exactly the tone to take with me just then, right before I could become hysterical.

“Where will three inches leave my ends when it’s dry?” I responded.  She pointed to a spot above my chest and I shook my head and we negotiated and then settled on two and a half inches instead and then she pulled out some foil and some dye and some scissors and the next thing I knew, I left that salon with hair the exact length we had agreed upon and blonde highlights I didn’t know I wanted in the first place.

(That one gorgeous guy who can cook aside, Andrea might be the single most important relationship I have formed over the last couple of years, and I say such a thing with no embarrassment in the slightest.)

Since it’s holiday time and my hair likes to look like I didn’t just rub my entire body against an electrical socket for kicks, it was time to carve out a few hours to get everything done again so Shannon and I decided to ask Andrea if we could go to the place after hours, if she’d keep it open for us.  She agreed and that’s why I found myself trudging outside in the pouring rain late one evening to get into Shannon’s car.  I brought my new puppy with me.

“Are you sure I can bring her to a salon?” I asked Shannon.  She was the one who suggested I bring the dog in the first place.

“Of course!” she trilled back.  “It’s just going to be us there!”

We arrived – and the place was packed.  Apparently, other stylists had been contacted by their friends who wanted to look presentable in the coming days and so I walked into a crowded salon clutching a member of the canine family.  But here, of course, is the thing:  there’s nobody who can look at a three-pound happy puppy and not immediately move from the thought, “Why is there a dog here?” to “I need to hold that thing this instant!”  I did what I needed to do and I pimped my dog out and let everyone pass her around and marvel over her ridiculous level of cuteness – which is staggering – and eventually everybody except us left.  I’d been holding her the entire time, but I placed a wee wee pad on the ground and she went right to it and Shannon and Andrea and I applauded.  Then she went tearing around the place, finding the pedicure station the most interesting.  While I was getting highlights, I didn’t want her to breathe in the chemicals so I tasked Shannon with watching her and handed her the bone the dog likes to gnaw upon at all hours of the day and night.  The next thing I knew, she was underneath the salon’s Christmas tree, reclining across the tree skirt near the nativity scene while nibbling on her bone.

“Is she okay?” I kept asking.

“She’s fine,” Shannon would respond.

“Are you sure she’s eating her bone and not the Baby Jesus?” I inquired at one point.  “Are all of the shepherds still where they’re supposed to be?”

Later that night – just as I realized that I really loved my highlights and my lowlights – my puppy peed underneath the Christmas tree.

“Tallulah!” I yelled.  “That is not where you go to the bathroom!  You go on your pad!”

She ran over then to the pad and she peed there too and as Shannon and Andrea congratulated her for being a belated good girl, I wondered if her act could in any way be considered a hate crime since she’s Jewish.  And if it was intentional, I’m thinking that perhaps I can bring her with me to SUR so she can squat on Jax’s shoe, piss on a fried goat cheese ball that will be served directly to Kristen, and point her paw and laugh at all the people who flit in and out of the action on this show who have still never made it into the opening credits.

 

THE UNICORN'S BIG DAY

THE UNICORN'S BIG DAY

I take a lot of things in my life very seriously and one of them is Secret Santa.  Sure, currently on the corner of my desk sits a pile of essays about 1960s-style film antiheroes that I should probably grade and there are definitely recommendation letters I need to write so some of my students can get into good colleges and not eventually have to live on the street or get a job at SUR.  I should also possibly carve out the time to call the parent of an eighteen year old in one of my classes who sits directly in my eye-line and picks his nose and then eats it.  (This is something that really happens.  The first time I saw it, I was quite certain that I was hallucinating.  I was not hallucinating; the dive into the kid’s nose was real and it was not just a one-time thing.  This event happens daily and I fear I might never be the same again.  Also, should this kid’s final average turn out to be a 12, I am still passing him just to get him out of my sight.)

