This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They adopted new puppies to add to their coterie of canines, which are all wholly untrained and will soon be terrorizing guests by stealing steaks off their plates. They had their suddenly hunky assistants running around in the backyard, trying to get clods of grass out of their dogs’ mouths. Lots of dog content with the Rich Women this week, but most of them were off in COVID isolation trying to get better and calling their friends for video conferences about absolutely nothing.
Yes, mostly what the rich women did this week was make do. Kyle, Kathy, Crystal, and Diana are all AWOL because they either had or were exposed to COVID, making all the resulting action seem flimsier than a Shrinky Dink right out of the oven. Diana avoided the dreaded coronavirus by “living on a deserted island for two years.” Is this Liplikia, the island kingdom that she bought with her divorce settlement? Is it a land where no one gets sick, the women are all powerful warriors, and the men grow hair in supple manes that can never be cleaved by scissors or shears?
With so many of the women sidelined like a drone out of batteries, we are left with many limp one-on-one lunches, including one where Garcelle met with Dorit so she could shill her book. The women were doing a lot of shilling, with Lisa Rinna hosting a wine tasting for a new line of wines that was announced [checks watch] today! As she is about to host everyone for her tasting, she says the women might be honest and rip into her wine. Please. This is Beverly Hills. All of these women know to put on a smile, choke it down, and tell her it is fabulous. None of these women would fuck with another’s bag.
Yes, this was a bit of a nothing burger of an episode, so why don’t we spend a few paragraphs talking about Sutton’s son Philip, shall we? I may have a crush on this gentleman, who the chyron tells me is 18, so it’s legal even though I can still feel icky about it. Philip wants to join the military, and as much as we love a man in uniform, I think we can all agree that the only thing better is a man in uniform who also has a trust fund.
Philip and Sutton’s daughter Porter are home for winter break, and she is caring for them by making her famous chicken salad recipe. Sutton stands in her kitchen, which looks like a Sur La Table that left its life and kids to become an actor in L.A., saying that the secret to good chicken salad is lots of mayonnaise. She then mixes her chicken salad with a giant wooden spoon. A spoon?! The sacrilege. The disgrace. The Kim Richards erasure. In this household, we know that the secret ingredient to a good chicken salad is tarragon and that the only acceptable way to mix this salad is with your hands.
What else can we talk about so we don’t have to discuss Erika, Sutton, and Garcelle fighting? OH! What about all of the dudes these ladies will set Garcelle and Erika up with? Dorit brings up that there is a handsome gentleman who has been bothering her for an introduction to our Haitian queen for years now. Um, why are we only finding out about this now? And is this man Boy George and he just wants to hang out and bump bagels?
Erika’s potential match is a lot more mysterious. He’s a friend of Mauricio’s, and Mo tells us that he has both a gold medal and is an NFL player. A cursory Google tells us that the only person this could be is James Jett, who won a gold in 1992 and played for the Los Angeles Raiders and Rams, which puts him in exactly the right Zip Code.
Ugh, we can no longer avoid talking about the fights in this episode. Well, maybe just for a second to mention how gross it is that they were all gossiping about Crystal’s eating disorder when she wasn’t there, and I really didn’t like it and I hope that Crystal unleashes her mutant power of venomous saliva and uses it to burn out the retinas of all the women at that lunch.
On to the fights. First up, it’s Erika vs. Garcelle and Sutton. Erika tells Garcelle that she thinks Sutton is a detriment to her. At Rinna’s party, Garcelle pulls Erika aside and asks what she means by that. Erika says that Sutton is always getting herself in hot water by saying dumb shit, which causes Garcelle to defend Sutton, which in turn causes Erika to say she thinks Sutton’s actions end up dragging Garcelle down. Garcelle doesn’t understand Erika’s aversion to loyalty. Garcelle says she’s from a large family, and they always had each other’s backs.
