You know honestly this week has been like swimming through the sewers of hell after Satan ate 47 pounds of sun-rotted egg salad—like moreso than a regular week I mean—and like I don’t want to be a Negative Nancy here guys but uh-oh Spaghetti-Os I think America might be in some trouble! So I don’t have anything funny to say to launch us into this week’s huswifery! I just don’t! I mean, the recap’s still funny (I think? Probably? Honestly who’s to say comedy is subjective please electrocute me with a toaster in a bathtub!) but as for a funny lead-in I am utterly bereft so IDK what to say man oh wait look at that we’re up to a whole paragraph okay well there’s that sorted let’s get it popping because if I don’t laugh soon I’mma cut my gin with Tarn-X!
We open on Leah meeting Luann for lunch, standard Housewives stuff, but then things immediately take a turn—oh God, here we go again—they’re both sick. With coughs.
They’re both hacking, deep-down hacking, and the coughs are LOUD and the coughs are FORCEFUL and the coughs are DRY and my heart is POUNDING and my palms are SWEATING and Leah mentions that she feels like she has BRONCHITIS and then demurs “But I’m also allergic to bullshit so” oh hahaha lololol what mirth BITCH YOU HAVE CORONAVIRUS YOU GOT IT FROM TINSLEY WHO’S BEEN SICK SINCE EPISODE ONE AND NOW YOU’VE GIVEN IT TO LUANN AND THIS ENTIRE SHOW HAS BECOME A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT VIRAL PESTILENCE AND I’M NOT FUCKING DOING THIS WITH YOU!!!
It was all I could do to keep from leaping through the television to be like “GO SELF-QUARANTINE YOU DON’T GET IT RIGHT NOW BUT I AM FROM THE FUTURE AND YOU ARE LITERAL GERM MURDERESSES!!!” It was so anxiety-inducing, I nearly turned the episode off and opened this Substack like, “You know what guys, I’m done, recap this shit yourselves I can’t do this anymore.” The constant pall of plague hanging over every episode! It’s too much! I am every week waiting for one of those medieval Black Death doctors with the bird-beak-helmets to emerge from the shadows of every frame and just stare menacingly into the camera over Tinsley’s shoulder!
True, RHONY usually starts shooting circa Labor Dayish, so given what we know as of now, it’s impossible that these women had coronavirus during filming. But I swear to God, you mark my words: in like 2023 or whatever when Jacinda Ardern's science minister finally figures out what the comprehensive all-encompassing exhaustively annotated FUCK is going on right now (because New Zealand is the only country on Earth with its shit together), they WILL determine that coronavirus started in China in like July of 2019 and came to New York in August via "an unnamed Manhattan woman who traveled to China to do animal rights charity work," which is the euphemism one of Jacinda’s PR flacks will come up with for “Real Housewives of New York’s Tinsley Mortimer, who went to China to adopt two dogs she named Strawberry and Shortcake which is even more egregious than starting a pandemic tbqh and if she ever comes to New Zealand she will be shot on sight with a bow and arrow because we don’t do guns here, we are normal and sane.” I am CONVINCED Tinsley was Patient Zero and if we had a functional government Andy Cohen would be on trial in The Hague! What did he know and when did he know it WHERE ARE THE EMAILS DEEP STATE BENGHAZI!!!!!11!!!!!
Anyway, Leah and Luann rehash what went down in episode 7 at the apple orchard and we find out that LOL apparently Sonja was so shitcanned she barfed all over Tinsley in the Mercedes van after so that's fun.
Speaking of fucking Typhoid Mary she shows up to lunch coughing too and this show is fucking nauseating brb gonna go drink a bottle of Fabuloso.
Of course, they get into Tinsley’s beef with Dorinda that finally boiled over at the orchard. Leah reiterates the heart of the thing: Tinsley was born into the life Dorinda used to have with her deceased husband Richard, and she’s resentful of it. Luann agrees, but in private she gives a simpler reason for Dorinda’s ire.
Yep, checks out! I think we’re done here!
