Welcome to the moment where my mental illness has seized the controls and I can barely string together a sentence! I am deeply depressed and wildly anxious, which is good fun, especially simultaneously! I should be all “hooray, a weekly writing exercise in fun and frivolity to lighten my mood!” but instead I’m like THE WORLD IS ENDING AND NOTHING MATTERS PLEASE DROWN ME IN A SEWAGE TREATMENT POND. That joke isn’t very funny is it, there are funnier things to drown in than a sewage treatment pond damn I told you I was depressed wow makes you think! And to make matters worse, this episode of RHONY was… dumb! It was just dumb! The universe has screwed me both comin’ and goin’!
Anyway during the past, IDK week, 10 days, maybe two whole weeks--who’s to say, mental illness’s creative process is always a mystery!--I have gone into a sort of mourning about all the shit happening right now and then also according to my astrology friend (hey girl!) apparently Scorpio is doing some shit right now and my moon is in Scorpio? Or my rising is? I can’t remember because I have no aptitude for this shit and can’t keep it straight but my SOMETHING is in Scorpio, which is why I am so mean on the outside despite being a Cadbury Creme Egg of dreamy Sagittarius bullshit on the inside who cried at the opening credits of Six Feet Under the other night just because “It’s just, like, ART and like *sobs to death*”
And now I’ve lost my train of thought. See? Depressed! Oh right SOMETHING’S IN SCORPIO. So my dick is in Scorpio or whatever and according to astrology friend Scorpio is doing some sky fuckery right now WHICH APPARENTLY MEANS that in addition to the present being a nightmare those of us with ~*Scorpio placements*~ are also experiencing a visit by the wounds of our pasts and LOLOLOLOL listen if this bitch is gonna keep being so fucking accurate about this shit I’ma have to start openly believing in astrology and that fucking pisses me off. I don’t even know how to believe in myself let alone the mystic wisdom of the tarot!
Anyway, per astrology friend’s ~*insights*~ I have spent a total of *carries the one* EVERY WAKING MOMENT of the past week thinking about how rapidly this country is imploding and how perfectly that dovetails with the sense of loss I feel about an early adulthood derailed by multiple overlapping traumas and how I was all set to make ~*big changes in 2020*~ and now *gestures at everything* Wow life really is a circle no matter how hard you try! Things could def be worse—I could have the pandemic shit in my person—but we human persons are not meant to live with the earth rapidly dissolving beneath our feet like cotton candy in a rainstorm (oh wow mixed metaphors we stan!) so at the moment I am stuck. Which is why this recap is weird and messy! Maybe you are feeling similarly all over the shop and it will make you feel better to hear someone else acknowledge it IDK!
Anyway, the fuck does this have to do with this week’s The Real Huswifery of New York you scream into the void well let me tell you. I bring all this up because just when I, and I’d imagine many of us, needed them most, the drunken Hamptons antics of these women came to a screeching halt and we got left in the lurch by some boring, dumb, interstitial nonsense last Thursday and isn’t that just the way! You ever watch Madonna’s seminal and genre-busting “Blond Ambition Tour”? The 30th anniversary of its launch was a couple weeks ago and the algorithms know that I am a certain kind of homosexual (rapidly decaying, out-of-touch, depressed), so I have recently been served every piece of retrospective Blond Ambition content the internet has produced. If you’ve not seen it, you should really give it a watch because it really is something. I suggest this rendition that aired on HBO, the YouTube photo for which looks like she’s taking a big sweaty shit isn’t that funny hahaha life is such a rich tapestry!
Those of you on the younger side probably don’t even know about pre-Blond Ambition rock concerts--did you know that music artists used to just get on a stage and play songs and that was it?! They did music and then you just went home! Say what you want for the old girl (and there’s plenty to say), but she truly did change the concert paradigm forever with this little Broadway-cum-Church-cum-Brothel dog-and-pony show, and that’s before you even consider that every number is rooted in the barely subtextual female and secondhand-queer rage of a recently ex-communicated rape survivor who’d spent the past few years exiting an abusive marriage while watching her entire circle of friends die of a plague the government openly laughed about!
I have a point! If you watch “Blond Ambition” you will find yourself in rapt, thrilled attention for close to an hour--a Metropolis “Express Yourself”! A masturbating Whore of Babylon “Like a Virgin”! A Martha Graham-inflected “Papa Don’t Preach”! And then bam--suddenly you’re being forced to slog through fifteen uninterrupted minutes of Dick Tracy movie promotion that nobody on Earth cares about. People barely cared in 1990, let alone now. But, of course, Madonna never met an opportunity for self-promotion she didn’t grab by the throat and strangle to death, and so we must endure three cuts from the Dick Tracy-inspired album I’m Breathless which, for all its big-band, Jazz Age concept-album sheen, is rather dumb! (Though it did give us “Vogue” and these two spectacular performances, for which we can be grateful.) It’s all very coitus interruptus.