Anyway, with all of my actual responsibilities piling up, I made what I think is the very adult decision to prioritize that which is truly important – and this week I have decided Secret Santa is where I should place the lion’s share of my focus.  I run the event.  I sent out the “Who wants to play?” email a few weeks ago.  Then I sent out a follow-up email because some people suck balls and therefore find it impossible to respond to a colleague who is just trying to make the workplace a little bit more festive.  Once the players were finally in place, I sauntered around a huge building in five-inch heels carrying a small box that was loaded with names written on small slips of paper.  “Here,” I’d say, shoving the box towards someone while he was in the middle of teaching eleventh graders about the recurring theme of solitude in Into the Wild.  “Pick a name.  If it’s yours or someone you hate, you can choose again.”  There were a handful of times people tossed the original name they picked back into the box.  There was also the moment I said to a good friend, “You pick first.  Anyone you want in particular? I have no guilt in cheating here,” and his response was that he wanted me and that was quite sweet, though it also totally ruins the game by eliminating the element of surprise.

One person was signed up to participate by someone else.  I was aware of that and I didn’t think it would be any sort of big deal, but what I didn’t know is that participating in a three-day Secret Santa is apparently against everything this guy stands for and, when I appeared in his room and thrust the box of names towards him, he began to shake and stammer like I had randomly decided to turn Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery into something real and he was singlehandedly choosing the name of the poor sucker who was about to get stoned – and not in the good way.  I let him off the hook because horrified people tend to make very poor Secret Santas, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t still weirded out by the whole thing.

As for me, I didn’t cheat – and that’s a first.  I randomly selected a name and I bought that person all kinds of presents and I wrapped them this weekend in festive gift bags that have color-coordinated tissue paper shoved inside to make them look extra pretty and I lined them up on my dining room table so I wouldn’t forget to bring them to work because the only thing worse than a Secret Santa having a nervous breakdown just by picking a name from a box is a Secret Santa who forgets to bring a gift.  I’ve always taken gift giving rather seriously.  I’m not a wait-until-the-last-minute kind of shopper and I keep lists in my phone throughout the year of maybe-presents to buy certain people.  And though the person whose name I picked is not someone I’d really qualify as my friend, I respect my role as her present giver.  As such, magnetic poetry featuring the words of Charles Dickens, her favorite writer, is coming her way and she can affix all sorts of fragmented sentences about Dickensian poverty and misery to her refrigerator all vacation long.  I hear she’s also a Fifty Shades of Grey fan and I did consider getting her some Christian Grey magnetic poetry too, but it is the holy season after all and she’s kind of religious so maybe it would be unseemly for her to create sentences out of words like “cock” and “fisting” this week.  I settled instead on the Dickens gift and a few ornate picture frames and some chocolates and the most gorgeous handmade soap you have ever seen.  And I only hope my own Secret Santa – whose identity was compromised before the fucking game even started – puts as much thought into his gifts for me and finally gets me that baby otter I have always wanted.

With thoughts of mistletoe and candy canes and Christmas morning running like reindeers on crack through my mind (which makes perfect sense and all since I’m Jewish), I can’t help but consider which gifts I’d choose for my favorite Vanderpumpers had we all participated in a raucous game of Secret Santa together – which, I’m imagining, would take place on the most frigid day Hell has ever seen.  And while I’d probably open anything some of them give me with sterile gloves just as a precaution, I do love receiving presents and I’d look forward to unwrapping whatever it is that Jax was able to steal from SUR to bestow upon me, though I really hope it’s a half-burned candle and not one of the place’s illustrious and not-at-all discerning hostesses he’s convinced to get shoved into a box.

THE SPITTER

THE SPITTER

It’s that time again in New York when the trees rise stark and bleak against the backdrop of a sky that’s the color of a worn out grey tee, when you can see your breath leaving your mouth in a faded frosty cloud if you burst into laugher while standing on the street in the moonlight.  It’s the time of year when I keep reminding myself that it might be very nice to invest in some footwear appropriate for the tundra and when everything I put on for work in the morning involves black tights that are designed to keep me from freezing my entire ass right off.

Yes, it is that time – or at least it’s supposed to be.  I think maybe Mother Nature didn’t get the message, or perhaps she’s going through a tumultuous breakup and simply doesn’t have either the gumption or the energy to rain flakes of fluffy snow down from her expansive sky.  There’s always a chance that she’s trying to ward off her own heady and chronic case of seasonal affective disorder and that’s why the trees here still have some stubborn leaves clinging to them.  It could also be why I walked around all weekend in just jeans and a long sleeved tee and no jacket and I didn’t shiver even once.  The brand new coat I bought that reminds me of the one Penny Lane wore in Almost Famous is still residing full-time in my closet.  There has been absolutely no need yet to adorn myself with anything that once grew off of a faux sheep.  The shovel that was worth every penny I paid for it last November stands patiently on my back deck.  Last year it was frozen solid into a block of ice that remained until mid-April.  I think it knows that it will eventually be called to action, but for now it’s reclining in peace and enjoying the sixty-degree balmy weather of an east coast December.

