Do any of you have a mean grandmother? Well, I do and whenever she would come to visit our house when I was a child, it would throw everything into complete chaos. We all had to pretend to be nice to her, but she drove us all crazy, sitting there at the dinner table ranting about her problems and telling us all what was wrong with us and we just had to sit there and listen to it. You couldn’t yell at her, you couldn’t tell her she was wrong, you couldn’t fight her. You just had to sit there and take it. Last night, on the Indian Richards and the Temple of Doom everyone’s mean grandma came to visit. Yes, it was time to see the morally corrupt Faye Resnick, as St. Camille of Grammer once called her. The million-year-old succubus was let forth from her vacuum-sealed sarcophagus and she unfolded her arms, with gauzy strips of fabric clinging to them, and slowly came to life before opening her ancient eyes with a snap. All we could do is stare into her yellow pupils, colored with the wrath of the ages, shining like a burnished cinder. Faye Resnick had awoken once again to feed.
But before we can get to her, we have to deal with the aftermath of the fight last week between Brandi and Adrienne the Queen of the Maloofs (a race of mole people that live under the mountain) and her husband Paullo the Chimp. For a recap in my recap (how meta!) Brandi talked some secret shit about Adrienne (most likely having to do with how her children were born which may or may not have been with a surrogate, allegedly) and Kim Richards told Adrienne about the shit that was talked and then Paullo and Adrienne blew up at Brandi and stormed out of the party. On the way out, Adrienne was talking about how Brandi is a drug addict and a horrible mother.
That’s when it struck me – Adrienne and Paullo are the worst kind of rich people. They are the kind of rich people that use their money and influence like a bludgeon to keep everyone in line and behaving like they would want to. They can afford to have a fleet of attorneys to approach Bravo with nastily-worded letters (not that they have, but they could) and tell Bravo that if they air whatever secret it was that Brandi spilled (that kinda might possibly have something to do with another woman’s vagina and Adrienne’s kids) then there will be a lawsuit. Because Bravo is rich enough for its own fleet of lawyers to read those letters and there is nothing one fleet of lawyers is scared of more than another fleet of lawyers, then Bravo complies and we will never once speak aloud of the secret (which, I’ve heard, allegedly has to do with Adrienne’s children and the checks she wrote to Surrogacy International, Inc.). However, Brandi doesn’t have those lawyers. She doesn’t have protection. All she has is the truth, but even that Adrienne is preventing from coming to light. Meanwhile Adrienne can run around accusing Brandi of being a drug addict (which, hey, might be true too) and that goes on the air to millions of people, but because Brandi doesn’t have anything on retainer except her teeth when she sleeps at night, so we get to hear all Adrienne’s disparaging remarks. Where is the fairness in that? Down with 1%! (I know this is just why Occupy was created.)
Speaking of behaving complete irrationally, can we talk for a second about Taylor? First of all she showed up at MMMmmmm’s Real Estate Eleganza Party (brought to you by Marriott) with an accessory gay that is like the real life version of Salacious B. Crumb (that annoying Muppet that lived in the folds of Jabba the Hutt’s fat). Then, after the fight, she was short of breath and about to pass out. Why, Taylor? This had nothing to do with you. You were not at all involved in anything that happened. You sat and watched a fight. Does everyone in a boxing arena put their heads down and clutch their necks like they’re about to land on a fainting couch and have the vapors? No. Stop making this about you.
Then she goes even a step further and says that Brandi shouldn’t have told Adrienne’s secret (possibly a surrogate, but, again, hey, I don’t know) because there are too many people who make these women’s secrets private. “Oh you better shut the hell up right this second, sister,” St. Camille Grammer says as she steps up to Taylor and gets up in her grill. “Are you talking about me? I know you are not talking about me!”
“Oh no,” Taylor says. “It’s just that I know all these ladies’ secrets and so do we all and I think that we just need to keep each others secrets secret.”
“You won’t even own up to it?” Camille says. “Fine, that’s cool. Whatever. I know you’re talking about me. First I will tell you that if you don’t want your secrets out there in the open, then you shouldn’t go on a damn reality television program. Secondly, when I told the cameras that your husband was beating you, it was not a secret because you were going around blabbering about it to anyone that would listen and give you a bony shoulder to cry on. Then you would pretend like it didn’t happen. I told the truth, not to be malicious, but to try to help you because people were saying you were lying about it and if you weren’t lying, then you were being beaten and not doing anything to stop it. So don’t you dare paint me with the same brush as Brandi.” I freaking love Camille so much. Sure, she didn’t really say all that, but she basically took all the snaps in the world, baked them into a pie, and then threw that pie right into Taylor’s big fat-lipped face.
