The only thing I know with any certainty in life is you shouldn’t mess with another woman’s handbag, especially a lady you don’t know. Some rando named Nina broke that cardinal rule of the lady Code, and it was the match we needed to ignite the gasoline fumes coming off last night’s episode of genuine Housewives of Orange County. It wouldn’t have occurred at all, though, if Shannon hadn’t doused her celebration first.
I’d state that the episode started out innocently enough, but that would be a lie, because it started with Shannon’s middle school-aged daughter doubting her dad about wet dreams in a cheesy costume shop. That, in addition to the extremely scream-heavy preview we saw last week, was all you truly needed to see in order to know how much of a mess we were in for last night. thanks to the party’s style (70s and Tequila Shots, as far as I could tell), it was one of the more bizarre fights I’ve seen on genuine Housewives in recent memory, and, much to my terrific happiness, its drama overtook the majority of the episode.
We did have to see a bit with the people who would later be bit actors in the episode’s genuine plot, though: Meghan and Heather, they of the disinterested (but rich!) husbands. They got together so Heather could stab Meghan in the tummy with her baby medicine, and when that was over, Meghan revealed she would soon be making a speech in behalf of those fighting colon cancer. Heather seemed uncertain on a number of points, including exactly how the speech would benefit anyone and Meghan’s confidence in her own ability to extemporaneously speak in public, which is, by all indications, not supported by reality.
It got overshadowed by all the eventual drunken shouting in this episode, but Meghan’s husband’s complete and overall disinterest in the baby they are trying to conceive is starting to drive me insane on her behalf. The dude married her. The dude pulled his swimmers out of the chest freezer in the basement to knock her up. She is going to carry the baby for nine months and then push it out of her body, neither of which are simple tasks, and then they are going to coparent the baby for the rest of its life, even if he eventually trades her in for a younger model, as older, richer guy are wont to do. The least he could do is pretend to care about his other half or that baby for five second for her TV show. Instead, he needs her to know that somebody is buying a personal jet.
Okay, before I pop a vein ranting about guy not willing to deal with the circumstances they themselves have gotten into, we requirement to move onto the party, as it is the actual whole point of the episode and, by extension, this recap. The celebration was one of the sadder-looking affairs in genuine Housewives history: the designs were type of sparse and cheap-looking, the liquor was plentiful but not top-shelf, and the number of guests seemed paltry compared to the size of the venue, which provided the impression that the invitation had only been warmly got by a small fraction of the people on the guest list. Those who showed up were either dressed in cheap-looking costumes or attire that appeared like they were meant for an early 2000s Playboy party; Shannon was going for a retro-glam blowout and she ended up with something that felt more like a themed wonderful Sixteen in someone’s parents’ completed basement. In short, it was a celebration that matched Shannon’s character quite well.
The finest genuine Housewives fights commonly have some kind of conspiracy to them: Was somebody spreading rumors behind somebody else’s back? Did one cast member try to sabotage another’s party? has an alliance been produced to take down a mutually hated Housewife? Last night, the big concern was whether or not Shannon had set new cast member Kelly up by inviting a couple of shared good friends who had some nasty things to say. If I had to guess, I’d guess that’s exactly what Shannon did, even though there are exactly zero people to root for in a fight between Shannon and Kelly that also tangentially includes Vicki.
When Kelly and her frightening narcissist spouse walked into the party, it took almost no time for a malevolent blonde complete stranger to sidle as much as them both and remind Kelly they had run into each other a couple years prior, when Kelly was separated from her spouse and had a boyfriend. To Kelly’s husband’s limited credit, he didn’t take the bait on that specific provocation; after all, the boyfriend wasn’t a trick and he had twisted his wife’s arm up until she returned home, so what did he care? Kelly handled not to lose her mind immediately, either, which is exactly what I expected to happen. But, as all of us know, that didn’t last.
In the intervening time between the proverbial match-lighting and the entire celebration blowing up, everybody set about the task of getting as drunk as possible. We saw Vicki do at least three directly tequila shots with her new BFF Kelly, and they were quickly drinking mixed drinks in between like the celebration was gonna convert to a cash bar at midnight. Heather, for her part, drank enough champagne that she fell off her roller skates and then sat down to have a serious talk with her spouse in which he might have been drunk too, because he finally copped to being type of an absentee parent. He will most likely not change that any time soon, but he expressed seemingly authentic regret and the conversation wasn’t combative or petty, which counts as a minor miracle in the truth TV universe.
Elsewhere at the party, though, the genuine drama was just popping off. despite Shannon’s blonde friend’s inability to begin a fight at the top of the evening, she had more success later, when aided by her brunette sidekick’s purse-snatching. (Okay, she didn’t take a purse. She just moved Vicki’s. but still, don’t bother anyone’s bag! Are you nuts?) When Kelly and Vicki realized they couldn’t find it, they went on a search, which eventually led them to walk in on Shannon holding court with the two problem-starters, who were beginning to recount the blonde’s drama with Kelly while Tamra gnawed quietly on some meat on a stick in a close-by chair.
Things devolved extremely quickly and complied with a logic that is only evident to the profoundly inebriated, but let’s get one thing out of the way: objectively, Shannon was indeed dressed like Mrs. Roper. Kelly may have been rude, loud and drunk, but she was not wrong. In my book, that counts for something. Also, I don’t believe she was wrong to believe those two women had been invited to the celebration to provoke her. The celebration was thrown explicitly for the show, the two women understood they were going to a celebration thrown for the cast, and they presumably understood who the other cast members were, if they run in that specific tacky, monied corner of Orange county social life. Shannon is good friends with these women and has hated Kelly from day one, so you’d believe that, at some point, they would have compared notes on their apparent common enemy, especially if one has a story she believes is juicy. It just seems unlikely that this would have gone down by chance, especially when Shannon is so badly in requirement of a story line.
In the background of the initial fight, Heather glided by on her roller skates, uninformed of the riot beginning next to her and quickly sucked into the drama vortex that had opened between Shannon and Kelly. At that point, they had mainly run out of substantive beef with each other and had moved on to insulting each others’ attire (which, to be fair, were both bad!), at which point Kelly’s spouse noticed what was going on and stepped in. He didn’t step in to stop the fight, though–instead, he stepped in to help Kelly roast Shannon, at which point Shannon literally ran off to find her spouse like a kindergartner being bullied on the playground. It was a bizarrely juvenile display, even by genuine Housewives standards.
When Shannon found her dude, whose name I have not bothered to learn yet, Vicki had taken the chance to draw him into a fight of her own by exclaiming “I DIDN’T lie about CANCER” at him, completely out of context and without even the benefit of any preceding conversation. nobody had so much as mentioned Vicki’s alleged cancer scamming all night, and, in fact, everyone had been quite cordial with her–for somebody who blathers so much about wanting to move on to other things, Vicki sure as hell took the chance to shout WORLDSTAR and run directly toward the fracas.
Once the warring factions had been separated and Kelly and Vicki had been deposited in a limo to simultaneously rave at themselves over the evening’s injustices, Vicki ran directly toward another problem: she called Brooks. Ostensibly, this phone call was to rant at him for producing all these issues with which she was still contending, but anyone who’s ever been unfortunate and drunk and not over one of her exes understands why she truly called him, which was just because it was a good reason to talk to him and she doesn’t have many of those left. Thankfully she got his voicemail, but if this is the beginning of Brooks making a return to genuine Housewives plot lines, I’m going to walk directly into the sea.