I’m quite sure that anyone who is not currently running for office would agree that what’s going on here is far more about the impact of global warming than Mother Nature dealing with the residual scalding bitterness of finding out that Father Time has been banging his mistress somewhere along the equator.  It’s truly fucked up that I flung my windows open yesterday to enjoy the nice crisp breeze, that I’m not really sure where my gloves are or if I even have both of them anymore, and that every day the weatherman crows that we have just neared another record high temperature.  But what I think we all must accept is that the weather patterns we’ve come to rely upon have shifted; that which we have come to understand and expect is no longer relevant.  And if something like the weather can change so radically, maybe people can change too!  Maybe Jax and James and Kristen and the thing called Lala can surprise us all by exhibiting character traits they’ve never shown before!  Maybe some of those traits will be positive!  Maybe these people are actually human!

BATTLE SCARS

BATTLE SCARS

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about empathy, both as a broad concept and how it manifests specifically in my own life.  Empathy comes easily to me (in much the way patience does not) and I’ve always been drawn to the empathetic sort, the kind of person who sweats great big drops of empathy after an intense workout that includes one-armed emotional pushups.  See, I think that the tendency to comprehend someone else’s feelings and then adopt those same emotions as a way to connect on a deeper level is, in many ways, just an offshoot of being logical.  Think about it:  someone you know feels hurt or lost and you can see pain written across her face like a story that doesn’t have an ending – or one filled with far too many endings – and you take a second to trace back what it is that might have caused her to currently be curled up in a trembling fetal position on your living room floor.  You know enough about her to realize it’s probably heartbreak and betrayal that’s been mixed into a shitty cocktail she drank through a straw without using a chaser.  You understand that she feels momentarily broken.  And you know full well that feeling broken is frightening, even if it’s been a good long time since you have been broken – even if you have sworn to yourself that, fuck no, you will never allow yourself to be broken like that ever again.   

But maybe that’s the stumbling block for people who are unable to be empathetic – and yes, those people exist and they walk amongst us.  Part of empathy requires sorting through your own personal storage shed of emotions and experiences to locate the one that will allow you to relate to the person sitting before you.  Unfortunately, mentally stumbling back through experiences you thought you had successfully buried can be akin to taking a spiky garden rake to the face.  (I was into my shed analogy, hence the rake.  Please go with it.)   

Relating profoundly to someone else’s emotions can result in you feeling shittier than you did before.  Empathy is messy; it’s crushing to try to decipher and then share someone else’s pain, but I think ultimately it would probably be even more crushing to feel nothing.  Still, there are definitely some perks to being emotionally barren.  Without pesky shit like sentiment pulling my focus, I could maybe benefit all of humankind by solving cold cases or building sterilization chambers meant to stop much of the cast of Vanderpump Rules from ever breeding.

MISERY LOVES MISERY

MISERY LOVES MISERY

There are just certain things one should never do:

1.    Enter any supermarket or CVS the day after Halloween when all the candy is 50% off and the sugary portion of the brain gets stimulated simply by looking at all of the discounted Twix that line the shelves like a caramel-and-cookie-and-chocolate-coated dream.

2.    Meet a blind date on a boat that takes you far out to sea when you’ve never been that good a screamer.

3.    Try on a bikini in December unless you’re tan, drunk, or surrounded by blind people who have been drinking.

4.    Go shopping for electronics on Black Friday without having first rubbed Vaseline across your entire body.  The slippery nature of the stuff will help you to stop the person who is trying to club you over the head so she can snag that humongous TV from getting a good grip on your forearm.

