We Need To Talk About Dorinda
You know how this whole pandemic thing has revealed the true nature of how our country, a beacon of freedom and opportunity to the entire world, is actually a teetering Jenga tower of kleptocratic feudalist psychopathy where 90% of the population are living lives that would make a Dickensian street urchin be like “Eew this shit is squalid af lemme go back to my lean-to by the Thames like fuck all this for real” and we’ve all been sitting here for two months like, “LOL I knew this place was a shithole country but hoo boy woweewow wawaWEEwah the entire universe is laughing at us and we are definitely all going to die hahaha” and then we finally begin reopening and immediately have another mass shooting the day after and each time we get out of bed is like staring into the face of Death as we quietly murmur, “Today, perhaps today, I shall simply jump into your arms”?
Well, that’s sort of what this episode of Real Housewives of New York was like. It was the kind of thing that resulted in my friend Brooke texting me, “OMG that last RHONY episode felt weirdly dark” and considering this is a show about rich ladies who drink an entire handle of vodka and then destroy a restaurant and call it a charity gala or whatever, that’s saying a lot!
(If you’ve missed the previous recaps, you can put them into your eyes over here.)
In this episode, we finally get to the bottom of Dorinda’s very dumb beef with Tinsley. For over a year now, we’ve watched Dorinda incrementally ratchet up her ire towards Tinsley, a woman with all the treachery and intrigue of a dashboard bobblehead. It has been very annoying! Dorinda’s complaint is that Tinsley isn’t as open and revealing as the other women, which is true—that’s part of why she’s boring! But the level of Dorinda’s rage—Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest—is not commensurate with the crime—being boring. So what is this about? What is it that has taken our daffy, bonkers, boozehound Dorinda, the Housewives GIF queen herself, and replaced her with this rageful, bullying boozehound? At last, we get our answer, and as always with humanity, it turns out this conflict isn’t about what this conflict is about. It’s about something much deeper, and much darker.
But first, we must set the scene. We open with Tinsley meeting up again with Leah’s bonkers boxing coach, played with subtlety and intrigue by the Rock Biter from Neverending Story.
I love this guy because, apart from the fact that he’s 19 feet tall and made of old junkyard car bumpers, he doesn’t take any of Tinsley’s shit. Starting with her name, which he renders as Tinsdale.
To motivate her for her boxing lesson, by which I mean, “Because the producers told him to,” Rock Biter asks Tinsley if she has any beef with her girlfriends that they can use for fightin’ inspiration. How clever and convenient because, of course, Tinsdale does have beef, and lots of it, with Dorinda, even though nobody really gets why. It’s like how “music people” (ugh, the only thing worse is “beer people”) hate The Eagles and William Joel. What have The Eagles and William Joel ever done besides make catchy pop tunes?! What is the PROBLEM?! Train has been out here making inexplicably execrable music about “soul sisters” and “drive-bys” for a quarter-century but “Take It Easy” is where you draw the line?! Young gays are out here saying Dua Lipa invented disco but “Piano Man” is what sends you into a fit of pique?! GET A THERAPIST.
Anyway. Tinsdale tells Rock Biter she has beef with a friend named Dorinda and Rock Biter is non-plussed.
Which is extra hilarious because my computer and phone always autocorrect Tinsley to Tinselly, and I was going to start calling her that until Rock Biter here came up with Tinsdale, which is funnier because it’s so much more wrong. I used to have a boss who had a raging cocaine problem and when he’d be super fucked up he would just call us by different names. But not like, “Hey Jim, come here” instead of John. He’d be like, “Hey Demetrius come here,” and we’d all look back and forth between each other until someone gave up and was like, “IDK man I think he means you.”
