FISHNETS & FUCKING FAYE RESNICK

February 3, 2016

Is there a place a nonreligious girl like myself can go to ask for forgiveness for taking last week off and not recapping the episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when Faye Resnick came face to face with the woman she talked total bullshit about twenty years ago in a book that was written in two weeks alongside one of the editors of the National Enquirer so she could most effectively capitalize off the murder of someone she claimed was her best friend in the whole entire world? Would it suffice for everyone to know that, even more than I hate the slug-like Resnick, I hate myself for spending last Tuesday night leisurely resting up for the Springsteen concert I went to the following evening instead of watching the Housewives devolve into simmering pits of resentment while the sea monster in their midst sat calmly on a patio she probably decorated? Can I ever possibly come to terms with the fact that it took me a full day to actually watch that slithering Resnick asshole smile her collagen-pumped grin while telling Kathryn, the new Housewife whose life she tried to destroy a score of years ago for profit, that she looks beautiful?

Let’s just call a fucking asshole a fucking asshole, shall we? Why split hair extensions and beat around what I’m guessing is a carefully lasered bush? Faye Resnick is a fucking asshole. Here are the facts of my case:

1. She achieved infamy because of her proximity and involvement in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. This infamy was not a surprising result that befell a shy woman who desperately wanted to keep her privacy. No, this infamy was garnered strategically by writing a book and posing for Playboy.

2. Rather than mourn the woman she maintained was her closest friend, she wrote a book about that woman’s secrets.

3. She’s really good friends with Kris Jenner and makes sure to appear every now and again on her reality show so she won’t disappear into the void of nothingness that can plague a woman who desperately needs attention.

4. Kyle Richards considers her to be like a sister. Score.

5. She once tried to shame Lisa Vanderpump at the woman’s own house where she showed up to a vow renewal ceremony uninvited and honey, you can do a lot of things before I contemplate cold-clocking you across your shaved jawline, but you’d best not fuck with Ms. Vanderpump.

Now, I’ve known for some time that Faye Resnick sucks the humongous sweaty balls of a farm animal during an August heat wave, but I got to be reminded of just how ridiculous a creature she is during the Kathryn Confrontation that never really got off the ground. First, Faye did not need to be invited to that dinner. I don’t give a shit if Kyle claims that she invites Faye everywhere and that the world would stop spinning on its axis and angels would stop getting their wings and Mauricio would stop getting covert blowjobs from interns if Faye was left off a guest list. I mean, we have watched Kyle gallivant on this show for years now and Faye most certainly does not go everywhere her raven-haired mistress goes. No, Faye was there for a showdown she then refused to participate in and she instead chose to sit and quietly nod in a nonsensical fashion as Kathryn (not so eloquently) attempted to call her out for her past misdeeds.

Faye refused to engage. She refused to say a single word. She refused to get up and just leave. She wouldn't even say that she was sorry or that she had been going through a tough time back then and she made some questionable choices she now has to live with and she would like to apologize for the fact that she is one of the greatest examples of why some entire cultures hate women. She refused to say pretty much anything even as she had the fucking audacity to stare blankly at the woman sitting before her and then cluck about how pretty Kathryn is, a compliment apropos of exactly nothing.

THE CONTRITION TOUR

February 2, 2016

There are some certainties one can always count on:

• The parking lot outside of a gym will be absolutely packed during the second week in January – and then it will be half-empty (half-full?) during the second week in March because resolutions only really last for so long.

• The very minute Christmas is over, those chalky sugar conversation hearts – the ones that used to have expressions like “Be Mine” but now have adorable sweet nothings like “Text Me” engraved in sugar across even more sugar – will appear on the shelves of drugstores nationwide. I will buy four bags and eat three before remembering that I hate them.