5.    Watch the reality show you’re tasked with recapping when you are in a very dark mood.

Yes, I’m coming off perhaps the bleakest week of my adult life, a week where I lost a lot.  I had to say goodbye to one of my greatest loves and it’s left me feeling a bit disoriented, more than a little bit lonely, and like I’m trying to swallow a craving that tastes both salty and sweet but the lump in my throat keeps getting in the way of gulping anything down, even a memory.  Over the last seven days or so, I’ve been faced with realizing definitively who is there for me in the murkiest of times and who is not.  I have watched life turn into death.  I have lost water weight from crying the kind of guttural sobs I didn’t think my body even knew how to generate anymore and I have lost any sort of patience for assholes who try to hurt those around them.  And it is with that mindset taking hold of my thought process that I’m going to issue a warning:  if you want to read a nonjudgmental recap where the writer pretends these Vanderpumpers are not society-tarnishing demons, you should wander away from this page immediately.  Come back next week when I’m sweet again.  Call it projected fury caused by wrenching grief, but I’m venturing close to the shadowy corners tonight – and I’m inviting you to come with me as long as you’re willing to take the journey without a flashlight.

This one’s meant to be dark.

 

 

SUR-tainly GRATEFUL

SUR-tainly GRATEFUL

Small request:  should your Thanksgiving not involve sitting around a table that’s topped with a platter upon which resides a chicken that has been shoved inside of a duck which has then been crammed inside of a turkey, can I please spend the holiday at your house?  I’ll bring dessert.

See, my sister Amy insists upon making a turducken for Thanksgiving – and she then wraps that sucker in bacon because three animals apparently aren’t enough to consume in one bite so she tosses in some pig too.  Having this monstrosity served to my family involves some careful strategizing.  My sister Leigh, who eats no meat, must maneuver her way to a spot at the table that is in no way turducken-adjacent lest she vomit on the placemats.  My mother needs a spot that’s near the kitchen because, even though we’re not at her house, she can’t stop herself from clearing the table while mentally calculating the carbohydrate intake just consumed by her nearest and dearest.  When the staggering sum finally settles into her head – it takes her a little while to do the math – she locates a quiet place to quickly do some lunges.  (She probably ate very little of the meal herself, but just being around such gluttony requires some immediate cardio.  I try not to judge.)  My brother-in-law likes to be near the soupy green bean casserole that has shriveled up onions on top.  The entire dish looks like something the turducken might have puked up after a bender, but it makes him very happy.  As for me, I’ve never been a big eater of the actual Thanksgiving meal.  I like to use my calories on appetizers and cake, so I spend most of dinner trying to furtively remove items from my stepfather’s plate that I fear could immediately clog his arteries.  Sometimes he catches me as I slip a hunk of duck into my napkin and his reaction depends on his mood.  I’ve gotten, “I love you, sweetheart” as a response to stealing his food and once I was stabbed with a fork so you really never know.

In spite of Thanksgiving being a working holiday for me since I’m on the clock as Food Lieutenant, it’s always been one of my favorite days.  I’m a part of one of those families where we go around and say what it is we’re grateful for and this year I’m grateful for the supportive people in my life; the opportunities that have come my way; my hair, which has been looking really good lately; Kim Richards being unceremoniously fired from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills; Springsteen’s upcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live; and that I finally know for sure what love feels like – and what it doesn’t feel like.  And it is with my own generating gratitude list in mind that I have started to wonder what our favorite Vanderpumpers might thank the heavens for on this special day.

Lisa Vanderpump probably feels grateful for her family, all of her dogs, and for the purses she owns that are large enough to tote some of those furry friends around with her as they ride shotgun in her Rolls Royce Phantom.  She probably also appreciates that she lives in a house guarded by swans who swim in a moat and that she somehow has the ability to still appear classy whilst starring on two reality shows that are populated by fucking heathens.

THE DAYS OF WHINE & ROSES & VICODIN

THE DAYS OF WHINE & ROSES & VICODIN

Last week, before actually important news saturated the airways (I’m speaking, of course, of the atrocities aimed at innocent civilians in Paris that shocked everybody and Charlie Sheen’s tragic medical diagnosis that shocked nobody), Bravo updates were appearing in the press constantly.  For a few days there it was impossible to go online and not see that two new Housewife shows are heading our way like an Earth-shattering comet and that Brooks, the smarmiest man ever to walk the streets of the OC, admitted to doctoring the documents he waved in front of cameras on his I Have Cancer press tour in a misguided effort to prove (through falsified medical records) that he indeed has been stricken with a deadly disease.  But before anyone can say anything, let’s just all go ahead and accept that fine, Brooks might have fabricated those documents, but he’s totally not lying about anything else and he obviously has a disease (I think it must be the disease that causes his unceasing smirk that I’d love to kick off his face with a stiletto) and if you believe anything else, you’re just an asshole.  Either that or you’ve got yourself some working synapses.

