Merry Christmas, Movie House! Welcome to a holiday-themed recap of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Last night’s episode featured a dick move from Yolanda, an aborted intervention attempt by Mr. and Mrs. Joyce, and a latex ball-gag/mask/muzzle thing that was NOT meant for Kingsley.
We began with a scene where Yolanda shopped for peonies, foreshadowing a dinner party featuring a performance from the latest terrible singing group her lizardy husband works with. In this scene, we learned that Yolanda is as passionate about flowers as she is about lemons, and that made us all have to lie down, because that’s a lot of passion. We also learned that the so-called purpose of Yolo’s dinner party, behind providing some desperately deserved exposure for the aforementioned Canadian Tenors, was to celebrate her newly returned good health and to make nice with the ladies after their Palm Springs Yoyce-a-thon.
After that, Joyce took her husband out to eat at a sushi resty-raunt. The Latina beauty queen told her husband that their son had accomplished some kind of higher level of color belt in his karate class than he had previously held, and Mr. Joyce replied, “How beautiful,” because, um, okay. Then, Joyce told him that Brandi picked on her in Palm Springs and was arguably racist, to which her husband was like “Gee, that certainly sucks.” Neither of these people seem to have a relationship to English as a first language, and yet their limited vocabulary seems to have nothing to do with their countries of foreign origin. Joyce and Moyce (Mr. Joyce) seem to be perfectly nice, kind of boring people, who just are not very bright. Although Moyce produced Capote, apparently.
Then came a scene in which a heartbroken Brandi hung signs in her neighborhood that advertised a $10,000 reward for the dog her now-fired assistant had lost. Brandi was flanked by a couple of her pals, and by Kim, and then by Kyle and the patronizing dimwit Mauricio, who told his daughter a few times how important it was for her to use The Secret in order to find the dog belonging to the lady whose crutches her aunt and mom once hid for laughs. Mauricio clearly didn’t want to be there. He looks down on Brandi. He didn’t have the decency to change out of his flip-flops for his half-assed search, and frankly, he visibly cares more about whether his wife can find a wide enough leg for her pants of choice than whether Brandi’s dog was eaten by coyotes. Mauricio bugs me more than Kyle right now.
Meanwhile, Carlton showed her nanny the sex dungeon she is in the process of creating. She and Elizy, a woman with a name that does not exist, rooted through the handcuffs, footcuffs, lingerie, prods, nodes, plugs, cogs, masks, gags, and various steampunk-themed gears that Carlton keeps in a room that she witchily refers to as her and her husband’s “playroom.” Now, I am very pro-sex. I enjoy: sex, doing it, making out, and screwing. On the other hand, certain sex things completely give me the creeps. And those things include: calling any kind of sexual activity “play,” flirting with women without actively fucking them just for the purposes of titillation, and the use of the word “daddy” in any context beyond a little girl regarding her father. That last one was not a thing Carlton demonstrated on-camera, but who knows what she and her husband say to each other once that ball gag comes out.
After a puff piece about the construction of Lisa and Ken’s new gay bar (stop laughing, British people — I didn’t say “Poof Piece”), we got to check in with America’s most fragile, actively emotionally disintegrating, technically adult woman: Kim Richards. Kim explained that Kingsley, the pit bull who will one day take her life, was doing better than he was before because of her listening to instructions, but that she was still going to train him “Kim’s way,” which is a euphemism for not at all. The sadistic trainer who physically abused Kingsley weeks ago showed up to haul the dog off to Dog Camp, and Kim burst into tears until her son, Chad, compared the experience to hers in rehab. “Oh!” realized Kim, after the trainer, Dick Monster, said that what Kingsley really needed was some “Dog Sociology.” What the fuck, Dick Monster? Does Kingsley need to take a survey course in Dog Sociology at Dog Oberlin before he gets his Dog Bachelor’s Degree and moves on to a Dog Temp Agency that won’t place him unless he knows Dog Excel? Dick Monster continued, for the sake of clarity to a brain-damaged former child star, to parallel Kingsley’s experience to Kim’s, and made an outrageous assumption about Kim’s life when he said, “You’ve got human sociology; you’ve been around humans your whole life.” Clearly, nobody ever pointed out to Dick Monster that taking direction from the crews of various Disney movies before a life of living alone does not count as assembled human interaction. Kim is actually MORE isolated and less socialized than her dog, and everything about her is completely tragic and terrible. But, boy did she like that singing group later!