Then we go to Dorinda, Sonja and Ramona at some workout class where the instructor openly checks out Dorinda’s juicy ass while licking her chops like those apocalypse coyotes they found on Michigan Avenue a few weeks ago. She just broke up with John so it’s perfect timing! I hope this turns into a torrid love affair and they get their own lesbian Bravo spinoff.
Anyway, Ramona tells Dorinda to cool it with Tinsley and Dorinda’s basically like “LOL nah.” But in the next scene, at her appointment with her “life coach”—by which I mean “vitamin salesman in a polo shirt with his name embroidered on it”—Dorinda finally gets down to brass tacks about why she’s been so nasty lately. Dorinda has been very dramatic all season about her Berkshires house having flooded, and now we know why: It forced her to sift through belongings she hadn't touched since Richard died. And yo, my heart is broken? Cuz that's traumatic af. When my best friend died his mom sent me a box of his belongings and it took me three years to even open it, and I've never opened it since. In fact, I retaped it closed with packing tape and it’s been in a closet since the Bush Administration. And to top it off there wasn’t even anything good in it! Like she could’ve at least slipped in a 20 or a Starbucks card or like an old booklet of those McDonald’s gift certificates we used to get at Halloween. Something!
Anyway, no wonder Dorinda has been so bonkers lately. (That said PLEASE GO TO A LICENSED THERAPIST NOT A VITAMIN WARLOCK JFC.) She starts crying and admits that it's made her an angry person because she’s been "lost at sea" since Richard died and damn, is there any better description of grief? Fuck.
I'm hard on her, but I love Dorinda and this is breaking my heart. In any case, she says that she's going to be selfish for a while and just focus on herself and, lucky for her, Leah has arranged to take these women for a “spa day”! Except Leah is too normal for these women by half and so for her a “spa day” means one of those Russian bathhouses they have in New York.
Because, you know, nothing says rich Upper East Side women like a Russian bath house in a downtown basement!
I mean this place looks like the breakroom at a goddamn meat processing plant. Leah says it has “character” and the ladies will love it but LOL bitch good luck with that, I’m sure Luann will be happy to sup upon spicy cow feet soup.
Anyway having bored of the work of infecting an entire city with deadly viral pestilence Typhoid Mary shows up with her face a completely different color than her neck because her makeup artist didn't realize she’d be spending the day in a fucking basement lit by the same half-dead flickering fluorescent lighting typically found in your better morgues.
Then Ramona shows up to the spa and, well, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so:
Then Luann and Dorinda arrive and, again, let’s just show and not tell.
“Uh wow (siren wailing in the distance).” How wonderful. Suffice to say “spa day” at Madam Svetlana’s Hot Tub and Abattoir is off to a great start. In the locker room, Ramona kicks things off by giving Tinsley and Leah a tutorial in moisturizing their décolletage by way of dragging Sonja for having wrinkly tits.
They go to get massages and be beaten with reeds or whatever and of course, as usual, these women don’t know how to act. Luann throws herself at the masseurs while Dorinda starts twerking.
Then Ramona’s basically like "STOMP ON MY NECK DADDY” to these 13-year-old masseurs.
Sonja does a whole tight five about S&M while getting beaten by said leaves and, being that she is playing the role of our collective conscious, Leah just stares into the abyss in mortification.
Massage time having conclude, the women sit down to lunch next to a festering hot tub, which is fucking disgusting.
Who serves FOOD next to a decommissioned HOT TUB. Fucking Madam Svetlana I guess. How absolutely vile. Last October I went to an EXTREMELY fancy spa in Detroit (YES IN DETROIT, YOUR “LoL dEtRoIt HaS fAnCy SpAs SoUnDs FaKe BuT oKaY” JOKES ARE PLAYED OUT AND UNFUNNY, it is 2020 and Detroit has everything every other American city has now, overpriced brunch served by PhD’d bisexuals named Keighleigheîëgh, too many goddamn CVS’s, a light rail that serves no purpose because the preferred mode of conveyance for all the white people who’ve taken over our downtowns is those accursed trollies where you pay actual legal tender to pedal about the central business district whilst screaming Imagine Dragons songs into glasses of something called “craft beer,” DETROIT IS BASICALLY MANHATTAN NOW SHUT UP).
