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.
It was probably somewhere around the fifth hour of watching the Senate hearing on Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks when a series of revelations began to sweep through my mind like a brushfire caused by an aerosol can of Resveratrol exploding inside the bidet of a marble bathroom that is Coto de Caza-adjacent:
1. There’s the ability some of us have to keep calm under pressure – and then there’s the way Hillary Clinton reacts under pressure. That woman did not so much as lightly perspire the entire time she was being grilled under hot television lights by political foes who would probably rejoice in literally roasting her over a bonfire like she was a rotisserie chicken. No matter what she was asked, her composure was nothing short of masterful.
2. And speaking of masterful, I want the name of Clinton’s makeup artist toot sweet and I’d like to buy stock in whatever company produces her matte face powder and blotting papers because – holy shit – those are clearly some excellent products and perhaps our greatest hope in the fight to make unintentionally shiny skin a thing of the past.
3. Anyone who can walk away from watching the coverage of these hearings without fully understanding the term “bipartisan” at this point is either an idiot or was too busy checking the US Weekly website so as not to miss the latest pearl of wisdom that has fallen from the inflated pout of young Kylie Jenner, a girl who now more closely resembles a blow-up sex doll than a human.
I’ve come to believe that watching Reunion episodes of The Real Housewives of Fucking Wherever is very similar to sleeping with a guy you promised yourself you’d never writhe beneath again before a cocktail of literal cocktails combined with the false notion that sex doesn’t have to mean anything settled first into your head and then gravitated quickly towards your waxed nether regions. What I mean here is that you think that you will get some satisfaction from the whole experience, but what you are really left with is a few hours lost from your life, a teensy bit of regret, and a wet spot that you could swear looks exactly like Vicki Gunvalson’s first face.
Just like sex with an ex, nothing that happens during a Reunion is brand new. Sure, maybe someone has a new outfit to show off or a tighter ass to wiggle or a point to make that’s said in a different manner than it’s ever been stated before (examples here might include “Here’s the newest reason I think Brooks is a liar” and “No, I’m staying on top”), but it all really comes down to the fact that, in both scenarios, nothing changes and nothing is truly gained and you probably could have achieved far greater happiness by eating a Snickers in a dark room where you could pretend to ignore the suggestion written on the wrapper of the King Size bar that a chocolate bar so humongous is really designed for sharing.
Fuck Snickers and whomever designed its packaging. Fuck the sharing of candy of any kind. And really fuck the OC Housewives who have done next to nothing all season long. Beverly Hills had a wineglass-heaving sociopath and an alcoholic who relapsed right there on camera. New Jersey boasts an incarcerated castmate who never completed the evolution cycle and a son-in-law who was rumored to have banged his wife’s mother. Atlanta has NeNe, the largest being ever measured by the naked eye that allegedly doesn’t contain some Sasquatch blood. And what does Orange County have? A whole lot of nothing.
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.
Last week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County had a subplot that seemed both weirdly literal and colorfully metaphorical at the same time. A storm was brewing in Oklahoma, one that might be strong enough to sweep Vicki clear to the east coast with just one fierce tornado gust, but (luckily for those of us who reside on the east coast) that was just a hint of the real storm to come. The real bluster comes about at a party thrown by one of our illustrious Housewives – and at this point, I think I might only have disdain for those who continue showing up at events where they are verbally assaulted before being handed a gift bag.
But this is The Real Housewives and what that means is that a party cannot just kick off the hour! First we are invited on kind of a journey where we get to see how all of the relationships are currently lined up so that we know who the teams at the party will be. At this point, Meghan is the captain of one team and she is lobbying to name her team “BROOKS IS A FUCKING LIAR AND I HAVE PROOF” but she’s concerned that the team name won’t fit on their shirts. Brooks, who is either a liar or a man falsely accused of doing something so despicable that it almost defies comprehension, will lead up the other team. Obviously, Vicki will be the star of “TEAM WHOO-HOO,” but the real question is where the other Housewives fall. Prior to this episode, it appeared that Shannon and Tamra would join Vicki and Brooks’ team. They would shut their mouths and gaze at the floor and Shannon would grip some crystals tightly in her palm and chant for Vicki not to yell at her about anything and Tamra would pray directly to God for the same thing because she’s religious now. There was a chance that Heather might have joined Meghan’s team, but I think Heather would be far more likely to quickly jet off to some tropical land so she could avoid the conflict altogether. Still, the lines seem to have changed recently and the teams are no longer so clearly separated and it all becomes clear when Heather meets up with Meghan at a dinner where Shannon will join them a bit later.
Tamra’s extremely classy faux-sex fiesta is over now and all that remains is the faint scent of discount-priced lube in the air and the very real need to pull duct tape off of body parts in one quick and incredibly painful motion. But just because terrible fetish wigs have been removed from the heads of Housewives all over town does not mean that any of them have forgotten what went down at a party where the guests were required to watch Tamra and Eddie’s oh-so-clever play on a sex tape that was really a workout video and then not vomit when the scene mercifully faded to black after we all got to hear that Tamra is really tight. See, just because it’s a brand new day doesn’t take away the fact that Vicki told Meghan’s husband that he married an asshole or that Meghan’s husband is a total asshole or that people have questioned the veracity of Brooks’ illness or that Shannon is never happy when she’s sober. Isn’t it sad when we realize that all of life’s greatest problems do not dissipate the moment we remove the leather collar and leash from around our necks? Oh, misery.
