Last night on the Housewives, daughters were in peril. Friends were in peril. It's a dangerous time to be a Housewife in Southern California — what was once easy and meaningless is now fraught with... slightly less ease.

There's really only one thing you can do in such tough times: Play tennis. Since the French invented the game six thousand years ago, tennis has been the stress reliever for lots of uptight white people and other white people who want to appear uptight. Tennis also plays a big role in the Housewives fran-sheeze (that's how the French say 'franchise'), because, to these classless nouveaus, tennis = old comfortable wealth. And that's exactly what they want to project. They never want to be seen while grasping and desperate, using their heaving boobs as leverage to hoist themselves atop the money pile. None of them particularly care about tennis, not really. None of them really even know what tennis *is*. To them it's just an activity where you wear a jaunty little skirt and act like a girly-girl because tee heeeeee. What they don't know is that the real WASPy tennis-playing ladies they're trying so pathetically to emulate? Those bitches are intense about they tennis. They really care and a lot of them are good.

So Tamra and Tits McCallister putting on their big bug sunglasses and thwacking away at balls and giggling isn't really cutting the moose-tard (French for 'mustard'). But they tried anyway, looking like two Betty Coopers done up like Veronica Lodge, with Moose Mason smarts and Big Ethel grace and just a hint of that Midge Klump menace.

If Tits and Tams are Betty/Veronicas, then that would make Vicki Mr. Weatherbee. Like old Waldo, Vicki is bald save for a few little tufts of alfalfa sprout hair, she often wears red three-piece suits, and she's having a secret affair with someone named Miss Grundy. Vicki is also constantly consternated and foiled by a bumbling, empty-headed wimp who is motivated by strange hormonal urges and a general fondness for jalopies. As it turns out, Vicki is actually Archie to her own Mr. Weatherbee. (And, oddly enough, she is also the jalopy.) See, at one point the office-bound Mr. Weatherbee version of Vicki seems professional and respectable. She goes to work at an office while the other wives stay home and slowly chew on their tennis racquets. She has a devoted staff of young people and she makes sweet, sweet dough-lars hand over fist. But then the Archie Vicki comes clumsily stomping in and wipes that all away. How, exactly? By rewarding her loyal insurancelings with a fucking Botox party.

A Botox and tanning party, in the office. I don't know why exactly, but to me having a work function in which your employees, who are young and don't need it, are gleefully put into chairs and have horse disease pumped into their face by long sharp needles seems like something of a professional abomination. Likewise the naked spray tan booth set up casually in the break room, but at least that isn't shooting donkey cholera into your face. It was truly creepy how willing everyone was to just go ahead with the Botoxing, even a guy who couldn't have been older than 32. He just sat there with a big stupid smile while Dr. Mengele injected his face full of mule cancer. Then everyone clapped and laughed and sang songs while they fed Vicki feet-first into the giant whirring Innards Enabler, which replaces your internal organs and guts and stuff with those of a six-month-old Mexican burro. Vicki laughed and said "Whoo hooo!" as blood sprayed everywhere and her small intestine was sucked up into a pneumatic tube, soon followed by everything else.

Over at Gretchen's gingerbread house, there was a picture of suburban domestic bliss being painted. You know what that cute old girl was doin'? She was having a tupperware party! Yes, one of those fun classic tupperware parties where all the ladies of the canyon come over and and you talk, hour upon hour, about tupperware. What's the best way to use tupperware? Should you put things in it, or should you put it in things? Can you eat too much tupperware? If you sleep in tupperware will you stay fresher? (If anyone can find me that episode of Eerie, Indiana I will be briefly grateful.) It's just a really great time talking about and sitting in tupperware. Gretchen got dressed up all cute and, ding-dong, the ladies arrived, carrying heaping plates of meatloaf and meat roasts and pearl onions and fillet of Chinaman and other 1950s foods.

Like every good tupperware party from that era, everyone was doing shots of tequila and there was a drag queen named Quesadilla. (I know it was a cutsier spelling, Kay Sadeeya or something, but 'evs.) That's just how tupperware parties go. Another classic feature of tupperware parties is that you bring your horrible lump of a husband who will stand in a corner chewing a toothpick and scowling at drag queens, because his convenient god hates men who do anything but stand in corners angrily chewing toothpicks while their cantaloupe wives burble their lips and walk into walls, tupperware perched on their heads like hats. Yes, Boobs Bingo's husband Ed Hardy was there, and he just had such a puss on the whole time. Well, not the whole time.

