S4:E10 “I’m not going to cry over Ramona Singer! She’s a piece of shit and I don’t have to talk about her anymore!” – Jill
Last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of New York took us back to Morocco for the third week in a row, and it really just got me considering what it must be like for the staff at the house who’ve been caring for these women for so long. It must be nuts! They must have to re-braid the rugs every day and re-paint the gold on the glasses that they sip tea from so instead of complaining about how the glasses look old and dingy the women just complain about how the tea needs Splenda. There’s just no pleasing these girls, and I bet that as soon as the local bugs have nourished themselves from whatever is inside these soulless creatures, the bugs do what that one lonely traveler who stayed with Don Draper’s family on Mad Men did and carve signs into the women’s skin with their long little noses that let other bugs know they’re better off trying to ingest the puss from a popped pimple before it slides all the way down a mirror and onto the ground.
Anyway, this episode picked up right where it left off last week, which was after Jill went into Ramona’s room and tried to straighten out all the issues between them. After the confrontation ended, Jill went and told LuAnn and Kelly that no matter how much she accepted criticism from Ramona, Ramona was unwilling to accept criticism and apologize for her own behavior. Ramona went off to the other side of the house and tried to tell Alex and Sonja what had happened and as she was complaining about things that didn’t take place, LuAnn walked in and started chastising Ramona for causing trouble. Ramona just demanded more of her Pino Grigio and after Alex got Empire State Building LuAnn to leave the room, Ramona admitted that she should have just kept her mouth shut and never said anything to Jill. Kelly and LuAnn re-entered the room later and said everything was going to be fine, and that they were all going to go out that night and have a great time. Once they got to the restaurant where they were going to have dinner and sat down at what Sonja called a “movie star table” (because of the way you can see everyone but no one can approach you), men started looking at them and Sonja was quick to signal to them that they men were 5s and that the women were 7s and that some of them were married sometimes so the guys should just turn around. Then they started dancing with the belly dancers, and then the men were finally convinced to obey the Sonja’s orders.
“I’m sick over this. I really am.” – Ramona
The next day, all the women except for Ramona went to look at a palace that was supposedly four times the size of the White House. Ramona stayed home to sulk in her wraps and her yellow v-necked unicorn shirt and reminisce about the previous day’s fight with Jill. Alex returned from the excursion early and went back to the house to check on Ramona and tried to console her, but it was so insincere that it was like what happens when one guy tries to comfort his upset coworker: the guy recognizes the disagreement that happened between his friend and his boss was bad and he can sympathize with his friend’s pain, but it’s really obvious that he’s just happy someone else made the mistake of amputating the boss’s arm instead of him. After that, LuAnn, Kelly and Cindy were downstairs getting Henna tattoos and Alex came storming down the stairs with more tension in her face than a Chicago sorority racing out of her sorority and over to the Target by campus so she can get the last bag of Fritos. Alex told LuAnn she wanted to speak with her privately, but LuAnn invited Alex to sit down and talk to her at that moment because there was nothing Alex couldn’t say to LuAnn in front of the other women. Alex never sat down and instead tried to tell LuAnn not to pick on Ramona because she was feeling very vulnerable, and Kelly just sat there calling out Alex for being nuts and crazy and weird and inauthentic and not normal. But the weird part was considering how upset Alex seemed to be, how Alex profusely thanked Kelly for telling her she was being weird and profusely thanked Ramona for offering her a chair to sit in. Eventually Alex got to the point and said LuAnn had been attacking Ramona this whole trip, and LuAnn said she’d been nothing more than a gracious host, which is actually true. Then LuAnn excused herself and took a walk on the patio and told Alex to crawl back into the cabinet that she cam out of and called her a witch. Alex blinked in shock like a lizard who didn’t match the bark he was sitting on.
