I used to sit in the passenger seat of my father’s tan car, stare hard at the blur of forest green woods just outside my window as we drove by them, and wonder if there were any dead bodies hidden back there. I was always somewhat certain that at least a few had to be buried underneath makeshift heaps of brown leaves that had turned a little bit grey from the rain.
I would walk across the docks in the harbor town where I grew up, the planks of old wood bending and creaking beneath the sneakers I used to wear then. I’d gaze out into the distance by squinting my eyes against the rainbow-colored glares of the sun. Far off, I could see glinting flecks of light that looked like silver sparkles dancing on the water’s surface that I knew were caused by the sun but I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps a mermaid had formed them herself when she took a break from brushing her long hair while reclining on a rock.
I went to sleep every night only after bracketing my body with stuffed animals. Cookie Monster slept on one side of me while my bear, Mr. Gerber, reclined on the other. I felt safer somehow if I wasn’t alone in my bed. I guess I still do.
I moved into my sorority house as a junior in college right after I’d spent part of the summer going on a true crime reading spree. Despite a rather overactive imagination that might have caused my parents great concern back in my toddler years, I grew up into a person who was able to talk myself out of getting too freaked out by the scary stories I enjoyed consuming for entertainment. But the tales about Ted Bundy freaked me out entirely because I just knew I was the kind of person who would have stopped to help carry some books if a nice-looking guy appeared to be struggling with them and I also knew that’s how Bundy got some of his victims. Lose that lining of naiveté you’ve still got surrounding your heart and your mind like Tupperware, I told myself once as the Bundy story kept me awake well into the early morning and I pulled my Cookie Monster closer. I finally managed to get over that fear. I just promised myself I would never stop to help some random person ever again and sure, I’ve struggled with such a proclamation, but I’ve comforted my tortured soul by explaining to it that at least it wasn’t being tortured in some psychopath’s basement.
During the years that our television screens – and our very lives – have been graced with the presence of The Real Housewives of New York, we have witnessed some truly batshit stuff. Off the top of my head? Well, we’ve watched Luann decide she’s a singer and then embrace her very own catchphrase, one she ironically doesn’t seem to realize has made her exponentially less cool. We’ve watched Ramona doll herself up in a silk teddy to give her philandering husband a massage while Avery probably sat in another room and filled out papers that might lead to her emancipation. We have seen Alex literally break out in a scarlet torrent of neck, chest, and face hives due to a confrontation she volunteered to have with Jill in an effort to spare a pregnant Bethenny from having to do it herself. We’ve witnessed Dorinda mentally swerve from seemingly calm to downright maniacal in two drinks flat and we have, of course, watched Sonja claim the following is all true:
She used to be exceptionally close to John-John Kennedy.
She spent most of her seasons in Gstaad – except for all the time she spent on the private jet that whisked her away to that private island she has recently started to reference in her hallucinatory anecdotes about yesteryear.
She speaks often to the Saudi royal family. (I believe her on this one. Those guys call me every Thursday just to say hello and to tell me they really enjoy my recaps. Such sweet people…)
She has an international lifestyle brand that is hugely successful and the fact that you can’t actually buy any of the clothing just means the demand for it has grown in imaginary leaps and bounds.
She is very happy.
Okay. So on the one hand, I feel absolutely fine making fun of Sonja Morgan and the delusions she spews out along with her breath that I’m guessing smells like wine that’s been left out overnight on the kitchen counter without a cork. She is a reality television star. She has made the choice to live what’s either a genuine life or a somewhat fabricated life while being filmed constantly. She has signed that Bravo contract year after year. She's seen ample evidence that's proved the show's editors probably do not have her very best interests at heart. She’s had viewers, fellow castmates, and Sir Andy Cohen himself directly ask if she really considers herself to be sane. She could have walked away at any time and instead she chose to stay and to make Reality Televisionland her permanent dwelling, one I'm guessing she dolled up by hanging some counterfeit art on the metaphorical walls.
My sister watches Days of Our Lives. I feel like I need to be clear here: she didn’t just start watching Days of Our Lives and she didn’t used to watch Days of Our Lives. No, she has consistently watched Days of Our Lives since high school and she is in her forties now and I don’t believe she’s missed even one single day of the show. Her commitment could be seen as impressive were it not so terrifying.