See, after the drag queen had done her little routine and then puttered off into the night sky with her enchanted bumbershoot (a word I learned, no lie, from Archie Comics), eyybody was getting tipsy and some chop-haired lass apparently was putting the moves on Ed Hardy. Right, because if you're a young pretty woman at a small tupperware party, the kind of guy you're hoping to meet is the festering, scowling boil chewing a toothpick in the corner. That's just how sex and pheromones work. So whatever was actually going on, Juggs didn't like what she was seeing, and she decided to go yell at people. She didn't yell at her husband for entertaining a young lady flirting up on him, because it's illegal for wives to say anything negative to their husbands, at least that's what he told her, he even showed it to her in the Big Book of Laws that he dug up in the backyard. No, no. She yelled at the girl. "How dare you flirt with a married man, he's mine, he's mine, look at how beautiful he is over there, farting and wheezing and slopping nacho cheese into his mouth with his hand."

The girl was shocked! And scared. And mad! And sad. And totally wasn't flirting! Or maybe she was. Nobody knows! Who cares. What we do care about is that Cans Carnaby just wouldn't drop it and kept yelling and talking about how she was classy or something. "I don't talk like that," she said when the girl accused her of affecting an 'urban' accent and snapping in her face. No, she doesn't talk like that, because she doesn't care for black people. Space-husband-god told her not to! The whole kerfuffle escalated to the point where Doug Smiley and Ed Hardy had to intervene, to tell the hysterical women to stop their petticoat flapping and sit down before the vapors made them faint. Doug Smiley took Flirtsy over to the kitchen or something and Ed, who was loving this, dragged Bags Bilbo onto the porch where he sternly lectured her. "This is a tequila party. You know how those go." Really, Ed? I thought this was a tupperware party. I guess I was wrong. It is a tequila party disguised as a tupperware party. Much like Gretchen is a tequila party disguised as a life.

Inside, some girl was like "That lady's husband isn't even attractive!" and I hollered and slapped my knee and the cat looked up at me strangely, as if to say, "Wine party."

The girls settled down and after the gentlemen had tipped their tall-hats to one another and ridden off in their carriages, all was fine. Brom Bones stared longingly at Ichabod, who was over there giggling with the Van Tassel girl, some foolish young thing who could never satisfy him, not the way Brom could. Much like the horseman that stalked the dark roads of Sleepy Hollow in the howling night, all Brom wanted was head. [long, slow awful slide whistle, followed dishes breaking]

After the tupperware party, it was time for Lynn to solve her life. See things have been a bit weird ever since she got her face replaced. Cats run screeching from her, the mailman has taken to calling her Diane, and the littlest Lynn-clone (never let her go, Lynn) is having troubles. Discipline troubles. See, no one has ever told Alexa to do anything ever. She's basically been raised feral, she is the girl in the window, and now that she's old enough to reproduce and her drinking hormones have kicked in, she's gone extremely wild. Oh she is so wild! I am being serious! Her mother tells her that she isn't going out that night because she broke curfew the night before. And what does Alexa do? She just gets up and leaves before her mom gets home. Just walks out the damn house and gets in some strange kid's car and zooms off to god knows where. If I had done that in my teenage years, and heaven forbid if my sister had done it, my mother would have ended the world. Just like that. Fingers snapped, no more planet Earth. We'd have ruined it for everybody.

But Lynn just popped some more face pills and had a long conversation with the ficus and sat up late with her weary but also too lenient husband. When Alexa came home — not visibly drunk or stoned, which makes me worry she's going to those blowjob parties or whatever the kids are doing these days — Lynn and husband were just like "Aww jeez, Alexa. Aw nuts you're late and we're... [yawn] we're so mad... at ya... Oh well." So Alexa just stood there, a bit dumbstruck, and then flumpfed off to her room. Lynn turned sadly to her husband, who yelled "Gah!" in horror and Lynn said "What? What?? What is it? Oh... Oh, for Pete's sake. Is it crooked again? It's crooked again isn't it? I tell ya, never buy these things discount." And then she slid her new face, which had been slumped and tilting about 30° to the left, back into the right position and it was time for bed.