That, my friends, is what this episode of Real Housewives of New York was like. A spectacular crash back to reality, a slamming reminder that drunken Hamptons antics cannot last forever because we are in the valley between the peaks and so we must watch glassy-eyed as these women go to New York Fashion Week so Sonja Morgan can promote her dumb clothing line. *Kristen Wiig Aunt Linda gif* I mean there I was last Thursday all in my Scorpio shit, ready to fill the yawning emotional void with more vodka-and-menopause antics and instead I got Sonja Morgan pretending to be Gloria Vanderbilt. No, that’s too sophisticated. More like Jaclyn Smith for Kmart.
And look, I know this is a proud and enduring RHONY tradition but I don’t care. I don’t care! I want to watch them get drunk and fight, or at least get drunk and do embarrassing white lady dancing. I do not want to watch them ~*achieve*~ I mean, I know part of the entire point of being on a Housewives show is to launch a brand and hawk wares but I am deeply annoyed by it. Except when it’s on Real Housewives of Atlanta because watching Black women succeed feels more like watching that part of “Formation” where Beyoncé is like “Best revenge is your paper” while dressed like a Creole swamp witch. I mean, I don’t even fuck with capitalism, I called Amex and Capital One a month ago and told them “I am SEIZING the means of PRODUCTION” and they were like “what?” and I was like “I’m not paying you anymore BYE” and they were like “Issa pandemic bb that’s fine” and it was deeply unsatisfying! I wanted a fight!
And here I go again, I’ve lost the plot, mental illness is truly a scourge. Oh--so I don’t fuck with capitalism like at all but nevertheless watching the Atlanta ladies do business I’m like “YES BEAT THE WHITE MAN AT HIS OWN GAME PROMOTE YOUR ~*PRODUCT*~ REAP THESE ~*FINANCIAL REWARDS*~” We simply love to see Black women succeed even if--perhaps especially if--the system in which they are doing so is fucked. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and American capitalism is inherently white supremacist so stack those hair-care dollars Kenya Moore! Log that satellite radio revenue, Porsha Williams! We simply love to see it!
But these New York women? In the immortal words of Nene Leakes, girl bye.
I just don’t care. Ramona (and Bethenny, when she was still around) aside, who truly come from nothing and built their shit from the ground up, these women have all gotten where they are by marrying and divorcing well and there’s truly nothing wrong with that in my opinion--if I had the looks for it my personal motto would be “ride dicks and cash checks!” Anyone who makes their fortune by using a rich man’s weiner as a magic wand to disappear his money from his wallet is doing God’s work as far as I’m concerned! Drain them nuts AND that bank account bb! Now That’s What I Call Wealth Redistribution!
But it’s just not compelling to watch, and yes, that is probably because I’m just jealous because here’s a secret no one acknowledges: most of the gays who succeed in this country are the ones people want to fuck, and the rest of us nobody can be bothered with. (Though I feel like this has seismically shifted in recent years, which is wonderful!) And does my own lack of success probably have more to do with low self-esteem and incompetent choices? Yes! But what am I supposed to do about that, ~*take personal responsibility*~ and ~*self-actualize*~? What am I a Republican?! Who’s got the time?! So lemme click two slots down in this Hulu DVR for which I pay through the nose and watch Kandi Burruss open another successful soul food restaurant AND deposit some more sex toy checks. This RHONY shit is boring!
But, in a spectacular lapse of judgment, some of you have actually given me money to recap these things, and I take that doodie--sorry, duty--seriously. So let’s get down to brass tacks--briefly, because there’s little to say and I’ve already bent your ear at length about… IDK, whatever the hell the above four million words were about. Here’s what happened last week.
As if Sonja Morgan’s attempt at fashion influence (more on which in a moment) wasn’t enough, we were also asked to believe Tinsley Mortimer is the 2020 version of Carrie Bradshaw doing some celebrity cameo ~*modeling*~ In what world! She is boring and has this terrible hairdo in her interviews!
What are those weird curls on either side of her face?! Why are they SQUARED OFF like when thirteen-year-old girls are still learning how to use a curling iron and they end up with those, like, CORNERS in their hair? This look is a MISTAKE and I’ve had it. This is a celebrity cameo fashion model?! It’s more embarrassing than the time Ramona “modeled” and did this!
Anyway, here’s a picture of Tinsley “modeling” looking like a goddamn extra from Toddlers in Tiaras if you care.