• One or more of the Kardashians (or those lucky enough to be Kardashian-adjacent) will experience some sort of monumental existential crisis every three weeks like fucking clockwork and that crisis will result in one of them deciding to host a brand new talk show because this family understands one simple fact better than you or I ever will: an event is only meaningful if everybody on the planet knows it’s going down at the exact moment it’s happening.

• The momentum inherent in the passage of time can turn a ravaged and stinging heart into one that quietly thuds with just a dull ache until eventually it doesn’t hurt at all anymore. You will be able to slide what was once ragged with the edges of memory down your throat like it’s a perfect oyster – and you will do it in one little gulp and you won’t even need a chaser.

Those of us who watch reality television and do not suffer from narcolepsy have become adept at picking up other patterns. These thematic configurations reveal themselves almost cyclically over the passage of time. We know, for example, that each season a different Real Housewife is given “the bitch edit” for probably no other reason than because she once showed up to Andy Cohen’s clambake late while hoisting a platter of cookies that contained gluten. We realize that the least emotionally-balanced chick who competes on a season of The Bachelor will undoubtedly be hauled back during the summer to bawl her eyes out on Bachelor in Paradise where she will stand on a tropical beach and explain how destroyed she is that the guy she’s known for about an hour doesn’t see her for the person she is deep down and now all of her hopes for forever-love have been smashed into smithereens so small that she can’t even snort them. We can be certain that there will always be another cheaply produced show upon which Farrah Abraham can appear so she can deny that she knowingly did porn. Should you flip to E! at any time of the day or night, you will be able to watch Kim or Khloe or Kendall or Kylie or Kill Me as they stare at their phones instead of saying anything of interest and you can feel free to go ahead and make a nice healthy wager about exactly which day it will be when my head finally explodes from not having a legitimate answer to the question, “Why are these people famous when they never even look up unless it’s to take a selfie?”

But perhaps my favorite constant in the world of reality television is The Contrition Tour that some participants embark upon usually around year three in their involvement with a show they probably never should have appeared on in the first place. The goal of setting sail on a Contrition Tour is to attempt to rehabilitate the reputation you essentially gave ratings-obsessed producers and underpaid editors carte blanche in crafting in exchange for an often paltry paycheck and the chance to either endorse some shitty wine nobody has ever heard of or to finally get the chance to record that dance single you and your tone-deaf heart have always dreamed of belting out to an unsuspecting world. The journey towards The Contrition Tour begins soon after you allow yourself to realize that the attention you got for appearing on television was probably not worth the misery that has come with being known as a verbally-abusive monster or so fucking stupid that it almost defies comprehension. Sure, you rode that wave of infamy for a little while – that wave made quick stops on The Wendy Williams Show and Watch What Happens Live so you could display even more of your flaws – but you eventually felt like you were caught in the funnel of a riptide and you could no longer see clearly and you couldn’t even breathe and you became furious that reality television did the opposite of showing the world “the real you” so you decided it was time to enlighten a mass audience who doesn’t actually care about you in the least and already made up its mind about you anyway.

Few people have aced The Contrition Tour, but Camille Grammer came off of hers like a fucking champ. This woman spent the entire first season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills either gyrating against another woman’s husband, inviting bile-spewing psychics over for dinner, misusing words like “Machiavellian” and “pernicious” and pretending her marriage was just fine and that her husband hadn’t already left her. I recall seeing magazine covers with photos of her huge eyes and her sneering mouth printed above headlines like, “The Most Hated Housewife?” and knowing – just knowing – that we would all see a very different Camille Grammer during season two of the show. In fact, the Camille who showed up for the second season barely resembled the woman we’d met just a few scant months prior. This lady appeared chastened and humbled. She spoke about her life with a rueful smile on her lips. She didn’t call Kyle pernicious even once. And she often wore a white coat with long sleeves and it was probably to hide the IV that was pumping copious amounts of liquid tranquilizer directly into her bloodstream so she would make it to the end of the tour and take a victory lap at the Reunion. Honestly? Bravo, Camille – I’d buy a commemorative tee from your tour and I'd wear it without irony.

