Brandi Glanville is a stripper. OK, not really. She’s a stripper teacher. OK, not really that either. She’s a female empowerment specialist and she empowers ladies by showing them how to be sexy and take their clothes off and drape their bodies around a pole. That is what Brandi does.
But first, Brandi must learn how to do this. She’s studying to get her PhD in American Ecydysiology with Dr. Sheila Kelley. I gotta say, teaching Brandi how to be a stripper is sort of like teaching a midget how to be short. This is just something that she instinctively knows already. Last night we got to audit one of her classes, and Dr. Kelley told us how to make a “yummy circle” and “let everything ripple” and “give your body over to the pole.” When Brandi showed off her skills she oohed and ahhed and moaned. “Congratulations! Merry Christmas. That’s amazing. Oh yeah, that’s so good. Yeah, just like that. Jiminy Cricket and Alfonso Riviera. Oh yeah, that’s good. Oh yeah, that’s amazing. Keep doing it. Just like that. Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Yes, Yes. Oh Yes. Perfect. Slide down that pole. Yes, yes, oh YEEEEESSSSSSSSSS.” That is what Dr. Kelley sounded like. Brandi had graduated. She was now a professional pole dancer and could go off to teach everyone else how to pole dance.
And that is just what happened. She took Kyle, Lisa, St. Camille of Grammer, her best friend Jennifer, and Fetch (also know as Marisa Zanuck, who is never going to happen) to Las Vegas so they could all be empowered as women by learning how to dance on a pole. They had a boring dinner that was boring and looked just like the dinner that they had in Ojai where Brandi and Adrienne Queen of the Maloofs (a race of mole people that live under the mountain) got in a fight and Brandi and Kim Richards made up. It was boring. Then she took them to a class where she had to get up and empower all the women and she was like, “Hey, um, guys. I’m not very good at this but I just wanted to tell you that no matter what you’re going through, um…” And Lisa interjected, “In life. Like divorce or…” “Yes, like if you’re going through a divorce just know that you’re…” “Beautiful, you’re beautiful.” “Yes, and that you can be amazing and you don’t need people to, ummm…” “Tell you you’re beautiful.” “Yes. You can just. Like strip! Let’s um…” “Oh, hell no. I’m not stripping.”
The funniest thing is that Brandi was trying to be empowered and empower all these other women, and Lisa and all her friends just yelled over her and took away all her power. Good job. Brandi’s Ladies Empowerment Strip-A-Thon. That’s sort of all that happened last night. I don’t know, this episode didn’t really hit it for me. There aren’t many other things I have to say about it.
Oh, we have to talk about Kyle Richards having a “sixth grade graduation” for her daughter Sophia and then having a big party where she just invited her friends and a bunch of old people and had catering. This is not a thing. This is not a real thing that people do. Do they? You know what I got for graduating sixth grade? Nothing! That’s right. You do not graduate from sixth grade. You just, you know, go on to seventh grade. I certainly didn’t graduate from sixth grade! I dropped out in fifth. Ha. Just kidding. No, I just got my report card, I came home from school and I gave it to my mother and she said, “Good job. But next year, I want to see better grades in conduct” and then I went to the living room and watched Jem and the Holograms. That is what happened. There was no ceremony. There was no party. There was nothing.
And of course Faye Resnick, the morally corrupt, was at the party, because that is the kind of influence you want around your young daugther. Yes, expose her to Faye Resnick. That’s about as safe as letting her do synchronized swimming in toxic waste. Then Kyle made a big speech and cried because none of her family was there. Instead she had Adrienne Queen Maloof continuing to bitch that someone dared to speak the truth in public, and Faye Resnick. Maybe there’s a reason why the family isn’t stopping by. (And as for Adrienne, it sort of pisses me off a bit that a continued and prolonged plot point on this season is something that Bravo won’t even tell us what it is. We’re just supposed to accept that Adrienne is angry and that her anger is somehow deserved and move on without questioning it. I’m sorry, you either have to show it all or show none of it.
We interrupt this recap for our newest episode of everyone’s favorite television program At Home with Yolanda Bananas Foster. Yes, ladies and gentleman, it is now time to check in on our favorite agoraphobic Housewife, Yolanda Bananas Foster. Yes, she can’t really leave her house ever so she just invites everyone, including the cameras, over and films all her scenes from there. It’s just best for everyone, I guess. Last night on At Home with Yolanda Bananas Foster Kyle and Lisa came over for a meet and greet with QVC mogul and Master of Thighs Suzanne Somers. Yes, Yolanda and Suzanne are great, great friends as most older blonde ladies with big bank accounts usually are. Yolanda and Suzanne are both obsessed with the same things: juice cleanses, vitamins, staying healthy, living to 100, and having lots of sex with their husbands because they are afraid that some floozy is going to come along and have sex with their husbands so that he’ll buy them a Chanel bag and then he will leave them and they will have nothing, nothing, nothing.