Tinsdale isn’t quite that wrong, but it’s close enough to be hilarious and it sounds like a suburb of, like, Columbus, Ohio that is full of McMansions which is basically what Tinsley is, in anthropomorphized form. And I hear you, “She’s a blue-blood Manhattanite which is the opposite of a new-money McMansion suburb,” to which I say, COUNTERPOINT the woman is also BASIC AF. They’ve got Olive Gardens in Manhattan too, you trying to tell me an Olive Garden is automatically a Buca di Beppo just because it’s in Manhattan? That analogy doesn’t make any sense because Buca di Beppo isn’t any fancier or better than Olive Garden but I can’t think of a well-known fancy Italian restaurant to complete my metaphor and also the phrase “Buca di Beppo” is inherently hilarious. It’s also on my brain because Dorit’s current storyline on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is that she’s “designing” an “exclusive” new “dining room” for a fucking Buca di Beppo and no that is not a joke and it is presented by Dorit and Bravo as some sort of ~*mogul shit*~ completely devoid of irony and honestly THAT is the show we should be recapping because that is literally the funniest shit I’ve ever heard in my life and I have taken actual comedy classes, I know the form.
ANYWAY. It’s funny you should bring up Dorit from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because Rock Biter here for some reason can’t say Dorinda and calls her “Dorito” instead, which the captions sadly misrendered as Dorita, but just trust me, he said “Dorito” and I screamed.
Honestly whoever Hulu has captioning shit needs to be fired because they have no respect for artistry. It’s egregious.
In any case, whilst we’ve been watching Rock Biter and Tinsdale spar, we’ve been intercutting with Dorinda shit-talking Tinsdale to Luann and Leah on the High Line with one of her trademarks: weird one-liners that she thinks are really hot and zippy but are actually just, like, “I’m sorry, is this meant to be a zinger or…”
MA’AM WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT.
We’ve also been intercutting with Ramona and Sonja in Central Park gossipping about how Dorinda has finally, thank Christ, dumped John Bahdessian, and their conversation, too, moves to the Dorito and Tinsdale beef. Dorinda, you see, is a widow—she and her departed husband Richard had a magical life and were deeply in love, and Richard’s loss was a devastating interruption to Dorinda’s life. Ramona thinks Dorinda is jealous of Tinsley because Tinsley still has the kind of charmed and carefree life that Dorinda had with Richard, a theory that will send Dorinda through the roof at the reunion but, honestly, seems really astute. In any case, the plot has thickened.
We go back to Rock Biter talking Tinsley up, presumably to further foreshadow the climax of this episode when Tinsley and Dorito go at it. “You’re a fucking legend,” he tells Tinsley, before finishing:
To which Tinsdale replies:
I need this guy to have a podcast, a book deal, a speaking tour, a self-help system sold through a multi-level marketing scheme with which my high school friends can spam me on Facebook—all of it.
Next we follow Luann to Leah's apartment for lunch, a scene that served absolutely no purpose except for us to watch Luann snob-squirm about how much she hates Leah’s extremely-small-by-Housewives-standards apartment. Leah’s like, “It’s small but it works for us,” and Luann’s like…
Oh the trauma written on Luann’s face. She has seen some shit in this easily $6000/month luxury two-bedroom apartment. My roommate Dan hate-watches these programs with me and spends the entire time scolding the women as if he were sharing the Maury Povich stage with them, and at this part he erupted from his seat on the sofa and bellowed in Luann’s direction, “SORRY SHE HASN’T HAD A CHANCE TO FUCK A COUNT YET BITCH, CALM DOWN.” And if that isn’t the most astute ~*analysis*~ of the Countess Luann de Lesseps I just don’t know what is! Judgment for the plaintiff!
The producers, of course, egg Luann on.
And we get some of the best shade Luann has ever thrown.
Devastating!!! We love to see it!!!
Next, we get a glimpse into Dorinda’s side of things: she opens up to Sonja a bit about what went wrong with John, and how sad she is about it, but how she basically started dating him on the rebound after Richard passed and it just feels like she’s outgrown him. You really feel for her, you know? Sometimes this show really does hit your heartstrings.
Anyway, since Dorinda’s going through it, Luann plans a trip to an apple orchard-cum-winery for them all to blow off some steam. Sounds like a pretense to get drunk and fight each other in a pumpkin patch but okay! Especially because before they’ve even departed, Tinsley is irritated, because the only reason the women even found out about Dorinda and John in the first place is not because Dorinda confided in them but because they all saw it written up in Page Six. This has Tinsdale at her boiling point, given that her and Dorinda’s beef is supposedly about Tinsley keeping her private life private.