Something tells me that the Contrition Tours won’t go nearly as well for the Vanderpumpers in our midst. Camille Grammer spent the first season of her show projecting to the world that she was flat-out ridiculous, but we can work with ridiculous, right? Can we – do we want to – work with the issues ailing Jax, Kristen, and Stassi? Are we meant to pretend that Jax has seen the light and he’s no longer a piece of shit who is so stupid that he ought not to be permitted to procreate? Should we make believe that Kristen’s brand of crazy is just dangerous to her and not a potential calamity that could impact all of humankind? Can we believe that Stassi genuinely feels this badly about ditching a group of people who were kind of shitty friends to her anyway and that she is not just crawling back now so she can get herself back on television? Can’t these legs of the tour just be cancelled?

THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT, JAX HAD TO STEAL SHADES

January 26, 2016

Maybe the only that’s interesting to me about preparing for the onslaught of a blizzard is how it all starts to feel so primal. Our basic wants morph almost instantaneously into what we manage to convince ourselves are desperate needs and those needs cannot possibly be quelled without making a frantic trip to a supermarket and posting at least three completely unoriginal messages on social media. Me? I did it all. That’s right – I turned into the girl who ran out to buy shit like egg whites and three different kinds of cheese and more fresh broccoli than anyone should ingest outside of a dare. See, I recently began tracking everything I eat and I lost 8.6 pounds in only two weeks by scarfing down mostly seafood and vegetables and I wanted to make sure that turning briefly into a shut-in would not cause me to pile back on even a tenth of a pound because I’ve become mildly obsessive about what I’m eating and I’ve chosen to pretend that such an obsession is a positive thing and not the mark of a latent eating disorder. But then I realized that I was going to have some company during the blizzard and I am nothing if not an excellent hostess. And what do hostesses do? I thought to myself while coming to a dramatic standstill in the baking aisle of Stop and Shop. Hostesses bake brownies, dammit! And kick-ass hostesses bake brownies that have chocolate chips mixed into the batter and then they top those already-decadent chocolate squares with marshmallows that are shoved for a second into a hot broiler so the marshmallows will melt slightly and turn the perfect shade of toasty brown!

Like Odysseus being beckoned by a bipolar Siren, I began to listen to the insane voice inside of my head and that voice screamed that cheese should never be served without some nice crunchy bread and that only a Neanderthal would not pick up gourmet olives and fresh shrimp and the next thing I knew, I had spent two hundred dollars on groceries and my oven was churning out something besides zucchini. And since I was quite consciously ruining the excellent progress I’d recently made in terms of portion control and ass size, I decided to start sprinting about my home like a madwoman. My goal? To plug every device I own into an outlet so everything would be fully charged come the storm. This particular action – which I’ll consider both cardio and a core-based workout because it involved lots of bending – was dictated by some rather devastating past experiences when my power cut off the moment a swift wind blew through my town and I was left with only the fear and the fury that comes with having a phone that is rapidly losing battery power and the inability to watch even a bad movie. Listen: I’ve been through blizzards and hurricanes and freakish random experiences like when the electricity in my entire community shut down for six hours one cold February evening for absolutely no good reason at all and I have learned some things, my friends! Here’s what you must do to prepare for the likelihood of having everything spontaneously go dark:

1. Buy a jar of instant coffee. Who cares if it sits unopened in your cabinet for a year straight? If you have been blessed with a gas stove, you can heat up water and still get your coffee fix during a storm without resorting to shoving some coffee grinds under your gum like it’s tobacco, a real thing I did during Hurricane Sandy.

2. Shower the night before the storm, flatiron your hair until it’s straighter than it’s ever been, and refrain from tossing it up into a ponytail so it will continue to look pretty while you’re trapped inside of a house with way too many mirrors that you have to look at unless you’re playing a game that requires you be blindfolded.