Speaking of the Cana-douche-ian Tenors, back at the Casa del Yolanda, Yo’s terrible husband was making stupid music with four dildos in stupid fedoras who can’t pronounce the word about properly. I know some of you think I’m overly hard on David Foster, but I don’t care. I think he stinks, both personally and professionally, and he once hit Ben Vereen with his car. Foster is the smirking embodiment of talent with no taste, and status earned only by America’s constant financial reward of soulless schlock. He makes Billy Joel look like Lou Reed, and he’s setting music back by hundreds of years with the bullshit he produces in exchange for enough money for him to justify his rampant disrespect of women to himself. Oh, and he was an asshole about Carlton canceling last minute to their dinner party. Yes; it’s not ideal when somebody can’t show up with no notice, but ideally, when it’s a matter of illness or any kind of personal crisis, you cut them some slack. Foster fumed about Carlton’s absence, mentioning it at least three times to whomever would listen; and soon, Yolanda changed her tune from, “That was nice of her to be considerate of my immune system and cancel because she’s not feeling well” to “She should have told us earlier.” That bummed me out; it was like a kitten learning from its older companion how to hiss.
While the Canadian Tenors rehearsed and Foster fumed about Carlton, Yolanda puttered around the house making sure her butler, Mr. Belvedere, was injecting strawberries with syringes full of Grand Marnier and that her still life of a refrigerator was adequately servicing the catering staff.
Meanwhile, Kyle picked up Brandi in a limo, and Brandi was wearing a bright pink lip and a stretchy handkerchief of a dress on her insane body. The two women got along, and Brandi, helping herself to some champers, disclosed a fissure in her bond with Lisa and Yo when she told Kyle that sometimes she felt like those two friends of hers judged her binge drinking. And Kyle said “Huh,” and filed that information away so she could one day use it to hurt somebody. Also, Brandi’s dog is probably dead, and her neighbor is a bitch. She was about to take this out on her own liver and on Joyce.
Soon, all of the ladies had arrived at Yolanda and David’s in time to feel each others’ breasts. This seems to be a pretty standard grooming/greeting practice among these ladies, and, in the process, we learned that Lisa and Kyle claim to have natural breasts, and we confirmed that Brandi’s are proudly fake. We were also “treated” to the return of Kyle’s blackboard-scratchingly cringeworthy impression of Lisa’s accent and physicality. And on a full stomach of Christmas cookies, Bravo?
Around this time of the evening, Kyle noticed that some of the place-card settings had little hearts drawn next to the names and some of them did not. And Yolanda, when confronted with the cold reality of the heart situation, admitted that, yes, indeed, she did draw a little something extra next to the names of her besties — but, in her defense, it was “subliminal.” And while I never miss a chance to point out the hypocrisy, phoniness, immaturity, and general shittiness of Kyle and her comrades, I would be an insane jerk to do anything besides agree with her, Kim, and Joyce that what Yolo pulled — subliminally or not — was mega C-wordy.
So naturally, then Brandi got blackout-drunk and started picking on Joyce. And this was after David Foster asked Joyce to make a speech in Spanish, which was weird. But because Joyce obliges anyone who seems to have authority and asks something performative from her, she prattled on about how happy she was to be there in her native Español. And Brandi loosely heckled Joyce, who, after her speech, referred to her husband as her “baby,” which was like pouring a gigantic holiday popcorn gift tin full of gasoline on an already-raging fire. In response, Brandi asked Joyce who her “Baby” was, and, upon learning that she was referring to her husband, asked Mr. Moyce P. Joyce, “Are you a baby or are you a man?” And that was provocative, but nobody said anything confrontational in response to it, because I think everybody is scared of Drunk Brandi, except for David, who is probably turned on.
And after an extremely sad speech from Yo about how she never dreamed she could be loved the way her gross husband loves her, and Joyce’s to-camera description of Gigi as “gentle,” the strawberries arrived and Kyle launched into about 40 minutes of bad stand-up about how, in Beverly Hills, even the berries get injectables. Oh, that was painful to watch — like the loud girl who keeps trying that one joke over and over at brunch until she finally gets a mercy response from her frenemies. “Good one, Carol.”
And after Mauricio mentioned that he had sold three houses that very day, the gang was forced to listen to the Canadian Tenors harmonize at them. And that caused Kim to feel emotions, and in her testimonial, she mentioned the “grabbiness” of the sounds she heard more times than was necessary for an audio mash-up, but appreciated by the D.J.’s at Barracuda, who always like to have more soundbites to work with than they need.
Finally, Joyce and Moyce rode home together and talked about how rude Brandi was in vaguely concerned tones. Joyce used her enviable powers of observation to note that Brandi was intoxicated at dinner, and went on to ask Mr. Moyce whether she should stage an intervention on the woman who hates her with little to no provocation. And Moyce said to his wife, “Maybe leave that job to her friends.” “Yeah, I guess,” quipped everyone’s favorite brain surgeon. And then, the episode was over.
What did you guys think of this “Dream Team” episode? Was Yolanda a jerk for drawing hearts on cards? Was Mauricio more annoying than usual? And which one of the four Canadian Tenors would be Ringo?
Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll see you guys next week! Merry Christmas!