I have to side with Garcelle on this one. Erika considers their friendship as a transaction, as she and the rest of the Get Along Gang would. What she means is that the fans might love Garcelle more if Sutton’s vibrating chihuahua act wasn’t always dragging her down. (I think that’s true.) However, Garcelle and Sutton are actual friends who view this as human beings would. Garcelle says she stands by her friend because that is what friends do. Yeah, duh. It’s a cliché, but I will drag my friends across town, through the suburbs, back to the airport, which is in the worst part of town, and then back to city hall, but if you come for them, I will be right by their side defending the very thing I was just bitching about to all of our other friends in the group chat we have where we just talk about what an asshole that one friend is. That is called loyalty — the GAG should learn about it.
As they’re talking, Garcelle asks if she can include Sutton in the conversation, and Erika says no. On the one hand, this is a show about conflict and its resolution, and Erika not allowing the resolution part gives us the reality equivalent of blue balls. On the other hand, I appreciate her commitment to Sparkle Motion, and in this context, Sparkle Motion hates Sutton. It gave us what amounts to a rare moment of honesty among this cast. Erika tells Garcelle, “I think you’ve been very clear about how you feel about me and everything that happened last year, and I think that I have done my best to explain myself and what I’m going through, but I don’t think you necessarily believe me.” Garcelle responds that this is all accurate, and I love them both for airing this dirty laundry and letting it hang out on the line rather than feeling the need to give us some pat resolution. Wait, wasn’t I just wishing for conflict and resolution? I take it all back. Let them all hate each other forever.
When they rejoin the women, Sutton asks why she is a liability, and we go through the argument again about what being a friend is about. Blah. It then morphs into something about when Sutton said she paid for Lisa to go to a gala, and Lisa never sent her a thank you — something I thought we settled!
Lisa renews her attack on Sutton about this, and it is bullshit for several reasons. Rinna says she’ll be able to get over this if Sutton says that the reason why Sutton “humiliated” Lisa on Watch What Happens Live, a show watched by tens of hundreds of people, was “out of spite because [Lisa] hurt [Sutton’s] friend Garcelle.” This is not how life works. You can’t wait for people to confirm your suspicion on why they did things. That can’t be the only way to reach forgiveness. What if that’s not why she did it? Is she supposed to lie? What if she gives another reason? Will Lisa be stunted in this aggrieved state until everything about her body has decomposed except her skull wearing its iconic haircut? She needs to find a way to forgive, and that path is not one for Sutton to hoe. (Imagine Sutton trying to hoe?)
Lisa then says that if someone comes for her husband or her kids, she will never back down. Yes, Sutton included Harry in her initial statement that she paid for them at the gala, but this fight is not about what Sutton said. She has apologized more than enough for that. This now has to do with Lisa’s reaction to Sutton and her apology, which really has nothing to do with Harry. She’s just hiding behind this false shield so that she can have something approaching the moral high ground, which is something that no one wearing a Fendi-print jumpsuit should be able to occupy.
Finally, Lisa says that Sutton did all this to humiliate her but failed and ended up looking like a fool. Lisa claims this is the truth, but it is not. Even I, who does not love Sutton, did not think she was a fool when she did this. She was just a Housewife engaging in Housewifery. Maybe Lisa is so mad because Sutton got her and she didn’t see it coming. Maybe she’s mad because she knows that she looks sillier than avocado on a hot dog. (Think about it.) Maybe she’s mad because her BJ skills aren’t really a ten on a scale of one to five like Harry Hamlin claims, and she knows it and feels like a fraud who will one day be exposed. Maybe she’s mad because she looked out over her backyard with Harry’s tomato plants and that giant above-ground pool that houses water in case of wildfire and looked across the chasm of Beverly Hills out into the valley over the trees, and she didn’t see a bird. Not one. Not even a pigeon or a swallow, and she missed her mother in that moment, and she needed to lash out. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was all of it. Or maybe she is just enjoying being wrong.