3. Buy a blindfold.

4. Turn the temperature of the refrigerator as low as you can. When your strawberries become so frozen that they can be used as weapons, that’s when it’s cold enough in there for your dairy products to withstand the potential loss of power headed their way.

5. Conversely, blast your heat until you can hardly take it anymore. Think about it this way: sure, you are sweating your ass off in the middle of January simply as a precaution – and you are probably spending a fortune to do it – but just try to recall how unpleasant it was to sleep in the frigid air when you had no power for four days during both the hurricane and the last huge snowfall. Remember how your pinky toe almost snapped off even while swathed in four pairs of socks and you were lying beneath three comforters? Throw on a tank top and some boy shorts and stop complaining.

6. Charge your current laptop, your gigantic ancient laptop that has the DVD player, your iPod, your iPad, and your phone. Yes, eating brownies and having sex are lovely ways to pass the time, but so is checking email and watching a movie. Think ahead!

I spent the night before the storm gathering candles and searching for flashlights and locating my lingerie so I wouldn’t have to eventually search for it in the pitch-black darkness. I ran my dishwasher and did my laundry and made sure my extra blankets were easily accessible. I sorted through the clothing people have bought for my puppy and pulled out her yellow fleece and her pink sweater so she could look stylish while feeling comfortably warm. I backed my car in and popped up my windshield wipers so they wouldn’t freeze. I located my shovel and leaned it against the wall in my foyer. And then I got into bed and felt an exhaustion that was quite real spread through at least a third of my body and I realized that I had just allowed myself to feed into a frenzy that could and should have been totally avoidable. Yes, there would be snow – a lot of it. But I’d be stuck at home for a grand total of perhaps two days and that fear had caused me to spend and to consume and to prepare like the end of time was upon me? That fear had caused me to make a platter of brownies topped with s’mores?

Yup, it sure did.

Now sure, those brownies were unbefuckinglievable – but the storm passed and it’s time to hop back on the healthy eating track and try to forgive myself for falling victim to a desire that I allowed myself to believe was a pressing need. And if I can learn to forgive myself for making the questionable choice of eating a few (okay, five) brownies during a brief environmental crisis, maybe that means I can forgive the Vanderpump Rules gang for their choices too! After all, eating a marshmallow-topped brownie is right on par with stealing a pair of sunglasses or crawling with your bedazzled tail between your legs back to a group of people you swore you’d rather die than ever talk to again, right? Aren’t we all just flawed creatures by nature?

FAYE RESNICK SLAUGHTERED MY SOUL

January 20, 2016

I’m not quite sure how it can be this way, but there remains a rather quixotic side to my personality and it's really starting to piss me off. It just doesn't make any sense! Really, you’d think a constant and steady exposure to questionable people starring on mindless reality shows would have eliminated my patently unrealistic levels of idealism, but that's just not the case – and I can’t seem to help it. I somehow still harbor the insane belief that most people are good, that they actively want to better humanity at large. Trust me: I've tried to quiet the blatantly out-of-vogue ideals I still blame my parents for instilling in me back when they were hippies who tried to pass carob off as chocolate. It's totally their fault that I cannot seem to cease having faith in the fact that the vast majority of us must have actual reasons for the times we find ourselves behaving in a manner that could best be described as heinously inappropriate.

The thing is, I no longer have any sort of pride about feeling this way. Holding tight to an optimistic mindset has turned into nothing but a fool’s game, one that ends in a shootout as balls (and not the fun scrotumy kind) fly at my head. Gone are the days when everything made actual sense, when someone's questionable motivations could be entirely justified with just a little bit of logic. We simply don’t live in that world anymore. Instead, we now exist in a time where an educated CEO – a mother no less – can go on an interview blitz where she steadfastly refuses to apologize for calling the virtual stranger she invited into her home a prostitute before telling her that her music videos have a shitty production value. We live in a world where this rude creature gives snappy sound bytes accompanied by a toothy smile about how she’s been chosen to guest star on a show precisely because she’s an asshole and she would therefore never temper her assholery just to be a decent person. After all, being decent is not what made her a zillionaire.

