#RHONY Recap -- Oh So We're Just Not Going To Talk About How Tinsley Mortimer Has Coronavirus, And Other Mysteries
Yes hello! And welcome back! Have you succumbed to the wiles of pandemic despair yet? I’ma be honest: I have! And as you’ll see, this episode did nothing to assuage that terror, and it is frankly abusive. I will be filing suit! But first, your recap.
After a harrowing episode one (recap here!), we open with Sonja and Tinsley meeting for a drink at some surely intolerable rooftop bar likely full of finance douches and PR girls. (I used to live in New York and these are the only two types of people you ever find at a rooftop bar because everybody else is living in Dickensian street-urchin poverty. God I miss that city.) Tinsley (ugh Christ) immediately launches into her overcooked beef with Dorinda (Jesus who cares) in which Dorinda accused Tinsley of continuing to sleep with her ex-boyfriend Scott so he’d buy her shit. Which, to be honest, so what!
Real talk, if I had the looks to run that kind of scam do you have any idea the kind of life I’d be living?! Probably the same laying-around-in-sweatpants-watching-bullshit-on-TV life I have now because I am very lazy and have given up but I'd be doing it in a penthouse suite while flushing caviar down the toilet just out of “fuck you I’m rich” spite! Why wouldn’t I eat the caviar? Because it’s not good! This is a whole other substack but listen: People will tell you caviar is a delicious way to add brine to any dish but the tea on caviar is that it’s fucking disgusting! Do you see the distinction?
My point is, having to maintain a standard weekly ass-bleaching appointment to keep a tech billionaire happy is a small price to pay to maintain a preposterously opulent standard of living on someone else’s dime so honestly I don’t really see what all the fuss is about if Tinsley is fucking some ectomorphic online coupon magnate for shoes! Who cares! We’ve been talking about this for 47 years! I am tired in my bones! Thankfully, new girl Leah shows up and everything gets derailed because Sonja notices something truly earth-shattering: *gasp* Leah has a tattoo!!!
I… don’t get it either. But it becomes a thing. Like… a whole-episode thing, which we’ll get to in a moment. For now, we see Sonja do that thing that rich white people do where she compliments Leah in order to insult her? She says, “Leah’s got a beautiful body,” but then qualifies that by saying the tattoo “says something negative about her.” She feels it’s self-deprecating, but because she’s Sonja Morgan and she’s probably drunk and on pills (no shade! I’m jealous!) she calls it self-defecating.
Does Sonja ever realize that the word she means to use, self-deprecating is also wrong here? No! And that is why she’s a television star! HER MIND!
Anyway, everyone’s going to Ramona’s tacky mansion in the Hamptons for the weekend and so we join everyone’s favorite jailbird Luann at some restaurant out there and look, this is gonna sound real mean so forgive in advance. But it truly delights me when this show takes these women into the wild and they have interactions with people who clearly have NO IDEA who they are. It's just so satisfying. And that’s precisely what happens here. If you know anything about Luann, you know that for two years now we’ve been following her alcoholism and sobriety ~*journey*~ Well suffice to say, Luann’s waitress is not a viewer of the Housewives franchise and right out the gate offers booze to a recovering alcoholic and the rage bubbling under Luann’s perfectly rehabbed face blessed me to my very soul.
Not because I'm cheering for Luann to fail at sobriety, but because you can see the words "Don't you know who I am" running through her brain and being stopped short by the awareness that she’s on camera and that is extremely my shit. I don’t wish ill upon any of these women, but I am a very bad person and so I hope that the fact that nobody knows who Luann de Lesseps is except a narrow demo of gays and the women who love them keeps her up at night!
Next Ramona shows up looking like the extremely cool babysitter I had when I was 7 that my mom hated cuz she wore a leather jacket and, you know, just come the fuck on.
However joke’s on me because Ramona walks into the restaurant and immediately gets picked up by some guy at the bar, a thing that has never happened to me in my entire life except one time when I was 25 and an old man asked me if I liked to be peed on. So Me: 0, Ramona: 98781334126374512436739837489123654183904!
Next we’re back to Tinsley and, my God, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. But... You know these stupid poodles she went to China to adopt? Well, it turns out she didn't just adopt them, she rescued them from being sold for meat while in China doing dog-related charity work! And honestly, I'm furious. Tinsley's entire THING is that she's an empty vessel and this character choice is completely ludicrous and I'd like a word with the writers. She’s even learning Chinese so she can communicate with them in their native language! It’s very sweet! This is an outrage!