The upshot of this whole Tinsley ~*journey*~ is that it did get us a visit from Tinsley’s Southern blue-blood mother Dale, who is orders of magnitude more interesting than her daughter. They take a quick jaunt down memory lane, reminiscing about the days when Tinsley was a mid-2000s It Girl in New York (Remember when she was a fixture on “Guest of a Guest” and “Park Avenue Peerage”? That really was an era. Whiling away your workday obsessively refreshing those sites and cross-referencing them with Gawker’s “Stalker Map” to read up on the comings and goings of luminaries you profoundly disdained but nevertheless had a car-wreck fascination with. What a world the internet was before social media turned it into a compendium of Neo-Nazi conspiracy theories about 5G internet bat flu!) Anyway all this looking back makes Dale and Tinsley bond-sob together about the latter “finally being herself again,” which was the saddest, darkest thing I’ve ever watched.
“Finally you’re yourself again because people are taking pictures of you at fashion shows for Getty Images!!!” Downright macabre!
Luann doesn’t really do anything this episode except show up early to the Pamella Roland fashion show the ladies are all attending (Roland’s somehow a friend of Ramona’s which, lol sounds fake but ok) and go backstage to demand one of the show’s hairdressers give her a blow-out while she waits for the others to arrive, which gives us this beautiful chyron, one of the crowning achievements of the shadiest team of editors in television history:
“Loic, hairdresser for models actually in the show.” Wow my depression is cured!!!
After last week’s drunken Hamptons antics, Leah is now embroiled in conflict with her mother over what she considers Leah’s relapse into alcoholism. We meet her former husband and babydaddy Rob when he comes to confront her about same and, whew!
Oh boy, wow o wow he’s extremely sexy in a way I did not at all expect! Leah is inhumanly beautiful and has a fashion line so I was expecting some boring generic model dude, but instead we get this vaguely blue-collar hipster dad and sorry but boinnnnngg! Push my head down while you talk about music no one has heard of, zaddy!
(In reality me and Rob are probably the same age lololol kill me.)
My girl Melissa texted me during this and presented me with a “Marry, Fuck, Kill” between the aforementioned Rob, Dorinda’s John Bahdessian, and Ramona’s ex-husband Mario. Leah’s former man was my “Fuck” choice cuz damn! John was my marry because he’s a sweet doofy huggy bear and would make a fine husband even though Dorinda hates him, and Mario was my Kill bc while sexy he’s also a cheater and broke Ramona’s heart and not even she deserves that. Bye Mario with your sexy ass, you gotta die!
And now we come to Sonja, whompst, in case you didn’t know, has not one but multiple fashion lines called various interpolations of the words Sonja, Morgan, and New York, because she thinks she’s Marc Jacobs and never noticed that Marc Jacobs’s multiple Marc Jacobs lines were somewhat parodies of both himself and the fashion industry and that’s why every woman in Obama-era New York had one of those totebags that said “Marc by Marc Jacobs from Marc Jacobs brought to you by Marc Jacobs in partnership with Marc Jacobs” or something to that effect. I don’t remember exactly, it was long ago, in a world before Gilead. Oh wait I Googled it, it’s this:
My point is, and I think I’ve made it cogently, Sonja is full of shit. But that hasn’t stopped her from scheduling a fashion show during New York Fashion Week--you know, when literally the entire fashion industry of the entire world has come to view fashions--and doing literally nothing to prepare until the last possible moment! And so half this episode is just watching her descend into that particular brand of chaotic madness that ensues when a person is all ego and no sense and very much up against a wall but lacks any of the skill or fortitude to actually pull it off.
In the end Sonja resorts to a positively baroque level of drama into which she tries to rope everyone else by jumping up in the middle of brunch to shriek about how much work she has to do and then when all the other women are like “LOL ok girl” she stomps off to an adjacent table to be left alone to ply her ~*craft*~. The unprepared and incompetent theater of it all, Shakespeare could never!
We are at least, thank God, spared the experience of seeing her triumph in spite of herself because after running around like a headless chicken barking orders at interns and blaming others for her mistakes, Sonja’s fashion show is a mess with no music or lights. It was honestly worse than the time Sherée on Real Housewives of Atlanta had a fashion show and none of her She by Sherée fashions were done in time and so it was… basically a cocktail party that Dwight famously called “a fashion show without any fashions, how dreadful.”
But at least that was just in Sherée’s house or something, as I remember, not at New York Fashion Week, and so given the stakes, Sonja’s was far worse. Fashion show? More like fashitshow am I right everyone? Thank you so much that’s my time, you’ve been a great audience, my God I hope this depression passes soon so the jokes are back up to par!
Oh! I nearly forgot Dorinda: she doesn’t really do anything in this episode except mime prying her brain out of her head with a butterknife in order to not have to listen to Tinsley babble on about her hair. We stan a relatable content queen!
So there you go. This was interesting, eh? My brain is broken!
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Ok thank you very much you are terrific and pretty and we are definitely all going to die soon lololololol not really but kind of probably hahaha oh we have fun!!!