Welcome to the dystopia, everybody. It’s a land drenched in Skinnygirl crimson and it smells like a knockoff version of Chanel perfume and it’s run in absentia by Mayor Kim Richards –otherwise known as She Who Shall Not Be Mentioned. Leave your integrity at the door of Kyle By Alene Too and instead shrug on an overpriced ugly caftan. You'll fit right in.

FREE LALA'S NIPPLES!

January 19, 2016

Regrets are tough things to live with because they sting while they're happening, burn when they're swallowed, and they leave scars that no high-end BB cream can mask. Me? Oh, I've got a mess of regrets and they run the gamut from the utterly superficial to the psychologically damaging and can be empirically measured on a scale of zero to forever. Let's see: I regret that time I gave myself a bikini wax and all the years I roasted in the summer sun covered from head to toe with baby oil. I regret the freckles I could have avoided and the overuse of filters to mask them in pictures. I regret all the nights I was too worried about liking my outfit to concern myself with making memories that were not colored by the sepia tone of body dysmorphic disorder. I regret not spending more time with people I love and I regret the years I lived by the doctrine, "In the grand scheme of my life, this will not matter," because I was often very wrong. I regret going out on a few second dates and I really regret that time I went out on a twelfth date. I regret letting one guy sleep through the night in my bed without taking off his boxer briefs with my teeth. I mean, yeah, I did just that come the dawn, but I wish I'd done it in the darkness too because I was bored while he slept. Oh, and I guess I'm supposed to pretend to regret the fact that I sometimes lack any and all inhibition, but that regret would just be a total lie.

The thing is, regrets are something most of us have in common. We don't always treat one another with kindness or compassion and sometimes our insecurities march like an army between ourselves and a far-off goal. I think you have to know yourself pretty damn well in order to recognize a pang of emotion as a twinge of regret and you have to be willing to go excavating through the clenching confines of your mind to dig out the source and origin of what caused the regret to transpire. It would probably be far easier to never take that hike inside of a dusty subconscious, but I still recommend doing so. Call it emotional cardio.

I'm not sure some of the Vanderpumpers are able to recognize the feeling of regret because some of them probably think what they're experiencing is a pang of hunger or that itch they always feel around their nether regions after a bender, but I think maybe it's time for them to pay attention. Acknowledging regret smarts like a dumb motherfucker, but it can't possibly bring more pain than what the future will deliver to people who are making grave mistakes on television in exchange for a paycheck. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe being emotionally barren is the way to go. Maybe it takes someone ultra-evolved to prance around half-naked on basic cable and drink like a sloth suffering from acute alcoholism and steal sunglasses before, during, and after lying to your live-in girlfriend. Perhaps in the future, regret won't exist in the slightest and that will be the platform under which President Jax Taylor will have campaigned. Seriously, people – it could happen. Did anyone really believe Donald Trump would still be in the lead for the GOP?

MY UNCLE LENNY

January 14, 2016

My first memories of my Uncle Lenny are so vivid that they smell like sugar. That kind of sensory detail makes good sense. He owned a busy bakery in Brooklyn for most of my childhood and I remember toddling in with excitement shining in my eyes and looking around in wonder. You know that expression, "It's like a kid in a candy store"? I lived that expression, but my candy store involved layer cakes.

