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The Real Housewives of NY

HO! HO! HO!

HO! HO! HO!

It’s June!  And the total awareness of my looming days of bliss during whence I shall sleep until the sun comes up and then frolic along beaches with my puppy and a particularly adorable man has left me feeling both exhilarated and rather selfless – and that reverberating sense of positivity has translated into a desire to help others.  Seeing as I am unable to do shit like save lives, I will instead pay it forward by imparting the most essential wisdom I have gathered over the course of my life to my favorite online friends so you too can achieve some of what this momentary sense of nirvana feels like:

1. You can tell someone is a truly good friend when you don’t have to question his or her capacity for loyalty for even a second.

2. Nothing can benefit your life more than getting a good education – unless you can get sponsored by Peter Thiel, because that guy has your future covered so long as you never want that future to include a job at Gawker.

3. The people in your life you view as crazy are probably legitimately crazy and the lunacy they project daily as adults can likely be traced back to a very shitty day in middle school from which they have yet to recover.  Do not try to reason with these people.  In fact, it’s probably best not to look them directly in the eye or feed them after midnight either.

4. Most of the finest shows nowadays will never air on network television.  Basic and premium cable are your real friends and that means you should tune in to Lifetime for UnReal, USA for Mr. Robot, Showtime for The Girlfriend Experience, and Netflix for everything else.

5. When a man tells you that he almost gets into a fight every single time he enters a bar, he’s either lying or he’s psychotic – or he’s both, which makes him a lying psychopath who probably slumbers atop a bed made out of diaphanous red flags.

6. Layer cake tastes way better when it’s kept in the refrigerator.

7. Doing squats correctly hurts like a motherfucker.  Doing Pilates correctly hurts like a motherfucker who is going through heroin withdrawal.

8. Only tell the handful of people you really trust the whole truth and just smile affably at everyone else because those people don’t really care how you are or what you think.  Save your time and energy for the people who matter.

9. Try not to call a television show “preposterous” when speaking to the show’s producer.  

10. See Hamilton as soon as you possibly can.  Know how it’s been touted as being the single greatest thing ever to hit Broadway?  That hype is real.

11. Shrug off the inconsideration someone directs at you because you’re strong and you can handle it, but refuse to forgive someone for all of eternity if that inconsideration is aimed at a member of your family – at least if it's a member of your family you actually like.

12. The thread count of sheets matters tremendously.

13. If an opportunity presents itself that both excites and terrifies you, do it. You’ll figure it out as you go and really, as long as you appear confident, people will think you actually know what you’re doing.

14. Don’t even bother trying to straighten your hair when the humidity level hits 60% or higher.  Also, only date men who love their air conditioners as fervently as they love their mothers or their pets.

15. For the love of all that is fucking holy, don’t ever RSVP “yes” to a holiday party thrown by a Real Housewife.

 

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

Let’s talk about Luann, shall we?  My dear internet friends, our favorite Countess appears to be smack dab in the midst of her own personal renaissance!  Gone are the days when she used to invite her daughter’s friends out for a festive afternoon of learning which fork to use while insisting that there’s nothing teenage girls enjoy more than brushing up on their etiquette.  That Luann is dead and the reincarnated version does shit like crawl home at dawn from some guy’s place before enjoying a breakfast laden with carbohydrates in her roommate’s kitchen while chortling about a brawl her friends caused at a party for a dry cleaner that was covered in the Post because it’s not like anything important such as genocide or terrifying elections are occurring these days.

I think it’s pretty undeniable that New Luann is far more fascinating than Old Luann. New Luann seems to be more of a person and less a bland prototype of what she once heard generic royalty is supposed to act like.  It would be hard, for instance, to imagine New Luann sliding into the backseat of a car and admonishing the friend sitting beside her for deigning to call her by her name when introducing her to the driver.  In fact, I’d like to think that New Luann would slap the shit out of the antiquated version of herself – or, at the very least, squirt all over herself in disgust.

PROTECTING THE FACIAL

PROTECTING THE FACIAL

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.  

THERE'S NO HEAT OR HOT WATER IN THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE

THERE'S NO HEAT OR HOT WATER IN THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE

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.”  

 

THE TIPSY GIRL'S GOBLET OF DELUSION HAS RUNNETH OVER

THE TIPSY GIRL'S GOBLET OF DELUSION HAS RUNNETH OVER

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.

 

THEY'RE BACK...AND THEY'RE SPECTACULAR

THEY'RE BACK...AND THEY'RE SPECTACULAR

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.

THE TAO OF BRANDI

THE TAO OF BRANDI

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.

 

THE CULT OF FRANKEL

THE CULT OF FRANKEL

“Dorinda drank the Kool-Aid, she joined the cult, she’s on the commune.”  And with that one hilarious – and completely accurate – statement, Bethenny Frankel won me back.

It’s always been a significant factor in my makeup as a person to have an immense capacity for forgiveness.  I don’t quite know where it came from, but I do know I have seen once-fractured relationships mend and grow stronger and such incidents can only transpire if one is able to forgive.  I can say that those I’ve forgiven over the years seem to really appreciate this ingrained quality within me, even as I’ve started to view it as kind of a torturous flaw.  I’d actually really love to change that aspect of my personality, to become someone who has zero desire to forgive anyone for anything, but that kind of alteration will almost certainly require a huge deal of effort and I think it’s just wise that I devote my energy to things like mastering the art of baking broccoli until it chars correctly, organizing my spring skirts by length, and finally sitting down to watch seasons three, four, and five of Friday Night Lights.  

I’ll learn to become a withholding asshole next year.

SONJA'S GOT A HOBBY

SONJA'S GOT A HOBBY

Here are some really nice surprises that have happened to me just recently: 

I ordered something that usually comes with a pickle and then – as though I was smack dab in the middle of a glorious dream – two pickles showed up on that plate.

I realized that the way the Jewish holidays fall this year means that I don't have to teach for a full week all September long. As a result, I have never felt so connected with my heritage in my entire life.

I couldn’t sleep one pre-dawn and I was scrolling desperately through channels on my TV and on every single one was Cindy Crawford trying to sell me moisturizer that comes from inside of a melon and then, just when I was about to break and buy that moisturizer, I stumbled joyfully upon a Dateline: Mysteries marathon.  (It’s probably worth noting that this happy surprise eventually backfired on me.   By the time I finally got tired, I could no longer fall asleep because I couldn’t stop myself from worrying about the prowler who would surely sneak into my house.)

I dug maniacally through my purse and triumphantly pulled free gum, a tampon, and a twenty.