Anyway, next we’re with Dorinda and Sonja on their way to the Hamptons and Dorinda says this:
Are we finally going to get the lesbian RHONY orgy we've been waiting 12 seasons for???
Who would be the tops and who would be the bottoms is what I want to know. I mean, stereotypes dictate that the entire group would be tops except for Tinsley, but when it comes to gay men at least, the old maxim is “Butch in the streets, bitch in the sheets.” So does that mean Tinsley is a full-on stud?! The mind reels! What we know for sure is that deep-voiced aggressive Luann would be the kind of lazy bottom who’d just lay there and have OPINIONS about your technique. Contrast that with Dorinda, who I feel would eat pussy like Serena plays tennis: take-charge flawlessly, probably while yelling a lot. Game! Set! Match! And then there’s Sonja, who after talking 10 seasons’ worth of shit about being an actual bisexual would reveal herself to be a fraud by throwing up in her mouth on her way downtown. A scandal!
But the real kicker would be that Leah would end up discovering she’s a natural at lady-business despite never having been with a woman before and it would drive Ramona so crazy to be upstaged that she wouldn’t be able to shut up about it long enough to actually get any and then we'd spend the rest of the season having Ramona start fights with everyone like "In awl sincerity I had you AWL out to MY HOUSE to have a LESBIAN AWGY and in awl sincerity none of you could even have the DECENCY to eat this pussy even though you AWL KNEW because you're my FRIENDS and I CONFOIDED IN YOU that I had it TIGHTENED between seasons!”
In the end though I regret to report that none of this happens and Dorinda bringing a collection of vibrators to the Hamptons is never explained or mentioned ever again. Incompetent writing!
Next we see Tinsley and Leah heading to the Hamptons and Tinsley just casually drops a fucking bombshell: “I have this really weird cough and stuff” and “I don’t want to lose my voice” because “what are we gonna do if I can’t speak?”
Which LOLOLOLOL don’t worry about it you never say anything of import anyway! Until now though!!! You’ve just returned from China! And now you have a “really weird cough and stuff” and sound like you’ve been gargling coarse-grain construction gravel for a week and a half!
MA’AM!!! YOU ARE CORONAVIRUS PATIENT ZERO GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE CAR AND GO TO PRISON!!!
And then she show just continues on like nothing happened!!! The next thing we get is Sonja screaming about how her chiropractor told her “wine is poison”!
Not even a disclaimer! Nary an explanatory title card! What the hell kind of dog and pony show is Andy Cohen running here?! You can’t just put this woman into my eyeballs sounding like someone ran a belt-sander down her gullet a week after she returns from China while I’m locked in my home having slept a total of 17 minutes in 35 days! I am calling the International Criminal Court! This is gross negligence!
I am honestly so disturbed I can barely even concentrate on what happens next but we must soldier on. So the women are all having lunch at Ramona’s and Sonja drops a bombshell on Dorinda. No, not that TINSLEY HAS CORONAVIRUS..
No, rather, the bombshell is this: Leah has tattoos.
And it becomes a whole THING and I’m gonna be honest: What is happening? Why are we talking about this and not THE VECTOR OF VIRAL PLAGUE EN ROUTE TO CLAIM YOUR SOULS. Who cares about a tattoo?! I’m incensed.
In any case, things progress at Ramona’s as normal. Ramona doles out bedrooms and gives Luann the ENTIRE finished basement which is bigger than most people’s homes and Luann throws a fit because it’s a basement and says this:
… which makes absolutely no sense. Then she walks around rubbing her arms like it’s 40 degrees down there in order to really sell her disgruntlement to LITERALLY NO ONE BUT THE CAMERAMAN.
Acting!
Then we go outside to where Dorinda is crying about having to remodel her vacation home, which for those of you who don’t watch this trash, is not a cabin but a literal mountaintop mansion.
You can’t imagine the agony!
To be fair though, it does sound like Dorinda is having a genuine anxiety issue, and she opens up about missing the support of her deceased husband Richard, which is heartbreaking. And as a person who is WILDLY mentally ill I wanted to reach through the TV and hug her, but then I immediately forgot all of that because TINSLEY COMES OUT TO JOIN THEM AND GET AWAY FROM HER YOU HAVE CORONAVIRUS DORINDA HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS!
Just walking around Ramona's $40 million manse actively shedding virus! All these bitches are going to end up in the ICU! Where is Dr. Fauci?!
Thankfully, though, when we most need a distraction, the true crisis of this episode quickly reveals itself.