Anyway as I was saying, last October I went to an EXTREMELY fancy spa in Detroit to celebrate the 40th birthday of my friend Melissa (hey girl!) and I mean this place was FANCY, it was nicer even than the spa in Palm Springs where a tattooed bear gave me a handie in the outdoor showers beneath a trellis adorned with the finest desert flowers, and yet I came home with a SCORCHING case of jock itch it took me FIVE ENTIRE MONTHS TO GET RID OF. No joke! The leaves were changing and I had jock itch, Halloween came and I still had jock itch, Thanksgiving? Jock itch. My birthday, jock itch, Christmas, jock itch, New Year’s and Martin Luther King Day and President’s Day and Valentine’s Day? JOCK ITCH JOCK ITCH JOCK ITCH AS WELL AS JOCK ITCH IN ADDITION TO JOCK ITCH. And then I went on vacation for two weeks and three days after I got home it fucking CAME BACK! And by then we were on lockdown so I had to tie a bandana around my face and wear surgical gloves to brave the interior of a disease-vector Target just for a can of fucking Lotrimin AF!
I have no idea where I was going with this. Jock itch, spas, hot tubs, AH YES so if I got something that virulent from a pristine fancy hot tub at a spa with a salt water pool just imagine what kind of suppurating hellmouth Sonja is peering into up there and beside which these women are being asked to luncheon! It probably has worms! I don’t know how a hot tub could have worms but I bet I can tell you who DOES know and it’s Madam Svetlana of Madam Svetlana’s Hot Tub and Abattoir. I want everyone on the payroll in prison by close of business!
Anyway. The women. They’re at lunch which you should know by now means it’s time to fight. Leah does the age-old Housewives song and dance about an “elephant in the room” that needs acknowledging--the Dorinda/Tinsley fight at the apple orchard--and Dorinda Medley will have you know that she’s having none of it. She visibly stiffens and spits, “I acknowledge it.”
Uh oh.
Luann tries to explain that Tinsley felt ganged up on and Dorinda immediately gets defensive, which is Ramona’s cue to jump in with one of her harangues where she’s like I KNOW I’M A BAG OF SHIT but that being said let me just tell you something about yourself and all the women are like aw Christ.
She tells Dorinda that she is vicious and has a pattern of attacking people and then feeling bad afterwards, which is true but is also the most pot-kettle-black thing ever, because the entire reason Ramona has been on this show for 12 goddamn years ago is that you can always count on her to say the exact wrong thing. So Dorinda’s like LOL BITCH YOU TOO and she and Ramona basically do “I’m rubber and you’re glue” for 45 minutes except they’re 60 years old and sitting next to a festering hot tub in a basement and I am tired in my bones.
But there can be no escape, because we still need Tinsley to scrap with Dorinda. They basically agree that they have mutual respect and leave it at that. It’s basically this classic Dorinda gif from seasons past.
Which is a deeply unsatisfying conclusion to a very stupid fight that has lasted two seasons, but what can we do. Andy Cohen gonna Andy Cohen.
Next we go to Leah’s house where she has lunch with her sister and honestly it was unnecessary and boring but here’s the gist: 1—Leah is back on speaking terms with her mom; 2—Leah is dating a nice Jewish boy who owns a pita restaurant because she has a thing for nice Jewish boys, which I can identify with because I basically moved to New York in 2007 in hopes of finding a Jewish husband with a meddling mother named Tovah who drives her son crazy but showers me with compliments and homemade rugelach. For the record, New York is fake and none of that happened.; 3—Leah also talks about how she only likes to date ugly guys because then she gets to be the Beauty to his Beast, which, sorry, Maury Povich reveals that’s A LIE because her babydaddy Rob is fine and I want him to kick me in the face, but I do wonder if I should be trying to date ugly guys to make me look better. Something to think about for when the quar ends.