Now we need to talk about Kim and Kyle. It’s become clear that Kim Richards hates her sister. Now, I don’t find Kyle as morally repugnant as some people (not that she’s great, but it’s not like she’s a plastic six pack holder suffocating 27 seagulls at once or anything) but man is Kim right to hate her. Kyle gets all pissed that Kim told Adrienne about Brandi at MMMmmmm’s Real Estate Eleganza Party. I said this last week, but apparently it bears repeating: If you do not want drama at a party, then you do not invite the Real Weavepullers to come to that party. It’s like giving your kids a bag of Cheetos and then getting pissed off that there are orange finger prints all over your white sofa. It’s like letting your daughter listen to Miley Cyrus and then wondering why she grows up to make bad life choices. It’s like giving Charlie Sheen an eight ball and then getting angry that there is a dead hooker in your bathtub. See, I could go on like this for days.
Kim is not having it with Kyle. She just keeps hammering at Kim until Kim finally says, “If someone was saying this about you, wouldn’t you like to know? If they were saying this about me, wouldn’t you tell me?” And Kyle says, “Yeah, but not at my party.” Of course not, Kyle, because all you think about is yourself. Then Kyle says something awful. “I support Kim in her recovery, but I don’t support the choices she makes.” Oh, I have a whole harvest of headshakes for Kyle. She doesn’t support Kim’s choices because they are not Kyle’s choices. She blames Kim’s recovery or addiction whenever Kim does something Kyle doesn’t want her to do. This is a destructive pattern we’ve seen for three years – whenever Kim does something that Kyle doesn’t like, Kyle blames Kim and says she’s a bad, messed up person. This, Kyle, is why Kim can’t forgive you. Kim’s not always wrong. In this instance, she was probably right to tell Adrienne. Adrienne was one of the few people that would deal with her when she was buying pills like they were discontinued Twinkies, so Kim has always been faithful and was looking out for her friend. That’s an admirable quality. Yeah, she might have told her on the phone before the event, but she didn’t. Anyway, it’s over. No reason to blame your sister for the whole thing. Adrienne and Paullo didn’t need to freak out like they did. You can’t blame that on Kim.
And then our poor Kim went to do Pilates. Oh, the shots of Kim strapped into that rig trying to get her drying out body to do those strange contortions. It was, well, it was sort of like watching Madonna do a back flip – at one point it could have been graceful, but now it’s as rickety as a screen door in a hurricane. But we did find out that Kim is going to her son Chad’s 21st birthday party in Vegas. Oh man, call the sponsor and bolt the door, because this is not going to be pretty. At first I thought this was creepy that his mom would go along with him to Vegas on his 21st birthday. What is she going to do, screen the strippers for him at the Juicy Fruit Zebra? Then Kyle (who was not invited because, see the paragraph above) tells us that its their tradition to take all of their kids to Vegas for their 21st birthday. Then I thought…no, it’s still creepy. There are some things you don’t want your mom around for, like bikini waxes, colonics, and trips to Vegas with your friends for your 21st birthday. It just shouldn’t happen.
Oh, hey girl. It’s Yolanda Bananas Foster. Gosh, I haven’t seen her in an age! I was about to put her face on a milk carton and ask Andy Cohen when was the last time he saw her. And what did she do this episode? She exercised. That is it. She and her 60-year-old trainer (who I would like to take to the guest room and force to do squats, lunges, and push ups over me for about an hour) worked out in her house. She ran up the stairs, she laid on the floor in the foyer, she lifted weights in the library. I’m sorry, but you should not be sweating profusely in any environment where there is wall-to-wall carpeting. But it wouldn’t be a visit to Yolanda’s Bower of Sorrow without a bit of pathology. We have to hear about how she saw her model daughter on the runway the other day and now Bananas has to work out even more because her boobs and buns and all her other gelatinous bits aren’t as firm as her daughter’s. I bet Bananas never stops working out. She is just always trotting around with some hand weights in a sweatband trying to burn those extra calories so that she can keep her dickhead husband and outshine her ungrateful model daughter. OK, well, that’s it. Bye for another week, Bananas.
Then Brandi goes to a meeting at Lisa Vanderpump’s new house, Villa Rosa. OK, what is up with this place? Why does it look like a store? And why does it have a name? And why is that name “The Pink House” when Lisa already runs a restaurant called “The White House?” Did she buy a retail space and now just lives in it? And who are those gates protecting her from? Are they to keep out Schaenna, the impossibly named conflagration of vowel sounds that is going to be Vanderpump Rules and we are thereby forced to have to talk about? Are they there for her?
