I am seriously worried about the water supply in Orange County. Did some crazy Russian plot from the Cold War finally get carried out and all of the reservoirs were dosed with LSD? What else could possibly explain what happens in this episode?
First, we have Lydia’s mother, Judy, who literally sees shining lights around people. The only time that ever happened to me was when I was candy flipping at Soaking Man, which is like Burning Man except it happens in my bathtub and I am the only guest invited. She also throws confetti and fairy dust around, which really just seems like a way to caress Tamra’s boobs without upsetting her husband, Eddie.
Oh, and what about Shannon Beador? She’s so freaking high that she gets rid of her fruity bowl that keeps her feng shui in check and believes that paying attention to her energy patterns in her house will actually make her life better. That’s sort of like seeing chasers or believing that your home is alive because the walls are breathing, both side effects to Timothy Leary’s drug of choice.
Shannon’s feng shui expert Elaine is totally bunk. First of all, how does Shannon have a whole bin of “feng shui stuff” in her garage? Do you need things for feng shui? I might just be a stupid Westerner, but I thought that it was about arranging the things that are already in your house to optimize the flow of energy. Wouldn’t having things expressly for this purpose just get in the way of all of that energy? Isn’t having accessories for feng shui kind of beside the point?
I did like Elaine’s message about the sink being feminine and the stove being masculine and that if the two of them are facing each other, then it’s going to ruin the relationships in the house. That is clearly the problem between Shannon and David. Yup, it’s the placement of their appliances. Maybe if they put the toaster oven in the microwave it will be like electronics having sex and it will repair any damage that might have been done by whatever is going on with the sink. I mean, this is obviously the cause of all of the Beadors’ problems: the furniture. Yup, that’s it.
Actually, we’re wrong. The real culprit is the toilet in the relationship corner of the house. Wait, does that mean that one corner of the entire house is devoted to relationships? Can’t you have a corner in each room that does that? Anyway, Elaine says that the toilet in that quadrant is draining away Shannon’s relationships. I think Elaine doesn’t entirely understand what a toilet does. Wouldn’t the placement of that toilet just mean that all of Shannon’s relationships are full of shit? That’s sort of what I’m thinking, especially considering how she treated Lydia.
Yes, the real reason I think that Shannon attempted to microdose but actually ended up macrodosing herself is because she acted like a total lunatic at Ava’s birthday party. I can’t even adequately describe what happened because I was so taken aback by how nuts it was. It seems like Lydia, who just met Shannon, is trying to play both sides of the divide between Vicki and Tamra and Shannon. (It’s really a divide between Vicki and the sane world, but I don’t really have time to split hairs right now.) Shannon takes offense to that and brings up her issues with Vicki and Brooks’s fake cancer and then Lydia compares Shannon to Vicki.
This leads to several things. The first of which is that Shannon blames her entire weight gain on Victoria R. Gunvalson, Esq. which, I don’t know, seems like a bit of a stretch. There are other ways to deal with stress and there are certainly other factors of stress in Shannon’s life, like the fact that her daughter has decided to start doing her makeup like she’s an Avril Lavigne impersonator. Oh, and also that her husband cheated on her and it rocked her world for years. Now he’s spending a lot of time with Eddie Judge. I’m not trying to insinuate anything, I just wanted to point out that everyone called attention to the fact that they are bosom buddies. (Not Bosom Buddies, though. Neither of them can pull off a Tom Hanks.)
Anyway, Shannon flies off the handle at Lydia, who decides that they can’t be friends because she acts so erratically. Shannon responds not by calming down, but by storming off in a huff as if to prove Lydia’s point. Neither of these women really handle the interaction all that well, but at least Lydia keeps her cool, which makes her look like the one who wins this first round.
We didn’t really see that much from the other Housewives. Meghan is moving back to the O.C. from La Quinta after the birth of her daughter. She also has a dog named “Girlie Girl,” which is the worst name that has ever been given to a creature with four legs. And this is in a franchise where one Housewife is currently living with about seven different animals all named Baby. “Girlie Girl come” is not a sentence that any human should ever have to utter, especially one like Jim Edmonds, who is about as cuddly as a box of stale Shredded Wheat. I do not believe in cruelty to animals, but if someone were to drop this animal off at Vanderpump Pets so that it could be adopted and sent to a caring home where it would not be given a cruel and unusual name, I think all of us would be better off.
Meanwhile, Kelly Dodd goes exercising with her husband, Michael, which makes her the second Real Housewife this season who is going to a fitness professional not named Eddie or Tamra, which seems kind of odd to me. Even Bethenny got Madame Paulette to rid her closet of moths, so you figure that Kelly could get Eddie to force her to do a dozen or so burpees. But I can’t really blame Kelly because her trainer Aaron is very handsome. In fact, he’s far more handsome than my trainer, who is really just a homeless person I pay $20 to chase me around the block with a stick until I pass out or he beats me bloody.
We do finally meet Peggy, the new Real Housewife, but due to the details of the Eileen Davidson Accord, we’ll have to wait four more episodes before we pass judgement on her. I will say her initial meeting with Lydia was, well, it was something. She asks Peggy if she had an operation recently and then says that her mother died of breast cancer at 51, so she had a preemptive double mastectomy, a procedure the rest of the world calls the Angelina Jolie. Lydia’s response to this disclosure is absolutely perfect. “Um, that’s a big story, Peggy,” she says, with a little bit of shock and dread in her voice. Yeah, you ain’t kidding. I think I’ll need something a little bit stronger than LSD if we’re going to have to keep hearing about this. Maybe whatever the hell Vicki always seems to be on.