This hat. This hat is a crisis. Can we get Bethenny Frankel on the line to add this to the list of shit she’s Mother Teresa’ing? THIS HAT. It is such a mistake. This is a costume piece for a porn movie. That is the only context in which I can see it not immediately making you basically do that thing Jason Bateman did on Arrested Development every time Anne showed up.
“This hat?” It’s so perplexing. It is so simple—just an unassuming sheer bucket hat!—and yet so malevolent. The mind reels. I applaud Leah for trying it with this hat—you miss 100% of the shots you don't take! But Coco Chanel said always take one thing off and that doesn't apply here because Leah is only wearing three things, but please take one thing off anyway and make it this hat fashioned from the lint screen of a Kenmore dryer. Anyway just as the shock of this hat threatens to overwhelm, Ramona says this:
The shade! The shade of it all! This is like when I told my mom I grew my hair out and she simply said, “Why?” And then when I showed up at her door with my suitcase she said, “Oh wow you really DID grow your hair out!" and then never said another word about it. A flex!
Anyway, just as we’ve settled into moving onto other things we go outside for lunch and Jesus Christ Almighty, we’re talking about the HORRIFYING TRUTH of Leah’s tattoos again.
These women are PRESSED! And honestly, wtf is going on? Have we unwittingly transported to another astral plane where it is 1952? Is Julianne Moore about to join this show and talk about her forbidden love affair with the Black gardener who comforted her after she walked in on her husband Dennis Quaid getting his pole smoked by a 20-year-old Twink in his office and then deadpan to camera, “But at least he didn’t have any tattoos”? That is an elaborate reference to the 2002 Oscar-nominated 1950s-set Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven! Which makes as much sense as this entire tattoo storyline in 2020! Especially given that TINSLEY HAS CORONAVIRUS. What on Earth is this television program?!
Next someone makes a joke about Ramona never remembering new people’s names and Dorinda, referencing Leah's trampstamp tattoo of her name on her lower back, says, "And if she forgets it you just need to turn around and bend over."
And here is where we begin to learn precisely the type of bad bitch that has just been hired for this season. Because this is how Dorinda has always operated--territorial pissings--but now that Bethenny's gone it seems like it's on 11. Tinsley's the type who just rolls over, of course, and the others are passive-aggressive and let Dorinda win. But Leah? Well...
After this horrifying moment where Tinsley covers Sonja in coronavirus while helping her with her eyebrows OMG YOUR DROPLETS ARE EVERYWHERE CALL A MAKEUP ARTIST!!!
The ladies head out to dinner and Dorinda goes for the jugular, as per usual.
And here, my heart leapt into my throat because Dorinda can be pretty vicious, and Leah, being the new girl, doesn’t really know what she’s getting into. Like Leah seems to be, I am a mouthy person who loves to tell a person about themselves (Scorpio rising, what’re ya gonna do?), and the whole reason I've never been in a fistfight is because any time some testosterone-choked dudebro tries it I run my mouth so hard he gets scared and leaves me alone. But here's the tea: I am actually terrified because homophobia both internal and external has left me with the notion that I am a weakling and a pipsqueak whompst a dudebro could easily kill with one blow just because... IDK patriarchy?! It makes no sense! But whenever I talk shit to an aggressor, my hands are in my pockets BECAUSE THEY'RE SHAKING LIKE LEAVES, and I don’t want the giveaway undermining my cred.
So imagine the thrills that went through my bloodstream when I saw this:
Dorinda drawn up to her full height so as to dominate and in return? Leah slouching! Steady hands! Can’t be bothered! No fucks to give! Leah, the odd man out in a group of women who’ve been doing this on national television for a decade, is unfazed! I am on the edge of my seat. And this is when I realized: Leah has Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Brandi Glanville vibes. Remember how Brandi was the only one who’d stand up to Lisa Vanderpump for YEARS? Leah is Brandi Glanville without the alcoholism and botched facelifts. Leah has Big Brandi Glanville Energy! #BBGE
Anyway, the ladies go to dinner and Dorinda and Leah sort of make amends. But…
And for her part, Dorinda seems to have found a worthy competitor.
Leah: She has the range!
So that’s it! That’s episode two! Except for the epilogue moment that closes the episode: Ramona going manhunting in the restaurant, which is just her wandering around like a lost dementia patient.
Bless.
Okay that’s it, until next week! If this made you laugh you should consider subscribing! I will be writing more non-Housewives stuff soon, so if you care about things other than Housewives now’s your chance!
Also an enormous thank you to everyone who subscribed last week, and especially those who have begun supporting me on Patreon! I am marginally less embarrassed about having one now, so thanks!
Ok that will be all for now! Please flatten the curve by staying away from Tinsley thank you!