The thought of two new Bravo shows appearing on my television brought on a strange combination of excitement and terror and I think it’s because I’m starting to be aware of the lengths the participants of these shows are willing to go.  In fact, I sat back and contemplated some of the craziest moments we’ve already been privy to and they include, but are obviously not limited to, the following: 

o   Kim Richards drunkenly proclaimed sobriety before being arrested – for public intoxication.

o   The husband of one of the Housewives committed suicide and, before he was even embalmed, his wife wrote a book about the abuse he’d allegedly leveled her way before, during, and after production.

o   A woman wearing a red sari crashed a White House dinner.

o   An electronic-cigarette-puffing psychic sneered that she wouldn’t help someone locate an abducted child.

o   A self-proclaimed MILF suggested that her son get a fellow Housewife “naked drunk” and then looked the other way while the two almost banged in a bathroom during a dinner party.

SPRING-CLEANING IN NOVEMBER WITH THE EMPRESS OF SELF-AWARENESS

SPRING-CLEANING IN NOVEMBER WITH THE EMPRESS OF SELF-AWARENESS

About a week and a half ago, I received a text from someone I’m usually pretty happy to hear from – but this time, the message almost caused me to clutch the nearest wall for both emotional and physical support.

HIM:  Have you heard?  Vanderpump Rules is airing twice a week this season.  

ME:  No, only on Mondays.

HIM:  There’s another show airing on Fridays.

ME:  Please tell me you’re joking.  Please tell me I will not be spending my Friday evenings writing about these dipshits after spending my Monday evenings doing just that. 

HIM:  I’m not joking.

ME:  Fuck. Me.

After sliding down the wall I’d been clutching and yelling out a litany of profane words in the sweetest tone of voice I could muster whilst in the throes of an existential crisis caused by this news, I decided to fact check the information.  I hopped onto Google and, with a shaking hand and a trembling heart, I typed “Vanderpump Rules Friday” into the search box.  It was only after I confirmed that the Friday airing is an “after show” where the “stars” will appear in the hopes of gulping in some extra attention that’s been basted in fleeting fame and will surely lead to bloating that I calmed down.

 

DO THERAPISTS GIVE REFUNDS?

DO THERAPISTS GIVE REFUNDS?

Once upon a time, in a suburban home with a decent sized backyard but sadly no full-time maid, there lived a teenage girl.  She had always been a somewhat happy child who had been reared on the mentality that nobody in the entire world could possibly be more fabulous and special than she was by a mother and a father who had neglected to take even a single parenting class about the dangers of inflating a child’s ego.  When she walked into school each day, she could feel the envious eyes upon her. She knew their adoration was clearly due to how shiny her hair looked underneath the glow of the fluorescent lights in the cafeteria and so she would gaze out at her minions from beneath her lashes because they thought she was important and she knew it was true.  

Back at home, she would climb the stairs to her bedroom and lie atop her probably-canopied bed and hold a pink pillow that had the word “DIVA” embroidered on it in rhinestones close to her heart and she would gaze up at the pictures on her wall that she’d carefully cut from the glossy pages of US Weekly.  Like deities, Lauren and Heidi and Paris and Nicole hovered above her and she would lock eyes with all of them, especially with that one wonky eye of Paris Hilton’s, and she would sigh deeply and allow herself to think about her future.

One day, she swore to herself solemnly, I too will be famous for absolutely nothing at all.  I will wear low-rise jeans and get photographed outside of a place like Hyde and maybe a Bling Ringer will even try to rob my home to steal my clothing and my blow.  And no matter what happens, I will lean on my dear friends for emotional support and I will call every single one of them “slut” or “bitch” because that will illustrate my undying devotion to them and one day we will all star on a series together where we will destroy one another.  One day…