Later on Alexa said that she wants her folks to discipline her, but they never do, so she just keeps wandering out of the house at all hours to go to her tupperware orgies or whatever the kids are up to nowadays. It's a vicious circle or cycle or something, and it's slowly turning Alexa into a disaffected little brat. In one scene last night she galoompfed onto the beach with her sister Regina (or whatever), who was dressed like what Hugh Hefner would dress like if he was a Thai sex worker — same captain's hat, but complemented by bulbous bikini and big novelty aviator sunglasses, and she just moaned to Regina about why couldn't they move to LA and Regina is 18 so she can legally adopt her and flerbbitty blerbitty she wants to partayyyyyy. Regina, who went through her own terrible twos, was all "I'm so over partying, I'm older now." And Alexa frowned and said "Oh, crumpets" and the March Hare walked out to cheer her up but she flicked him away with her finger and her eyebrows wrinkled and wormed and Regina sighed. Oh, youth.

Because Lynn had made one lazy attempt to lay her foot down, she was exhausted from parenting. And that is totally reasonable. What Lynn did is very hard to do. I mean she stayed up until midnight! Yes, the midnight. Phew. So she was just wiped the fuck out and needed to call in reinforcements so, ding-dong, over came that Teen Coach from the other episode about Teen Feelings. Alexa really respects this strange woman that she's only met once, Lynn figured, so she had the lady over and, I'm not joking about this, put her on the phone with Alexa so she could tell her to come home. Lynn just metaphorically handed over the mantle of parenting to a relative stranger because she was just so zapped from being a half-diligent parent once. Alexa was justifiably like "Um... OK... I'll... uh, come home..." and a little while later she did. The Teen Coach talked to her about Teen Feelings and Alexa nodded her head, pretending to listen, while she was really just thinking about what she and Randy and Steve and Brixton had done in the backseat of Lindsay Duggan's dad's Navigator (or whatever the youngs are getting into lately).

I don't really think that anything was resolved, but hopefully age will take care of it, as no one else really seems willing to. Maybe Alexa and Regina will go to LA, maybe they won't. Whatever does happen, I'm sure she'll figure it out. Well, actually. No, I'm really not. I'm just not.

The last thing that happened in this episode ("happened in this episode" typically means "that I remember") is that Gretchen and Bazoombas Billingsworth went to the ponies. Or the horses or something. No, no. They weren't grinding them into a powder and then cooking that powder in a spoon and then injecting the liquid into their faces so they can look a few months younger for a few weeks. They were actually watching the horses run around an oval. The races! Off to the races. The main purpose of the scene was so Sacks Satchmo could talk to Gretchen about Tamra and there could be this whole like "Which one will Pillows pick??" question. Earlier, after the tennis, Tamra and Gazungas had sat on a bench ("I feel so New York, like we're in Central Park" Tamra said, kind of adorably, about sitting on a bench) and bitched about Gretchen. And because of her deeply-held Christian beliefs, Pouches Pinkerton is an equal opportunity bitcher. So she owed Gretchen the ear time.

Nothing new was said. Mostly there was just talk about the mean "blog" on Gretchen's website, because it is 2010 and some people still don't know what the word "blog" really means. I'm so sick of hearing about that blog. I've never even bothered to try to find it to read it. Because I know what it says. It just says "Winky winky, Tamra's stinky." And then there's a picture of a poop, smell lines and all, that Gretchen drew herself. Honkers Holbrook just nodded her head, bored to biscuits, and stared out at the sunny day. There was a group of colts and ponies, spindly little things, out in a corral away from the track. Such youth! She pointed them out to Gretchen and Gretchen looked at them and smiled and felt sad. She pulled her big floppy straw hat further down on her head and took a deep breath. It felt like the wind, and she liked that.

Watching the young horses stomp and teeter around, she thought about her botched attempt to save Alexa. Poor, unguarded Alexa. Gretchen thought about her own turbulent teenage years — doing it with Mr. Lipinski in the AV club closet, trying meth or coke or something white and powdery and zingy for the first time in Jason Rudner's Tacoma, what happened that night in Lorna Beemer's basement — and it made her shiver. "You cold?," Hooters Hardgrove asked, not really caring. Gretchen shook her head. "No, no. I'm fine. Just caught a chill for a sec."

She looked back up at the ponies, saw their worried legs, imagined their deep marble eyes. It's such a long time to be scared, she thought. So long to not know.

Then, there in the distance, she saw Vicki, dressed in safari gear, carrying a big butterfly net. She was out catching horses, so she could take them back to her laboratory and, later, put them in her secretary's face. The circle of life lurched on, and Gretchen felt small and big all at once. Like a teenager. Gangly and strange. Full of worry and wonder.

Suddenly a gun went off and a new race began, the animals heaving and sinewy, tearing around the track. Around and around and around they'll go, Gretchen thought. Until the cheers and applause have faded and everything's over.