Did you see it last night while trolling the Christopher Street Pier for, um, a friend? That dull glimmer out across the water, coming from behind those Jersey bluffs? It was the Housewives, calling to us out of the dark.

Oh goodness it's been so lawng! Almost a yeeuh. So how are the beautiful meatsacks doing? Oh they're just fine. No one's been shot by mobsters or found mysteriously dead out near the Meadowlands or is lurking on the periphery, peering at the other ladies with bug eyes. Oh, wait, that last thing actually did happen last night. That is something that happened with one Housewife.

I suppose that Danielle Staub — née Beverly Merrill, née Connie Clarkson, née Patches O'Grady, née Chanteese, née Dr. Morton Salzberg, née Margot Kidder — is as good a place to start as any. She had a sad little episode, didn't she? Poor dear. She's still dealing with the whole fallout of last season's bookgate, which ended with a table being thrown at her and then lots of shrieking at the reunion. It's still sort of mysterious what she actually did to make these other women so angry. Supposedly she spread rumors and made weirdo threats to people and put shit in people's mailboxes? Which, OK, I guess I could see her doing that. But it all just seems so shadowy and unspoken. Why can't anyone just say "I hate Danielle because of _____." "I'm mad at Chanteese because she _____." No one says anything! They all just make vague allusions to her wickedness and we're just supposed to believe them outright. I don't buy it. I mean, I buy that Danielle is a shifty weirdo, but I don't buy that the other wives are these total victims who are beset by a mysterious stranger. I think they're making a lot of it up to mask the fact that they don't like her because she's not Italian, isn't part of their family, and is another woman. Those three things combined, fuhgeddaboudit. (Ha Ha Ha. "Fuhgeddaboudit" is a thing that Italian gangster people say! Just like the people on the show are!) Yeah mostly everyone hates Danielle because she's an outsider and, as we are all welllll aware, these feisty attack dogs are thick as thieves.

Yeah, anyway, Chanteese is shunned and upset. So she went to the only person who knows how to solve spats between New Jersey housewife reality stars: Desmond Tutu. Yes, Desmond Tutu was on last night's jam to give Chanteese some religious guidance about how to handle the girls. Basically he told her to at least forgive if she can't forget and to not say bitchy things about people and just let the whole thing be in the past. Chanteese nodded solemnly, taking it all in, and then finally said "You know, the others don't even go to church." Archbishop Tutu put his head in his hands and made a quiet vow to never do a favor for Ban Ki-moon again.

So that didn't work. Chanteese then decided to go to a store called "Posche" with her daughters for some retail therapy!!! Oh what a fabulous Posche dealership it was. "You've heard of the Porsche Cayenne? Well this here is the Posche Paprika. It can drive seven Dutch miles on one kiloquart of resin!" Danielle nodded her head. "Verryy nice, verryyy nice." Her daughters looked nonplussed. Danielle then decided to talk to one of the Posche dealers, a plump-lipped Jersey Joan Allen who smiled as Danielle told her the horrible story about the other horrible wives and their horrible ways. "That's hawrible," Jersey Joan said pityingly. "Just hawrible." Danielle was so moved that this woman, this big time Posche dealer!, was being an empathetic ear that she made a cry face and ran her hand, snakelike, up the woman's arm. It was seriously creepy. The woman shivered a little and the room filled with a cold air and the head of the Posche dealership ran in and said "No cold! No cold! Not good for Posche's donkey engine!"

Danielle's final act of sadness — it was a triptych, a trilogy, a mournful Paula Vogel play told in three acts — was to drive around in the middle of the night, daughters stuck in the backseat, and mumble incoherently about the wicked Caroline Manzo and some big stupid party she was having. Danielle, of course, was the only Housewife not invited. Danielle really wanted to see who would show up to the $1,000-a-plate charity dinner (for the local sheriff, because Caroline likes to buy everyone off) so she tore down the dark highway toward Caroline's house, Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" playing ominously on the radio, while the girls clutched each other, their casual annoyance turning to a creeping dread. She almost made it there, almost did the sad thing and drove by to see all the cars and lights and hear the faint music coming in a haunted thrum from the back of the house, but at the last minute she did not. She straightened herself up. She wasn't Crazy Beverly anymore. She wasn't the coke queen of Union County anymore. She's older now, wiser. Her girls sighed with relief and Danielle said to the cameras, "Of course I wasn't going to show up. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction." No, you'd just give them the satisfaction of watching you on a TV show contemplating doing a drive by, terrifying your two daughters. Do these people know they're on TV? That we can see them?