But it all starts out nice enough. There’s wine! And food! And this weird giant wine glass that Dorito makes a cute joke with!
They’re all laughing and having a good time and then fucking Elyse—UGH, Elyse—whose entire purpose on this show seems to be “How about you’re just some rando who comes out of the woodwork each episode unexplained and totally out of context and then says the exact wrong thing?” does just that. She just blurts out, apropos of nothing, “So Dorinda what’s going on with you and John?”
And even Sonja’s shit-starter ass is like, “This bitch.”
And there's a visible, palpable change in Dorinda. Honestly? It’s a little disturbing. She’s clearly going through it. She tries to put a positive spin on it but it's very unconvincing.
You can feel it coming... Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch Dorinda blow her fucking top. Every season has a Dorinda Medley Fukushima-Daiichi-level meltdown—and today is gonna be the next.
But first! One must light the fuse, right? Dorinda says it's not easy for her to open up about stuff and now Tinsdale has had it. Why is it okay for Dorito to struggle to open up, but not for Tinsdale? She talks some shit under her breath.
Dorinda hears and bitch, consider the fuse lit! Out comes another insult that doesn't really make any sense.
Ooh! Seems Dorinda’s been workshopping the mint thing and now it’s about gum! I guess! Tinsley, for once, has the perfect comeback for an insult this bad.
Then Dorinda comes out with the real zinger. Oh God!
I do not know what “un-value-added” means (isn’t it like a sales tax in the U.K. or something, what on Earth…) but I am calling everyone that from now on. Then Dorinda gets actually mean: she says Tinsley is invisible, and the energy changes, and the other women jump in to be like, “Dorinda, be cool.”
But Dorinda keeps going, and now she’s openly mocking Tinsley—like true bully shit. Then Sonja, as always, jumps in and makes it all worse. She takes Dorinda's side, and then everyone turns on Tinsley and does that fucking thing people do when they know the actual aggressor is an unreachable bully, and they don’t want the smoke so they try to stop the fight by jumping on the victim to calm down, like the time my brother challenged me to a poolside fistfight for calling Sarah Palin an idiot and everyone jumped on ME for being judgmental and aggressive and it’s like THIS DUDE IS UNIRONICALLY THREATENING ME WITH FISTICUFFS OVER A DUMBDUMB FROM ALASKA ARE YOU ALL ON BARBITURATES?! What these hags SHOULD have done is lit into Dorinda and sent her bullying ass to go take a fucking NAP in the van! Shit like this makes me crazy. I am fucking heated!!! There's a psychological term for this and it's ~*GASLIGHTING*~ and look what you've all done you've gotten me so fucking angry I'm taking Tinsley's side! I don't even like Tinsley! I shit-talk her in every one of these recaps! I wrote an entire thing a couple years ago that was half about how she is an anthropomorphized sheaf of printer paper!!! I am shaking with rage!
Anyway Tinsley storms off and is sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and I’m sorry but this shit isn’t funny anymore, I am an awful, mean-spirited person whose entire animating force is class rage but even I have my limits and it turns out seeing even dumb boring rich girl Tinsdale Mortimer be bullied into hyperventilation-sobs is one of them.
Thankfully Luann, even if inadvertently, gives us a laugh just when we need it: Luann tells Tinsley that she has to learn to not let these women get to her and command the conversation, and, thinking she’s helping, as Tinsley quite literally shriekcries, she says:
And Tinsley loses her mind and I SCREAMLAUGHED SO HARD. “You know how Obama does it?” HAHAHAHAHA you can’t write this shit!
