This week on our favorite show Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They went shopping at the trendiest boutique in a resort town that still managed to have a wine o’clock sign from HomeGoods displayed prominently and then bought the most expensive thing in the store. They sat through an energy-cleansing ritual at a restaurant and then were scared as someone blew the Taco Bell Grande out of a conch shell and then giggled about it in their mint feathered jumpsuits. They sold the property they didn’t even want anymore because their neighbor found an alligator in the pool and they made double their money anyway. Capitalism, baby!
But mostly what they did was cry. Crystal cried. Sutton cried. Diana cried and it is the most that Diana has done this entire season. Yes, it is that time. Since this is Diana’s fifth episode, the Eileen Davidson accord expired (and not just because our queen made a cameo in a flashback). Yes, it is the season’s sixth, but the first one was all about Dorit’s burglary so Diana didn’t feature, thus kicking off her grace period with episode two. The official verdict on Diana is: I get it, and I don’t.
I totally get why you would want Diana on the show. She’s actually filthy rich instead of house-of-cards rich like some of these other ladies (or House of Cards rich like Beau Willimon). She’s gorgeous; she has a hot younger husband. She sends her staff ahead of her when she travels. She is rich enough to be unafraid of what anyone thinks about her. I get it. She seems like excellent casting. Good job, casting.
But then you get her in a scene and she fizzles like a wet bottle rocket. Our biggest hint was the last episode when, in the thick of the climb up Crystal and Sutton’s Mt. Molehill, we hear a faint glimpse of Diana picked up on someone else’s mic, saying, “Why are we even talking about this?” Cause that is the show, Diana. That is why you are all here. Talking about stupid shit is the entire job description for Rich Women Doing Things.
This inability for Diana to engage is also all across this episode. When Erika, Lisa, and Crystal are surfing and Kyle, Garcelle, Sutton, and Dorit go shopping, where is Diana? Up in her room talking to the staff? In the hotel lobby looking at Instagram? Down the beach reenacting the finale of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar? (I hope so because same, sis.) She emerges from the ocean like an appropriation-free Bo Derek in time to talk to Crystal about crying, but she misses out on everything.
An even bigger example is when Rinna brings up her book, Room 23 (available on Amazon for $304.90), and Diana says that they already had this conversation and she doesn’t want to talk about it. What we have to find out, in confessional, is that conspiracy nuts say it is really a catalog for celebrities who also dabble in high-end prostitution. The thing about being on this show is, as we just said, you have to talk about shit. Bring it up at dinner. Be vulnerable. Show the people how much it hurt you. Give them something to discuss. But no, she shuts it all down.
When initially judging Sutton, I said that she was not of this world, and I don’t think Diana is either, but it’s two very different things. Sutton doesn’t have the temperament to be an excellent Housewife. An amorphous blob of gaffes that is entertaining to watch, yes. Housewife, no. Diana just doesn’t have the interest. She doesn’t need money or fame, and she doesn’t seem to be launching some cockamamie business. (Unless she is really a celebrity madam. Kidding! Kidding!) Then why is she here? Once she figures that out, I think she’ll have a story.
As for the rest of the ladies, they know why they are here, and it is to cash a paycheck without having to reveal anything about themselves. That is why they are forever producing the weakest among them to rush to the cornucopia that is Bravo’s Hunger Games. This week the Executive Producer in Waiting award goes to Erika Jayne for coming right into the middle of this Sutton and Crystal doo-doo flinging and making it happen. First, she tells Crystal on the beach that she needs to stand up for herself. Then she tells everyone at dinner about Crystal crying on the beach and forces her confrontation with Sutton. I was just shocked that she somehow didn’t make this about her beef with Sutton like she has every other conversation this season.
I was a little ticked that Garcelle and Sutton accused Erika of talking about their drama so that she doesn’t have to discuss her legal problems. They all do this, and they have been doing it for years. Garcelle does it too. She’s accusing everyone else of stirring it up when she is the one who incited this whole stupid incident by baselessly asserting that Crystal was trying to set Sutton up for saying something racially insensitive.