Next, we at last reach the climax of the episode. Ramona's having a cocktail party with a bunch of ice-faced UES nightmares, including Elyse (ugh Elyse) and this woman, Nicole, whose face literally never changes from this expression.
Literally never.
Then there's a woman who shows up dressed as Nicki Hilton in 2004.
And this woman who had the temerity to put a bump-it in her hair and has what I believe to be a dream catcher necklace.
While this was airing my friend Brooke texted me this and I died and I’m typing this from my coffin.
Ramona tells them all about how her new apt is starting to feel like home now that her friends are there and don't worry Nicole has no reaction to this whatsoever.
Sonja shows up to the party which now includes the woman she drunkenly insulted in the Hamptons a few eps ago so that's fun, and then Dorinda arrives. Now, we’ve already established that Ramona and Dorinda have drama from the Madam Svetlana semen-encrusted hot tub lunch, so obviously shit’s about to go down. But turns out Sonja also has drama with Ramona because in unseen footage, Ramona fat-shamed her at Madam Svetlana’s. Which gives GIANT FAT LADY Sonja Morgan a chance to do her best Lizzo impression or whatever.
Naturally, they immediately start rehashing the spa conversation and Dorinda’s claws come out.
And Sonja for some reason starts marking time with diarrheas? I… have no idea what this means.
Dorinda launches into a tirade about how Ramona isn’t a supportive friend, how jealous she is now that Dorinda has patched things up with Luann, and how she plays the rah-rah “girl power” role but secretly her policy is, "Do well, but don't do better than me." Which is 100% Ramona in a nutshell. Dorinda really gets people which is why she’s so dangerous. Anyway Ramona and Dorinda are SCREAMING at each other now and let’s get a quick update on Nicole.
Honestly I’m not convinced she isn’t dead.
In any case, now that Ramona is losing this fight there is, of course, only one thing left for her to do, and that is for her to blithely say something shockingly cruel and miles below the belt.
Thar she blows! Ineloquent and syntactically weird, but cruel all the same: on top of Dorinda having broken up with her boyfriend this week, it is also the anniversary of her husband’s death. Dorinda's eyes fill with murder, and she basically calls Ramona a vengeful slut. And look, we don't like that kind of talk. We don't like that kind of talk! But the problem is, the fly in the ointment, the kink in the hose, if you will, is that IT'S FUCKING TRUE??? Like I am sorry, sex positive and we should all be feminists and all of it! All of it! A woman’s place is in the House and Senate! Beyoncé’s giant video screen FEMINIST gif! Gloria Steinem! But Ramona is as Dorinda has said—a maneater who’s jealous of others’ LTRs—and that’s just that and facts don’t care about your feelings. *bangs gavel*
But Ramona isn't going to take that in her own home, so she tells Dorinda to leave, and Sonja, who's mad about the fat-shaming thing, leaves too. And now they're screaming in the hallway.
Honestly I can't believe any of these women are able to find anywhere to live! Those NYC co-ops are notoriously stringent on who’ll they’ll let in and “Dowagers who literally shrieksob in hallways for a living” doesn’t seem like one of their target demos. But here we are! In any case, Elyse ushers them back into the apt and Dorinda and Ramona start sobbing and making up.
Sonja can't be bothered with any of this though and just starts eating. What a fkng treasure!
Even when they do eventually all three hug and make up, Sonja only does so on the basis that the food is good.
She knows my heart.
Anyway tune in tonight when the women go on another vacation and we get the return of drunk Leah! Oh noes!
So there’s something for you to look forward to as our society continues to crumble and we sit slack-jawed amidst the mayhem. Hooray!!!
Okay! Thank you for joining me, as always. You know the drill now but in case you’re new or you just forgot—if you like this dumb shit I write every week, or the other sometimes not-dumb shit I write on a more sporadic basis, you can:
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this post, and/or: read more things I have maked for your eyeballs at my blog or on Medium. Or don’t! You are your own person you choose your choice! I will see you soon regardless. Okay bye bye now!