What is Yolanda’s deal with this? Later on in the episode, after a boring lunch with Suzanne where all they talked about was vitamins (yawn), we saw Yolanda using the many lemons from her enchanted orchard to make a lemon chicken dish for her husband, David Fosters Wallace. Yes, she cooks him up some chicken and chocolate souflee and, boy oh boy, does it look very good. See, this is what she is doing to keep her husband. She has to feed him and sex and him and do everything to cater to him, or he is going to leave her for that lady with the bag. Yolanda Bananas Foster is petrified that her man is going to leave her. It’s insane. It’s as insane as having a magical lemon orchard in your back yard. Wait, that’s it. That’s how she gets him to stay. It’s not the sex or the food, it’s the spell she has placed on the fruit. That’s why he has to eat every meal there, it was like those nasty shakes Rosemary had to drink so that the devil would get into her baby. It’s the same with David Fosters Wallace. When he eats the lemons, he can never leave. He’s enchanted. Oh, that Yolanda. We always knew she was a witch.
We interrupt this recap of At Home with Yolanda Bananas Foster for an episode of our newest program At Home with Kim Richards. Hoping to slice off a little bit of the glory from her friend Yolanda Bananas Foster, Kim Richards has decided that she doesn’t want to leave her nose anymore. Haha. I’m sorry. What did I say? She doesn’t want to leave her nose? Ha. I meant her house. She doesn’t want to leave her house. Because, well, she does want to leave her nose. The only time she wants to leave her house is to go to the plastic surgeon. To hear Kim tell it, she went with a friend on a consultation and, you know, since she was there she figued she should just pick up some surgical procedures. You know how it is. But the doctor, well, he wouldn’t operate on her face or her eyes because, don’t you know, Kim Richards doesn’t need it. Her face is perfect. Oh, well, except her nose. That is the only part of her face that he would operate on. That is Kim Richard’s only flaw. It is her nose.
So, she finds the best nose guy and meets with him and, even then, he says he doesn’t need to do much and we should listen because he knows noses. How do we knows? Because Kim Richards tells us. “I know he knows noses. I knows he knows noses. Hahaha. Get it? He knows I know he knows which noses he knows. I supposes he knowses his toeses are noses. Haha. Get it.”
Oh Kim. Then she goes back home to hang up pictures with Jeeves, her Mexican Manservant. That is what Kim does. She is finally going to decorate her sad ranch in the Valley, also known as the Sad Valley Ranch, with photographs of her children. “Oh look, there’s Kimberly. Oh and Chad. There’s my Brooke-y and Whitney. What are they doing there? They’re such hams,” she says to no one in particular. Then she looks at Jeeves and says, “They’re all hams, my kids. They’re all hams just like me. Let’s put all of these up.”
She holds each picture in its frame, dozens of them scattered on the floor, and then Jeeves puts a nail in the wall and they hang them. She doesn’t know how she’ll get them all up there, but she wants them all. She wants the wall covered. There is no plan or scheme, she hasn’t laid out which ones should go next to which. She’s not even sure what’s in the pile, but she wants to be surrounded by her kids. She wants all the images in a great mass so that they can project down on her and protect her. They will be a talisman from the outside world.
Suddenly one of the pictures strikes her. There she is as a young mother, with the spring sunlight in her hair and shadows falling across her face so you can barely see her freckles. It looks like a movie still, in black and white, with her children’s heads perched just under hers. There were only two then. Oh, how it is so different now. And that’s when she sees it. Her nose. That is what sticks out to her. How it was always wrong, how it was always off. She needs to fix it. She needs to get her face back to how it was in that picture, with her children about her and so much in front of her. All the roads were open then, but now, well, it all seems like it’s over. It seems like the final chapter now and she’s withered and a mess. Maybe the nose will fix it, she thinks and she runs a finger along its lumpy slope. She can’t think about it now. She needs her kids about her, like in that picture. She bends down to snatch another frame and suddenly she feels woozy and twists herself so she lands ass-first on the carpet. “Sorry, Jeeves, but Missus is a little tired. She just needs a minute,” she says as she leans back against the wall, a welling getting tight in her chest, the air pulsing through her mouth and coming out her nose.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: Bravo]
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