I used to watch that show, too. I was such a fan while I was in college that I would organize my class schedule so as not to miss a minute of the dastardly goings-on in Salem, which were often far more interesting than the generic chaos happening on campus on a random Thursday. That said, even as a Film major who learned early the concept of willfully suspending disbelief, I had a limit when it came to the patently ridiculous and it was the storyline that centered on Stefano living in the depths of Marlena’s closet and sneaking into her bedroom to open her soul every night that finally pushed me over the proverbial ledge. I’d already accepted demonic possessions and new actors appearing as longstanding characters out of nowhere and pregnancy scares and swamp girls turning into princesses; I had to draw the fucking line somewhere.
The show is moronic, I told my sister over the phone as gently as I could. I’m breaking up with it and, if you have any dignity, you will cut it out of your life as well.
I was, after all, only trying to be supportive of a family member.
Leigh did not break up with Marlena or John or Patch or Sammy. She stuck with them and I was able to make a tremendous amount of fun of her for years and years about the bullshit programming she embraced as entertainment. Me? I got into different shows like Lost and Breaking Bad and The Wire and Dexter – you know, quality programming. I would talk about those shows with friends and acquaintances and new men I met at bars. (Nothing makes a man more excited than a girl in a tank top talking about Dexter. Actually, if my cleavage could project Caddyshack on a nearby wall, that might beat the Dexter thing, but I’ve yet to figure out the technology behind that little skill.) But privately? Well, that was a different story because I also found myself falling into a ditch where only reality shows played on a loop and, even though I probably could have crawled out of that ditch without too much trouble, I chose to stay there and I installed a DVR. I began watching The Real Housewives of Fucking Everywhere and Survivor and Vanderpump Rules and one season of America’s Next Top Model, though I completely blame a friend for pulling me into that one. I tuned in to the first few seasons of American Idol – and I even voted once, which is on my Top 10 list of Biggest Personal Humiliations. (It ranks higher than the time my left boob popped out of my bikini top on a date and sat there bobbing on the surface of the water for at least five minutes before I realized what was happening.) And I became (oh God, the shame) a fan of Big Brother and watched every episode of that show – and lest you not realize how humungous (and tragic) a revelation I am making here, please know that show airs three times a week during the summer.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about Sonja Morgan lately. And what I’ve realized through countless hours of pondering the motivations of a rather loony woman is that she’s now fully bypassed the time in her life when she could just be classified as being amusingly batty. Those days are dead. She has since entered a new phase in which she spends her late afternoons and all those drunken evenings teetering on the precipice of total and complete clinical insanity. Now, that’s a bold charge for a recapper to toss one’s way, so allow me for an instant to share with you the definition Psychology Today offers to explain the variables of such a sickness: Clinical insanity is a mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. Sound about right?
When she first appeared on this show, Sonja was a (somewhat) different person and it was a very different time. Bethenny hadn’t yet achieved gazillionaire status. Jill Zarin still believed she’d be relevant forever and enjoyed passing her days recording grievances against friends on index cards and posing for covers of books she deep down believed people would pay full price to read. Alex and Simon pretended they did not decorate their home to resemble a cheap bordello that housed hookers recovering from chlamydia. (They also enjoyed pretending that Alex could legitimately become a model and that Simon was legitimately heterosexual.) And Kelly Bensimon gnawed dreamily on gummy bears she was convinced had been grown organically on trees in a meadow where a sunny ball of LSD glowed majestically in the sky when she wasn’t running clear through oncoming traffic for her daily dose of cardio. She also lost her sanity so completely that anyone who so much as stood in the same airspace appeared nothing but fully lucid in comparison. Into that tumultuous environment did Sonja Morgan enter our lives. She was vivacious. She was funny. She had a way of turning every third sentence she uttered into the kind of sexual innuendo only a real dame can spew out without appearing completely ridiculous. She giggled and rooted for the best for everybody and appeared to not take herself all that seriously.
I’m not quite sure where that loopy though mildly lucid version of Sonja has gone. I can only guess that she hocked that part of herself in order to pay delinquent electricity bills or something, but the Sonja Morgan left in its place actually concerns me. This devolved version of Sonja that appears (with her staunch consent) on our television screens is a Sonja who legitimately does not appear able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fantasy anymore. There have, of course, been hints that this form of psychosis was upon us. Remember when Sonja tried to insist that Madonna came to support her at her fashion show but nobody saw the illustrious Ms. Ciccone because she wasn’t able to get through security? Recall the evening when Sonja screamed in Kristen’s face that Kristen should have known to tell a reporter some version of, “Sonja Morgan is far too important a human being to concentrate on a mere toaster when she is clearly blowing the international lifestyle brand game to smithereens with her business acumen that is both impressive and absolutely invisible to the naked eye.”