A quick recap: After Garcelle accused Crystal of setting up Sutton, Crystal said that Sutton said other things that were “dark.” She wouldn’t tell the ladies what those things were, so they all framed Crystal’s accusation as “dangerous” and assumed that what Sutton said was racist without actually revealing what Sutton said so they could all appropriately judge. Sutton then said that Crystal was lying about her and it is a pattern she has heard about Crystal, that she makes up lies about people to stay in their good graces. Sutton won’t say what she heard or who said it but leveled this accusation anyway.
I wanted to go over all of this because this week the hypocrisy of it all is driving me to want to become a Chrisley Knows Best recapper instead. Kyle, Garcelle, and Sutton have decided that Crystal is lying about Sutton because that “matches up” with what they heard about her from her former friends. Garcelle says that when Sutton brought it up, it was “powerful.” Wait, but when Crystal brought up something she wouldn’t say, that was “dangerous.” Why is everyone Team Powerful all of a sudden?
Because Kyle now thinks she’s lying, she has decided that Crystal is manipulative and she likes to make herself look like a victim to get their sympathy and thereby her approval. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Kyle better back herself and the horse she rode in on right up. She says Crystal plays the victim because “she doesn’t fit into this group.” Um, the reason she doesn’t fit into this group is that none of them will let her. As soon as she started on the show, they told her she couldn’t feel violated. They have systematically ganged up against her every time she tried to assert herself and have denied her feelings. Why would she feel like she fit in?
Sutton is just as bad. She accuses Crystal of “attacking her character,” but she attacks Crystal’s character by bringing up this rumor that she heard that she’s a liar. A rumor, I might add, that everyone is bandying about but not explaining — how are we supposed to judge for ourselves? How can they all say that Crystal can’t be trusted when we, at home, don’t have all the evidence to know whether or not she can be trusted?
Also, Crystal’s case is based on something she was present for Sutton saying. Whether or not it was “dark,” Crystal was obviously hurt. These women are now judging her based on a rumor. Why not ask Crystal about it? Why not get her side of the story? Why not find out if this thing ever happened. We’ve heard enough rumors (need I point out Kyle and the rumors about her husband?) that have turned out to be false; why does Sutton get the benefit of the doubt and Crystal doesn’t? If we can answer that, then we can find out why the group seems so against her.
And in the middle of this, Sutton starts screaming about how she’s a good person to Diana, and all Diana can say is that Sutton is a vegetarian that eats meat. My favorite thing about Diana is that she is obsessed with this fact. That is the one thing she will remember about Sutton and will bring it up every time she fights with her.
This is all so exhausting, and I don’t think even three bags of frozen Reese’s Minis will be enough to get me through another episode of this. Can’t Kathy Hilton show up at her Conrad by Hilton luxury property and save us from nose-holding, ear-blocking, crotch-cradling action that we’re stuck in?
Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about the white girliest shit that has ever happened on this show: Lisa Rinna thinks her mother is now a flock of birds. I get it, it’s hell to lose a parent, and we all grieve differently. However, Lisa told us that she was talking to a medium while her mother was about to pass, and the medium (who is not Allison DuBois, mind you) told her to look for a flock of birds. The two paintings in her room were — gasp — of birds.
Lisa then tells the women that she opened her makeup bag that morning and what was in there? A ceramic bird. Kyle freaks out and says, “Your mother put it here, one thousand percent.” You know Kyle means this literally, not figuratively. She thinks that ghost Lois found a ceramic bird, picked it up with her ghost fingers, teleported it across time zones and space like she is Dorinda’s dead husband Richard inhabiting a red balloon, and then put the bird into Rinna’s makeup bag so that she would think of her.
I don’t think that is how spirituality works, exactly. That’s not even how ghosts work, and I know that because I watched Casper once while high and going through a Christina Ricci phase. (Still in that phase, to be honest.) Then Lisa Rinna says, “I’ve been seeing birds all day.” Of course you have. You are on the planet. You are at the beach. You are under the sky. There are birds. There are also thunderclouds and pollen and seaweed and all of the gnats that you inhale in the night that you don’t even know about or want to know about. The world is full of many things, great and small, serious and funny, gorgeous and ugly. The world is full of sunrises over the ocean that take you back to that time when you were playing on the living-room floor with some blocks and you looked up and there was your mother beaming at you, reflecting her love at you like the sunrise over the ocean, and it doesn’t take a bird to you remind you of that. That is always with you, clutch that and hold it close to your heart and leave that ceramic bird for the next person who needs a miracle.
