overnights

The Real Housewives of Dallas Recap: Schnapps, Lies, and Videotape

The Real Housewives of Dallas

Growers and Show-ers
Season 3 Episode 14
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

The Real Housewives of Dallas

Growers and Show-ers
Season 3 Episode 14
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Bravo

It’s not about how you spend your time, but who you spend it with, particularly if one of the people you may be forced into close proximity with is your current nemesis. Today’s Copenhagen itinerary is a choice of a bike tour or a canal tour, and Chaotic Neutral Cary makes a point of splitting up the strong ionic BFF bonds of Brandi/Stephanie and LeeAnne/Kameron into separate groups.

Brandi says that LeeAnne would look like the Wicked Witch on a bike, which LeeAnne is very upset about, in addition to already being very, very upset to have learned that D’Andra apologized to Kameron (but not to her!) after she went to bed last night.

And so “Boat Sisters” D’Andra, LeeAnne, and Stephanie float by palaces and sip rosé; “Bike Sisters” Cary, Kameron, and Brandi ride past a fountain or some shit, and more importantly, Cary casually mentions that she dated Lance Armstrong for a year. The Boat Sisters spot the Bike Sisters from the water, disembark, and then everyone proceeds to jump on public outdoor trampolines while continuing to sip from their wine glasses. Scandinavia 1, America 0.

The Boat Sisters peel off to an outdoor café, where LeeAnne makes a point of scooping up and saving their bottle caps from the cider they’re drinking, for “sentimental” reasons — much as she held onto her maid-of-honor bouquet from D’Andra’s wedding, and the boutonnière, and the invitation. I can only imagine she’ll be assembling all of these objects into a passive-aggressive Joseph Cornell–style shadowbox to throw at D’Andra during the reunion.

That said, they’ve actually been kind of, I hate to jinx it, getting along. Stephanie takes it upon herself to serve as D’Andra and LeeAnne’s marriage counselor slash calming blue-eyed therapy husky and force them to talk. An extremely timely rainstorm opens up over the restaurant.

LeeAnne’s M.O. here is basically to serve as a Random Lifetime Movie Choked-Up Dialogue Generator, my favorite examples being, “I feel like you think I’m a piece of trash that you can just throw away,” and “When you took away my opportunity to love you, you took my heart.” D’Andra’s over-it exterior eventually softens, and she too sheds tears. “It really is my deepest desire that today we can move forward,” she says. And just like that, the sun reappears. A little on the nose of you, the weather, but sure.

Cary waits until the gals are all styled and glammed up to announce that their evening outing to the Tivoli Gardens amusement park has a compulsory dress code. Each woman is issued vaguely elfin “Danish girl” outfits (no, not Danish Girl outfits) with colorful aprons and bonnets. They ride a carousel and then without passing Go, without collecting $200 (sorry, D’Andra), proceed directly to the beer garden.

Apparently gunning for a producer credit, Cary reminds everyone about the Wicked Witch comparison. Brandi, still steaming about everything bad that LeeAnne has ever done all at once forever (which, I mean, fair), offers what is essentially the opposite of an apology. “I should have just called you a wicked bitch instead of a wicked witch,” she says. Cary’s expression is about what I’d expect from someone who’d stuck a fork into an electrical outlet. And yet LeeAnne weathers this with the stone face of a Buckingham Palace guard, if not the big furry hat.

The next day, it’s time to meet the rest of the Christensen cousins! The women head out to the suburbs, where Lotte, Camilla, Johan, and the gang have a surprise waiting for their distant relative: Zuri (cute!) and Mark (whatever!) have flown out to join them. Cary is moved to tears, especially when Mark FaceTimes her dad, his co-conspirator.

Over a traditional Danish lunch of spiced herring (which, per RHOD resident food critic Stephanie Hollman’s review, has notes of “salty asshole”), enough beer and schnapps is had so that just about everyone agrees it would be a very good idea to take a customary plunge into the 50-degree Baltic Sea. Cary is eager to do so in the local fashion, i.e., naked. If I had a body like Cary’s, I too would probably expend a lot of mental energy concocting reasons to remove all of my clothing on TV. “You don’t get privacy?!” Zuri screams, as a fisherman looks on.

Various members of Cary’s extended family also skinny dip, as does Mark, treating the other women to the unseeable sight of a Real Housepenis. As Stephanie puts it, there are “vaginas and franks everywhere.” D’Andra, Kameron, and Stephanie, minus Stephanie’s hair extensions, take a swim in their bathing suits, but Brandi, true to character, is Team Nudity. At least she was, until she saw LeeAnne filming the proceedings on her phone.

On the ride back to the hotel, Brandi demands LeeAnne delete the video. LeeAnne insists she was harmlessly recording “for posterity,” which I’m sure the Library of Congress will appreciate. Given their fraught history, Brandi isn’t crazy to be paranoid about what LeeAnne might do with this footage. Or, as she puts it, her frenemy is a “manipulative fucking bitch.” Kameron argues that someone who’s “fine getting butt naked on national television” should have no such concerns, but I would argue there is a meaningful distinction to be made as to whether or not the specific contours of your nipples and vulva are edited into a respectable blur.

And yet, at a schmancy Michelin-starred restaurant that has the gall to serve them head-on shrimp, can you imagine, Brandi’s persistence improbably manages to win me over to LeeAnne’s side. “Would you have liked it if you had your sunny-side up titties and I took a video of you and was laughing at you?” she asks, and I lose five minutes of my life to wondering what, exactly, “sunny-side up titties” would look like. Is that a pejorative reference to LeeAnne’s ill-begotten boob job? (Miss you, Dr. True.) I lose another five minutes to wondering what necrotic sunny-side up eggs would look like.

Inconsiderate and dumb though it might have been, I do believe that LeeAnne’s impromptu movie shoot was ultimately innocuous. As she says, she didn’t make any attempt to hide that she was filming. And, huh-duh, it would be pretty obvious who was responsible if such a video ever did surface. (That is, unless an enterprising to the point of being actually evil Bravo producer got an idea …)

Brandi is convinced LeeAnne is only “pretending to be zen.” Time will tell, but so far, she seems to be mostly succeeding at being zen. “I’m not mad at you, I’m not going to be mad at you, and I’m not going to let myself get mad at you,” LeeAnne says, with the cadence of a Stuart Smalley daily affirmation.

In a confessional, LeeAnne theorizes that Brandi is always trying to prove the existence of “Old LeeAnne.” But she does still exist. LeeAnne “just control[s] her better.”

That’s the Hulk’s secret: She’s always angry.

Real Housewives of Dallas Recap: Schnapps, Lies, & Videotape