It was only yesterday when one of my students arrived for class looking like he’d just suffered an emotional punch to the face by someone who had never allowed a gym membership to lapse. As usual, he was the second student to arrive, but this time everything was different. He usually drops off his stuff on his desk, collects the handouts needed for the day, and then heads back into the hallway so he can coo and cuddle with his girlfriend before the bell rings. Then they all but dramatically scream, “Fare thee well!” at one another and reluctantly part ways for the next thirty-eight minutes.
I never say anything to kids who are making out in the hallway. I sort of just avert my eyes so I won’t see tongues flying about because I’m pretty certain that kind of image would scar me. And I rarely to never ask students about how their romantic relationships are going because I used to have this odd and rather terrible habit of inquiring about the status of things on the very day one of them was broken up with by the other via text. I’ve never said a word to this particular student about his girlfriend before and I don’t even know her name, but the absolute light that shines from his eyes when she is anywhere in his line of vision is obvious. As an adult who knows how rare it is for high school love to last forever, I wish I could hold a hand up in front of my face the way I did the first time I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because I just know the certain carnage that lies ahead.
This summer, I’m going to take Tallulah for a long walk every single morning before it gets sweaty-hot outside. I should walk her down by the water and get a cup of coffee afterwards! Wait: the people at Starbucks won’t allow me to bring her inside and I’m not about to tie her to the pole next to the door. The chance that someone might look at her and realize she’s worth a bounty is way too high. I’ll just walk her up and down the hills near my house. I hate hills. I also hate Jonah Hill…
There was a line at the front desk and every single person standing in front of me wanted to use a gift certificate and then promptly lost several shits as each realized she would have to pay the difference. One woman flatly refused and asked instead to see a list of cheaper treatments before settling on a facial that doesn’t include an extra blast of what I’m guessing is very costly oxygen. I decided to make the choice not to get annoyed by the way certain people can be so inconsiderate of strangers waiting patiently in a line behind them and I got through my minor exasperation by slowly and deeply breathing in some oxygen that nobody charged me for.
Obviously, I want to begin this recap by throwing out the suggestion that we all band together by season’s end and form a vigilante group, one whose very specific mission is to free Dorinda from John and then cart her off to intensive inpatient therapy because it appears that she actually loves the fleshy-lipped pig – or we can just say “fuck it” and head en masse to the Bravo studios with torches – but I feel like I have to talk about the psychic first. We’ll return later to my ideas about fundraising possibilities for our group. I’m thinking of holding a bake sale or maybe doing the Housewives equivalent of the Guess-How-Many-Jelly-Beans-Are-in-the-Jar game, only our version will ask people to hypothesize about exactly how many dicks have been inside of any part of Sonja so far this year. (My official guess is thirty-one.) We’ll also get to the discussion about whether or not we should use a straightjacket for Dorinda that has its very own detachable fur vest, but first we really need to tread through the Psychic Scene.
Before we go soaring off into the mystic with a mystic, let’s quickly check in with Sonja. She was not invited to meet the psychic so she’s wiling away her day by getting a facial. This facialist became part of a storyline at one point on this show when she was captured on camera gleefully proclaiming that Luann enjoys banging little French people. Now the facialist is back and she’s fighting like hell to stay relevant. In fact, she will hold up a golden apple in the opening credits of this show if it is the last fucking thing she does. Before I can fire off a threatening letter to Andy Cohen (Dear Andy, I have already put up with Aviva Drescher proclaiming that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. If you hire the gossipy facialist, I will destroy you. Love, Nell), Sonja’s brand new intern comes out to chat with her stem-celled-mask-covered boss about the RSVPs that are trickling in for Sonja’s next big event. Even the facialist has scored an invite despite the fact that the party is so very exclusive. The official word is that the party is meant to celebrate Sonja’s birthday, but the evening will also be used to launch Sonja’s brand new alcohol line! That’s right: Sonja, who either has a huge drinking problem or becomes a huge problem when she’s drinking, is ready to head a brand new business because her wildly successful fashion line cannot possibly be improved upon. I mean, once the public can purchase a jersey tunic that is shipped from a dilapidated townhouse because it’s not actually sold in any stores, what else is a savvy businesswoman to do? What would Elon Musk do? He probably wouldn’t team up with a guy who looks like the rodent in Charlotte’s Web to sell wine, but maybe it’s Sonja who really knows best. She might not own a Tesla, but she’s been naked in one! (The facialist told me so.) Anyway, the news about Sonja’s alcohol line will eventually be met with shock and derision from the people at the party who have some sense (and Ramona), as well as untainted raw fear when it's revealed that Sonja plans to call her brand Tipsy Girl, a prospect this bizarre amalgamation of a human lady actually believes will cause Bethenny to become dizzy with flattery and excitement.