Well Scheannaeiouandsometimesy is scuttled away because Brandi is coming over for a deep talk about Adrienne and Paullo the chimp and their fight. Brandi tells Lisa everything that happens, and then Brandi does this weird thing where she starts making vague accusations. “You guys don’t know how awful they’ve been to me,” she keeps saying. What does that mean? And if we don’t know, why don’t you tell us? You’re not on Real Secret Keepers of Silencio Hollow, you’re a damn Real Housewife. Out with it. Then she says, “Oh, it could get a lot worse. Trust me.” Trust you? How do we know? Do you mean they could call up LeAnn Rimes and do a People cover together bashing you? What are you talking about Brandi?
And then they had a discussion about RadarOnline. Now, I applaud the Real Housewives franchise as a whole for getting into the womens’ real lives (which includes the trappings of fame and dealing with the tabloids) where other shows like Jersey Shore and The Hills (which is about as real as Yolanda’s face) suffered for trying to pretend like the subjects weren’t famous. However, a big groan to RadarOnline which looks like a Hello Kitty binder scribbled full of mean notes about the fat girl that no one will sit next to on the bus. It turns out that there is a story that day on RadarOnline about Brandi after she said mean things about Adrienne and she is convinced Adrienne planted it. It seems way too coincidental. And this is after Adrienne accused Lisa of selling stories to the same website at the reunion last year. Damn, look who has become the thing that she hates. It’s Adrienne. The worst kind of rich person.
This is the mood going into Kyle’s dinner party. Well, first Kyle has two very important meetings. The first is with MMMmmm who is still mad about what went down with Brandi at his party. He blames her rather than Adrienne and Paullo because, well, he is friends with them and doesn’t know her other than the awful things. Also, she says she hopes that this dinner will get everyone togehter and they can get over their problems. Kyle always thinks this and it doesn’t happen. Does she know what show she is on? Does she think she’s on the Real Peacepipes of the Cherokee Nation? No! Next, Kyle met with Faye Resnick who, we learn, has her hate on for Brandi. Oh man. We’re getting there. We really are.
So, Kyle has everyone over her house for a Isn’t My New Dining Room Nice party. Faye redid the room in the classical Roman style which was not classic when she was younger, then it was just Roman and she learned it from Julia Agrippa, the designer of all of Nero’s sex dens. Around the table is Kyle, Faye, St. Camille, Lisa, Taylor, and Brandi, wearing the latest in a string of fur vests (is she starting a fur vest line that we don’t know about?). Then there is Marisa Zanuck, who is some Hollywood big shot and looks like a richer, classier version of Kim G from Real Manzo Munchers of Stinktown. I don’t mean that as an insult, it is merely the truth. She’s also one of those part-time Housewives this season. Bananas can’t come because she was at Donna Summer’s funeral and Kim was in Vegas for Invitation to Relapse: Chad’s 21st Birthday in Vegas. Adrienne didn’t come because she had a severe case of Brandi.
When Kyle brings this up at dinner it is a natural segue way into talking about Brandi and Adrienne’s troubles. Faye Resnick pounces like a soul-sucking demon who needs the last bits of Brandi’s misspent youth so that she can continue living another century. Yes, Faye wants to destroy Brandi and that is the problem with the conversation. Faye is not there to listen, she is not there to reason, she is not there to influence; she is there to put an end, once and for all, to Brandi Glanville.
First of all, this whole dinner is Official Housewives Business. What is Faye even doing there? Yes, she designed the room and she is Kyle’s friend and she’s been around for some epic dinner party fights in the past, but Faye, as far as I know, is not a Housewife with a capital H. She’s not even a housewife with a small h. She’s just there. And now she gets a grievance lunch and a dinner party blowup in the same episode without even being on Bravo’s payroll? I don’t think so. This is like your cousin’s girlfriend showing up at the family reunion and trying to tell you that you make the potato salad all wrong and that you need to do away with the traditional softball game. You don’t care because you don’t really know this bitch and you have no clue how long she’s going to be around, so you barely bother to learn her name. (Sorry to mix my Faye Resnick metaphors, but she is basically every awful person in your family that you are saddled with.)
Faye’s big problem with Brandi is that Brandi says cruel things. This is objectively true. Brandi can be a fierce bitch. But as Brandi herself will tell you, she only does it to defend herself. Brandi is, by nature, a reflexive animal. She won’t attack you with her teeth out, but if you bark at her, she will lunge, she will bite, and she will not let go until her target has bled all over the ground and is a lifeless corpse sagging in her mouth. Faye is still pissed that Brandi called Kim Richards a “meth head.” Now, let us revisit that fateful night in Dana Wilkie’s Game Night of Destruction. Yes, Brandi did call Kim a meth head, but she did it only after Kim and Kyle were repeatedly rude and bitchy to her face. Kim even hid her crutches. And Faye is going to make it seem like Brandi just showed up, shouted, “Kim, you’re a meth head,” and then folded her arms and snatched up her mouth in a smug rictus while everyone else got mad at her? No, that is not how it happened. The Sisters Richards came for her, and Brandi ended it. Also, Kim wasn’t, in fact, a meth head, but she was doing just about everything else and behaving like a total drug addict. Kim herself will tell you that. And, as Brandi said, she and Kim are good now. They have worked it out. Why is the youth-snatching witch Faye Resnick, of all people, upset about it?