My favorite part of our excursion was always going into the huge kitchen. I think it was probably hot in there with all those ovens going at once, but I have no memory of the heat. What I remember instead is that he had all those icing bags filled with whipped cream and butter cream and he would let me eat as much of it as I wanted directly from the bag. He'd also walk me around the bakery and tell me I could have whatever I wanted and I often chose the largest item I could find, like some giant parfait in the refrigerated case by the door. When we'd leave, but mother's arms were laden down with bags filled with cakes and large cookies (my favorites were the chocolate chip and the huge butter cookies with a big dollop of hard chocolate in the center) and boxes of the small cookies that I grew up calling "Uncle Lenny Cookies." I always gravitated towards the complicated cookies. I liked stuff loaded with sprinkles and dipped in chocolate with jelly in the center. Even today, I like my snacks filled with things like cream or crunchies and I see absolutely no need to ever eat what I consider "unadorned" chocolate. If there's no caramel or nougat, what's the point?

MEET ERIKA JAYNE

January 13, 2016

I have a confession to make: the image of Yolanda’s bloody implant is slowly destroying me from the inside out. I’ve had dreams about that thing. The very worst one involved placing my head dreamily upon a pillow I thought was made out of baby pink cotton candy only to find that the sugary fluff had disappeared and what enveloped me instead was a gelatinous mess of silicone and guts. Really though, that gooey implant terrified me as much as catching a glimpse of a Pegasus in a movie usually does and a big part of me believes that the implant did not actually come from deep inside Yolanda’s chest cavity as the world-renowned surgeon wearing the colorful baker’s hat would have us believe. I think there’s a good chance the implant really originates from the dankest and darkest depths of the bottom of the ocean where its kin continues to frolic with mythical beasts that are made entirely of gills and whatever it is that first birthed Faye Resnick.

I’m hoping (and praying…and chanting…and lighting candles) that now that Yolanda’s implants are out of her body for good, the nightmares will finally cease. I realize, of course, that the visual revelation of Erika Jayne that has been promised to us tonight could cause a new phobia to burst forth, but I made sure to exercise for an extra hour earlier today so chronic exhaustion would crush fear. Besides, there’s probably not all that much to be nervous about. It’s not like I haven’t seen porn before.

PERMANENT BAD CHOICES

January 12, 2016

As long as we’re on the subject (since I just brought it up), here are a few things I don’t miss in the slightest:

· Those incessant blizzards that rocked the east coast last winter. Yes, I realize that I might have just committed the weather equivalent of shouting, “Looks like a no-hitter!” during the ninth inning of a baseball game right before the batter smashes a grand slam homerun straight into the outfield bleachers, but should a month of continuous snowfall accompanied by ice thudding from the sky suddenly commence, please blame Mother Nature, not me.

· Thinking that I have to say yes to everything I’m asked to do at work. There were those early years when I tutored for the SAT and helped students write college essays and ran classes designed to get kids a better score on the Regents exam. I was even suckered into being the advisor for the Trivia Team my first few years, an act that mandated that I accompany kids who loved shit like physics and trigonometry to academic decathlons where I had to read questions that I not only didn’t know the answer to, but often I couldn’t even pronounce half of the words in the question. Even the time I dove into a pool and then unknowingly conducted an entire conversation with a guy I was interested in for fifteen minutes straight before realizing my left tit was hanging out did not make me feel as big a moron as I did when I went to those trivia competitions. Finally recognizing that I was allowed to say, “fuck no!” to random requests at work changed my life.

· In terms of technology, I do not mourn the commercial-crammed days when I lived without XM Radio, the dark ages when DVR was just a figment of an excellent idea in some madman’s mind, and the years my phone didn’t contain that beautiful “block” button that I’ve started to use pretty frequently.

· I do not miss the days when I refrained from telling people in my life who were behaving like pathetic assholes that they were acting like pathetic assholes and I definitely don’t miss the nights I couldn’t sleep because I was far too consumed with running the imaginary conversations I should have had with them in my mind. I also do not miss the years when my nearest and dearest were less than honest with me. Maybe it’s a loss of patience or maybe it’s the gaining of patience or perhaps I’ve just formed an allergy to bullshit, but I’d much rather have the difficult conversation for real than perfect it a hundred times in my mind for imagination’s sake and nothing else.