While my favorite things to read are either books that can be filed under categories like Historical Nonfiction or articles about how this entire society is either going to be saved by a cronut or destroyed by a Kardashian, I’m still always open to the literary suggestions of others and I often shill out some suggestions as well. It’s funny, though: I feel legitimately guilty if I recommend a book or an article to a friend and the end result is that the person doesn’t enjoy it or get why it maybe meant so much to me. I understand that reading causes reactions and reactions are subjective, but there’s still almost this tangible feeling of failure when it’s revealed that no, your best friend did not enjoy the book Prep and now she really can’t understand why you’re dragging her to a book signing of the author’s follow-up and staring at that author like she’s fucking Elvis. You forgive this friend, of course. After all, she’s the person you stole Easy Riders, Raging Bulls from all those many years ago and you smile every single time you open your pilfered copy and see the one sentence that she underlined in the entire book was a quote by Joan Didion.
How’s the weight loss going? I texted this question to a friend the other night. He had to gain many pounds for an acting role that is now complete.
Only twenty to go, he answered. I’ve been boxing.
You should remake Raging Bull, I responded – and then, just as I pressed send, I had this horrible thudding feeling settle inside of me because nobody should ever remake Raging Bull and what if my text somehow put the entire travesty into motion simply because I’d foolishly introduced those vibes into the universe? What if Jonah Hill's eventual starring role in Raging Bull 2 is all my fault?
The Top 5 Most Exciting Moments for me in all of television history probably go a little something like this:
1. Jack screaming, “We have to go back!” making every single viewer feel gobsmacked by the staggering and sudden realization that Lost has just bounded into the future, that some of our castaways got off of that fucking island.
2. Jim telling Pam in a dark parking lot that he’s in love with her on The Office – while she’s engaged to somebody else.
3. Visually stumbling into that dark red room where a dwarf danced a jig and spoke backward on Twin Peaks. The scene was so bizarrely brilliant that it’s quite possible that I threw open my bedroom windows, looked up in wonder at the darkened sky, and shouted, “Hooray for fucked up art appearing on television!”
4. Frank Underwood tossing Zoe Barnes onto the train tracks seemingly out of nowhere on House of Cards. The moment stunned me to such a degree that I turned to the person I was with and actually asked – as the train crushed every bone and cell in her body – “Is she really dead?”
5. John declaring that he’s not at all terrified of Bethenny while he sweats clear through his clothing and shakes like a coked-up leaf because the truth is that Bethenny scares the fucking bejeezus out of him.
High on the list of my favorite all-time songs is Jungleland, that soaring rock n’ roll epic about swaggering guys who have something to prove cavorting with barefoot girls who recline on the hoods of cars right before a knife is raised high into the shadows of a stark night and everything changes forever. It’s a pure masterpiece of writing, one that ignores typical conventions and instead surges forward with the haunting rhythm of a saxophone, some blaring and unrelenting guitars, and one of the single most beautiful measures of melody ever tinkled on a piano. Perhaps even more than anything I’ve read by T.S. Eliot – or anything I ever pretended to read, like Beowulf –Jungleland captures the loss of control and the spinning of the self and the disquieting way that literally anything can happen once the sun goes down.
The song’s lyrics are astounding. They’re poignant and profound in their construction and visceral in their effect. The words sketch a portrait of a life most of us will never experience; then they beckon us to take a closer gander before we scurry back to safety. When I hear the song – even today – I feel transported to a place where there’s a glowing Exxon sign hanging high above the Jersey state line, one illuminating the faces of all those poets who don’t write anything at all.
To even pretend that it’s possible to compare the work of a musical mystic with Bravo Housewives is an exercise in futility, so I will not be wasting my time trying to locate similarities that don’t actually exist between what I see as the newest incarnations of Good and Evil. But if I really wanted to reach, perhaps I could say that the lines, “Man, there’s an opera out on the Turnpike…there’s a ballet being fought out in the alley,” remind me a tiny bit of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because brawls are also being fought there, only they’re being waged by morons and none of it is poetic in the slightest.