The discussion at dinner continues and Brandi starts again with the, “You don’t know what Adrienne did to me. She’s a liar. I don’t like her. She’s been cruel to me and I was cruel back,” spiel. Faye presses her for details. For that, I am grateful, because we all want to know exactly what Brandi is talking about (it seems to have something to do with Adrienne wanting her to help attack Lisa, which she refused to do). They Faye tells us she and Adrienne have been friends since the Eisenhower administration, when Faye was the first female Secretary of Interior, and Adrienne was just a Princess of the Maloofs, the mole people that lived under one of the mountains in Faye’s jurisdiction. They met because Adrienne’s brothers, the Maloof Princes, were dating Faye’s stepdaughters. Does that mean that Adrienne’s brothers are very, very young, so young that they are behind their sister in the line of succession for the Maloof throne, or does that just mean that Faye is married to someone who is even older than her. It is the world’s oldest living Nevadan or something?
The problem is that, while Brandi isn’t giving Faye – or anyone, for that matter – very good proof that Adrienne is evil, Faye wouldn’t believe her anyway. Faye is protecting her friends, which is a good instinct, but I have never seen Brandi not tell the truth about someone. She may be crass, she may say things at the wrong time, she might hit below the belt, but she fights with the truth. That is why she always wins. There is no defense against something that is true. And Faye is not letting anyone stick up for Brandi. When Marisa, who is more of a Real Housewife than Faye, tries to defend Brandi, Faye just puts her hand on her arm and shushes her and tells her not to get involved. That is not a discussion, that is railroading.
Brandi, who has been discussing this whole thing in a calm, even tone (when she could have just gone full Housewife and started screaming and yelling to try to get her point across) just says, “Well, I’m going to leave.” I think this is a good response from Brandi. She did this when attacked by the Sisters Richards too. When she can’t win with the truth, when no one is listening to her and there is no one to defend her, then she leaves. What good can come of staying? It will only escalate. It will only get bad. So she leaves. She approaches the man holding the pomegranite lychee martinis in zebra print martini glasses and asks for her fur vest. He brings it and she closes the front door behind her.
While walking to her car, Brandi thought about why this was always the case. Why did this always happen to her? Why was everyone out to get her? Was it because they were jealous of how pretty she is? Was it because she tells the truth and exposes them for what they are? Is it because she is spiteful and mean and attacks too often? Is it because she can’t hold her tongue. But all her life women have had a problem with her. They have slept with her husband and said things behind her back. They have treated her unfairly before they even knew her and then she hurts them back and then they will never be her friend. It’s a vicious cycle, one she can only end by leaving. One she can only end by running.
She is putting the key in her car door and the soft night is wrapped around her, like a blanket while she lies on the couch, and that is when she hears the noise. It’s like the crackle of electricity and it’s coming closer and closer to her. She turns around and behind her she sees Faye Resnick, the morally corrupt Faye Resnick. Her dress is billowing in the wind and little streaks of lightning are unfurling from her fingers which are stretched up in the air and they are tearing the pavement as she hovers and floats toward Brandi. As she gets closer the light intensified, especially around the eyes, which now look like they’re bleeding sparks. The beast lets out a roar, and as her mouth opens a fireball comes out of it and sails just past Brandi, leaving a scorched circle on the lawn.
Brandi runs, her heels clacking against the pavement, but Faye Resnick lets out another yell and speeds up, her head and chest tilting towards Brandi as her float gains speed and the night is whipped apart by her energy, which is turning blue, which is turning purple, the color of ancient royalty. The color of the ancient necromancers that taught this Faye Resnick her dark arts. The roar because louder as Brandi’s breathing becomes hard and labored. She has to get away. She has to get away. But it is too fast for her. The lightening too intense. As Faye catches up to her, Brandi feels the way her hands press, the way it spreads a terrible glow through her whole body which feels like it’s setting her whole body on fire like it’s eating her up, using her like fuel. She crumples into a little pile on the floor and Faye crowds over her, her body concealing Brandi’s as there is a poof and then a cloud of glistening ash. Brandi is gone, just another stain on the street. Faye picks herself up and smooths her dress. She wipes something invisible off the corner of her mouth and then walks back into the party to rejoin dinner, her face somehow looking better and fresher. She’ll blame it on the candle light. She’ll blame it on her new moisturizer. No one will ever be the wiser. No one will ever know the truth.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: Bravo]
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