· I can’t even pretend to miss the dewy mornings when coffee didn’t spurt instantly from the Keurig that sits in a place of prominence on my kitchen counter, especially since I never properly learned how to make a pot of the stuff on a normal coffee machine and it turns out that exploding coffee grinds are a real pain in the ass to clean up.

· I’ll never again long for the years when my salary was so low that I internally debated every now and again how maybe settling for a guy with money and not much else wouldn’t be the single worst choice I could possibly make – and that includes the time I got those terrible choppy side bangs that not even my closest friends could react to with anything but horror.

· I was once certain that I would, but I do not miss those flavored ramen noodles that made my hair smell like chicken or that month when I went on an all-candy-corn diet (scoff all you want; it worked) or when I moved out for the first time and realized that it meant I could buy any kind of cereal I wanted – that it didn’t have to be one of the healthy kinds – and I truly began to believe that Apple Jacks tasted like a sugary form of freedom. I mean, sure, it might have been the single most liberating experience I’ve ever had inside of a supermarket, but that doesn’t mean I miss that day.

· I also don’t miss the banana clips that could never properly hold back my too-thick hair, the year everyone (including me) wore a tiny Prada backpack for no good reason at all, the nights I spoke to guys in bars who rocked fedoras completely without irony, the years I was convinced thongs had to be equivalent to having a perma-wedgie, and the money I spent on Juicy sweatpants because I managed to convince myself that my ass would look best in ridiculously overpriced aqua terrycloth.

· And more than any of it, I do not miss Stassi Schroeder.

Yes, my dear friends, it looks like Stassi will soon be galloping back to Vanderland on a wounded pony and I for one could not be less excited to see her. Her return feels the very opposite of triumphant; in fact, it strikes me as remarkably similar to the reaction I have when that one student who graduated five years ago continues to stop by every few months just to say hello. “Time to move on!” I always consider bellowing his way, but I just keep the interaction to a swift, “Nice to see you,” before I go fleeing down the hallway and away from a kid who is perpetually ensconced in the dynamic that was high school. I’d argue that Stassi continues to be stuck in a high school mentality too and that high school probably felt like her glory days when she ran that fucking cafeteria like an Adderall-guzzling Gestapo agent who inspired fear in her lowly minions with just a withering glance or a flick of her newly-dyed hair. I cannot forget how, at the start of this series, Stassi would mandate who her “crew” were and were not allowed to speak with and how she would threaten minor punishments like castration done with a rusty chainsaw to anyone who dared violate a single one of her decrees.

THE TOOTHLESS, BOOBLESS, BRAINLESS WONDER

January 6, 2016

Um, I believe it was implied that the Skinny Girl would show up at some point tonight. After all, our Beverly Hills ladies are heading to the Hamptons and who is more representative of the Hamptons than Bethenny Frankel? In fact, I heard through the grapevine that Bethenny is even considering running for Mayor of Southampton because she found out that she couldn’t throw her hat into the race to be the next Queen. Her platform? That every road sign in the community should be painted the exact shade of red that’s in her brand’s logo. I don’t see how the woman can lose.

We all saw Bethenny in the previews for this season and I guess I expected that she’d be onscreen from the get go. While I don’t care that much about catching a glimpse of her on her own show, I was looking forward to seeing her in this bowl of non-fat, non-dairy, non-gluten Housewives soup. See, I just love crossover episodes of television shows, don’t you? There’s this extra special thrill that comes with watching the Love Boat as it flows intentionally towards Fantasy Island or seeing Mork and his rainbow suspenders saunter into Arnold’s to visit with the Happy Days gang. It’s a joining together of some of our favorite characters – a double dose of in-jokes – and it almost doesn’t even matter that the episode itself never actually lives up to all the hype that preceded it because there’s just something kind of delightful about watching the Griffins dine with the Simpsons or witnessing a Carrington toss a Colby off a balcony and onto the hard marble floor below.