“Close your eyes. I’ll make you a deal. Close your eyes.” – Kelly
AND THEN MY FAVORITE THING HAPPENED. See, it’s clear that Alex doesn’t know how to express herself with words anymore so her anger manifests itself through her body, which is why when she’s mad she storms around like a woman who can’t have sex with her boyfriend because there’s no Cool Whip in the house. After LuAnn forbade Alex to keep talking to her, Kelly tried to get Alex to calm down and help her see that it’s not her job to reunite Alex and Ramona. Alex started to cry and shake and get hives and ran after Kelly to finish telling her about why she told LuAnn to lay off Ramona after Ramona’s fight with Jill. She met up with Kelly in the garden doing all these things that were not talking and Kelly told her to close her eyes. Alex didn’t want to because who closes their eyes when their upset and trying to tell someone why their upset? I don’t know, but it was great and if my new landlord gets upset at me for screwing up the wall when I try to install my own toilet paper roll in my new apartment, I’m going to tell him to close his eyes. So Kelly and Alex are in the garden and Kelly is really trying to convince Alex to close her eyes and calm down, and Alex doesn’t want to so she says, “no Kelly, I’m not closing my eyes.” Kelly was very insistent though, and so Alex made the compromise to keep talking about her feelings while her eyes were closed. In the garden. About a fight she wasn’t involved in. In a wrap that was probably made from an alpaca, in what I imagine is some really thick heat. MY FAVORITE.
“Her behavior was appalling.” – LuAnn
LuAnn, Jill, Cindy and Kelly sat down to eat dinner that night and as they were waiting for Alex, Ramona and Sonja to show up, they learned that the three of them told the kitchen to deliver the food up to their rooms because they didn’t want to eat with the other women. LuAnn was very upset by this because she said the respectful thing to have done would be to tell her that they wouldn’t be joining them for dinner, and then everyone got to talking about Alex and Ramona and their interactions with LuAnn and Kelly and everyone said everything was fucked up, and they were all surprised because they were in Morocco where things aren’t supposed to be fucked up. Then all of a sudden Alex showed up and claimed she didn’t know there was a dinner, and LuAnn scolded her for not using her education and telling her that she wasn’t planning on coming. Alex did some more apologizing and then Kelly escorted her out because she was late and therefore that meant she didn’t get to eat. And in the minute after Alex left, Ramona and Sonja waltzed into the dining room and asked rather casually what was for dinner. LuAnn was completely shocked and told Ramona and Sonja that dinner was over for them because they already had dinner in their rooms. Ramona claimed they hadn’t eaten anything but the snack they arranged for themselves personally, and LuAnn just got up and left because she was done having other people ruin her plans. Ramona sat down at the table and claimed her heart was racing because LuAnn was being so mean to her and she’d had a stressful day (all these women are claiming they have stressful lives while they’re IN MOROCCO, IN A HOUSE WITH SO MUCH STAFF THEY DON’T HAVE TO CLEAN THE DIRT OUT FROM THEIR EYELASHES!) and she just wanted to eat something. Eventually, Ramona pulled LuAnn aside and apologized for “forgetting about” dinner (which you’ll notice is different than not know what time it was going to be served at), and LuAnn accepted the apology and said that she really just wanted Ramona to know that if they psychic WAS right about Ramona’s husband having another woman in his life, that she would be there for her. Ramona promised LuAnn there wasn’t anything wrong with their marriage, and LuAnn definitely didn’t believe it.
“Mario, go in closer to Sophia. A twitpic for Ramona!” – Simon
As the women were getting ready for their last night in Morocco, cameras cut to their husbands in a pool hall and hanging out with a professional pool player named Sophia. One of the guys asked Mario, Ramona’s husband, when his wife was coming back and he said “hopefully never.” Then he leaned in to Sophia and Simon (Alex’s husband) took a picture of the two of them together and emailed it to Ramona. So the psychic was right! Then we cut back to the women in Morocco, who were all dressed in their custom gowns and sitting around the dinner table talking about what their favorite moments were from the trip. They all kept interrupting each other in providing their answers, and they just talked and talked and talked and eventually everyone else in the restaurant died because no oxygen was left for anyone else in the room. That’s actually not what happened. It could have been edited out, though.