Back at lunch, Leah tries to reason with everyone and explain why Tinsley is so sensitive around these women, because whereas they've all gotten what they wanted from life—they’ve all been married and had children, even if there’s been loss along the way—Tinsley's already 44 and has gotten neither. And hoo boy, that was the wrong thing to say to Dorinda. She’s now on a tirade about how it is demeaning to all of the things she and the other women have been through that Tinsley would think her problems equal theirs. Which, sorry, is ridiculous. People don’t experience their lives in comparison to others’, that’s not how it works? And in Tinsley’s defense, I've never even been in love, let alone had a husband or kids, and it IS extremely hard to watch everyone you know get that one thing we all want most in life while you're like "LOL I’m 639 years old and my longest relationship is a five-weeker with a musical theater actor I dumped because he wouldn't stop SINGING AT ME.” Like it is not fun and I bet it’s even worse when you’re a lady and the idea of children doesn’t make you want to drown yourself in a porta-potty!
Be that as it may, and despite the ludicrosity of this, I do feel for Dorinda—she is obviously shattered to an extent none of us, the women onscreen included, realized. She launches into a frankly heartbreaking speech about how happy she was with Richard, what a good wife and mother she was, and she had it all taken away from her.
I mean I want to leap through the screen and hug her. But there is one fly in the ointment and it is LADY WHAT HAS TINSLEY DONE TO YOU???!!! DID SHE GO TO A WARLOCK AND HAVE HIM TRANSFORM HER INTO A CANCER AND THEN BURROW INTO RICHARD’S SKIN WITH A TINY MICROSCOPIC JACKHAMMER OR SOMETHING?! WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?! Which is basically what Leah says.
But of course, emotions and trauma aren’t rational. See episodes like this are when I struggle with these shows bc all I want to do is cry and then fly to New York and spend six months stalking these women so I can finally find them and give them a hug and be like, “DORINDA I HAVE TRAUMA TOO I GET IT JUST HANG ONTO ME I GOT YOU” and she’d be like “What the fuck am I, that girl from My Sister Sam, please get the fuck off of me and go to prison.” That is a reference like three persons over the age of 40 will get because as you should have noticed by now, that is the sort of obscure weird gay kid from 1987 discourse in which I traffic. Please give me Patreon money! Anyway, my point is, sometime these shows get a little too real.
Thankfully, they put all this drama to bed and decide to go explore the rest of the apple orchard. Everyone is basically broken. Dorinda has this weird convo with some goats.
Tinsley climbs an apple tree for no reason.
And Sonja, as is her wont, is fucking shitfaced and tries to sleep with the apple orchard’s owner, who is basically like, “Lemme show you to my corn maze so you can GET LOST.”
The corn maze rapidly devolves. After what feels like hours of trying and failing to find their way out of this maze, Tinsley rounds a corner and finds Sonja with her entire pussy out pissing in the corn…
…and Tinsley, who I’ll remind you is so shattered she was moments ago climbing an apple tree for no reason, primal screams into the endless rows of corn and it won't translate to the written word but it was among the funniest things that has ever happened on this entire show.
Then Sonja wipes her vagina on the corn stalks and this is the best show ever made Jesus Christ.
I mean Sonja is definitely going to be found face-down in the Hudson one day if she doesn't die of cirrhosis first but there is nobody more horrifyingly funny when drunk. As Leah says there's two Sonjas: old money Sonja and “turnt up Sonja, which I love.”
Us too, Leah, us too.
Post-corn maze, Ramona has a heart-to-heart with Dorinda and man, she's really going through it. She says she never wants anyone to say, “My life was less because I met Dorinda Medley”
And like she’s talking about John Bahdessian but like is she really talking about John Bahdessian or is she actually talking about Tinsdale? Because this is Dorinda’s pattern. She burns someone to the ground and shits in the ashes and then immediately feels guilty an hour later bc she's actually a giant softie. God love her.
But lest we tumble into the doldrums again, the Bravo gods give us a parting gift as the women finally fucking EAT SOMETHING, thank God. We get one more bit of Sonja’s sage, alcohol-induced wisdom, this time about the magical powers of blue cheese.
Upon which this onlooking employee can only stare dead-eyed into the abyss. “Hello darkness my old friend…”
Until finally, speaking for all of us, Luann ends this debacle.
And there you have it, the harrowing seventh episode of this season. I am emotionally exhausted.
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Okay thank you so much please do not take hydroxychloroquine because people need it for Lupus and they can’t get any now because our President is fucking stupid thank you!!!