It was with this barely contained surge of excitement barreling through me that I settled down to watch what I figured would undoubtedly be the Entertainment Moment of the Year. And sure, it’s only January 5th, but what other recent televised moment should get that glorious distinction? Twins showing up to compete as one person on the new season of The Bachelor? A convicted murderer potentially getting closer to an appeal because of additional information that might have been uncovered through a Netflix series? Yeah, okay – that last one might trump the west coast Housewives colliding with some of our east coast Housewives, but just barely.

CHANGES ARE AFOOT IN VANDERLAND

January 5, 2016

You know how some things just stand out in ways that can really surprise you? Well, there’s this quietly amazing moment in The Big Short that has stayed solidly in the very forefront of my mind since I saw the movie about a week ago. And it’s weird that it’s this scene that I can’t stop thinking about because it’s not a particularly showy scene. In fact, it’s not even an actual scene. Instead, it’s part of a montage near the end and there is no dialogue taking place at all because, by then, there’s just not a whole lot that needs to be said. The economy has crashed spectacularly – and sorry, but I refuse to label such a thing with a spoiler alert because if you don’t know the economy went belly-up in 2008, that can’t be my problem. (Feel free, though, to blame any combination of your parents, the liberal media, Donald Trump, or whatever virus you caught the last time you ate at Chipotle.) Anyway, two minor characters in the film –formerly so pompous and pleased with themselves for saddling financially unsophisticated homebuyers with outlandish and impossible mortgage rates – find that they too have been crushed by the very system from which they used to profit. These are guys we first met as they sat on bar stools and flushed hotly at just the thought of excess and we see them near the end at a job fair where they must start over without an expense account. The expressions on their faces – framed in enough of a close-up that we can see both abject terror and sweaty desperation – allows us to know that it’s not simply the economy that has crashed; everyone and everything fell. The blame scattered. There was more than enough chastening to go around.

It certainly says something about the stellar performances and the cinematography in The Big Short that a single shot that was maybe eight seconds long resonated so powerfully. The film itself? It’s brilliant. It is perfectly paced and far funnier than I expected a story about a flawed banking system to be, but I think the things that felt most intense to me were not just the homes that were lost or that sweeping shot of a vacant floor at Lehman Brothers or a security team ushering Finance guys out of a building like they were in danger of being shot. For me, it was about that moment when the realization set it – when it really set in – and people finally understood that everything had to change.

It’s those days and nights of gripping fear that are punctuated with a loss that feels like an exclamation point that brings about change. Rarely do we randomly stumble upon the idea that everything about ourselves must be overhauled. No, it’s more of a dawning comprehension, an internal skywriter who slowly sweeps out the words, “Nothing you’re doing is working for you anymore,” in loopy cursive and you finally have to stare at the entire sentence and admit, fuck: I need to make better choices. And look, making the declaration is the first step. It’s an active form of realizing that things can’t continue the same way anymore. It’s putting some cohesion into what – for way too long – was simply an abstract idea you allowed to do the backstroke because fighting the current just felt exhausting.

But it’s a new year – and it’s time to fucking swim.

I’m not sure that Jax or James or Kristen or Lala understand what it means to commit to changing and I seriously believe that gaining notoriety on a show for being their very flawed selves will not lead to anything different. But oh, what I would give to stare at a moment onscreen while James mutters, “You know, I really am an asshole who is crippled by massive inferiority that runs through my tiny brain and then lands on my low-cut tank tops like glitter – or dandruff. That must be why I behave like a toddler on blow most of the time!” I’d also probably pay to watch Jax stare at himself in a mirror – which so far seems more than doable – and hear him say, “I am an adult! I should stop trying to come between a twenty-two year old DJ and whomever he wants to bang! I should stop removing cartilage from my nose! I should be a better man tomorrow than I was today…” Seriously, I’d sell a family member to hear those words, but nobody is for sale today. See, I’ve got a birthday coming up and those people send presents.

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