One person who definitely knows she's on TV is Teresa "T.T." Abbondanza's daughter, Sciopero. Little Madon is such a blessed show child, isn't she? She just preens and grins in her Parmesan oily way and T.T. claps and says "Oh my gawwwd, adawrible." Poor T.T. She's just tryin' to muddle through, isn't she? Just tryin' to figure it all out in that big marble convention center they've got her living in. T.T. is pregnant with her fourth child and everyone's quietly hoping it's a boy, because otherwise T.T.'s husband Bulldog might do something unpleasant. Everyone is also worried that if T.T. does have a son, he'll turn out to be a fanook, because all T.T. knows how to do is dip her children in enormous vats of glitter and liquid marble so they'll look shiny and pretty. To her credit (honestly) T.T. said she wouldn't care. "We'd go shopping!" Sigh. Gay men like shopping. It's true. These clamdigger newspaper slacks I've got on were fun to shop for. And this Jordache tunic. Though I didn't so much "shop for" it as much as I "found it at the Goodwill and stole it, because it's come to that." But yes, T.T. I'd imagine that your gay son would enjoy a good shop. Though I can't imagine that Bulldog would be too pleased. No, I can't imagine that at all.

So that's that with T.T. There was a scene last night where she was making tomato sauce in the driveway, because that's just something you do when you live where these folks live, I guess. "Hey, you know who I ran into the otha day?" "No, who?" "Gina Scazzifoni." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah, she was makin' driveway sauce." "Well, it is that time of the year." You know when you go to really fancy Italian restaurants and the chef says "Thissa sauce-a was-a made-a in-a the-a finest-a driveway-a in-a all-a of-a Roma-a." It's just how it works. So that was a nice cultural moment that we got to witness. While sitting in the driveway, an old fellow talked about periods for a while, blood red tomato sauce sluicing through his hands, and we all excused ourselves to go make driveway vomit, and then the scene was over and we moved on.

Remember Caroline? We talked about her before. She's the show's flinty-eyed murderess who eats skulls for breakfast and later poops them out and they are pitbulls. Well she had her big police party and also she took her husband suit shopping because he has lost a lot of weight. That was a cute scene with two older people in love, so good for them. Back at the house, pre-party, they needed help cleaning up all the dog shit in the backyard (so many pitbulls...). So they enlisted their two sons, Albie and Disappointment, and one of their friends. You remember Albie, right? He's the Manzo's golden god, the kind of chiseled apple boy all moms and dads want. The girls want him, the boys want to be him (or want him), and that's that. Except... didn't he seem decidedly less golden this time? Maybe it's just the ladder of years wearing us all down. Maybe it was booze-bloat or HD TV or maybe it was something else, something more unknowable and sad, the peak and pfft of fireworks, the bright-bright and then the fizzle. Albie might be fizzling, his glorious beauty just a dim-ringing memory from a summer ago. That is too bad. Ah well.

Oh and the friend. The friend is a big pile of mook named Bobby Baccala who is dating Caroline's daughter, Caroline 2: The Revenge. Albie doesn't much like this, especially when Bobby and Caroline 2 sneak illicit kisses while both clutching sacks of dogshit. So romantic. Albie remembers when girls used to kiss him like that, when there was that breathy, hot knowledge that she was kissing someone wonderful. Now those days are over. Now girls want to be pals, they want to set him up on dates with friends. Albie spends most nights in the basement, building a time machine. One day he will strap a colander to his head like a helmet and he will enter the machine and he will turn the dial to 2008 and he will cross his fingers and press "engage."

Who else is on this show? Oh, Dina. I like Dina. I think she is funny. At the party that Danielle almost crashed, guess who was there? No, not Gina Scazzifoni. She's still busy with her driveway sauce. Jersey Joan Allen! Yeah, she was there and you know what she did? She bitched about Danielle to the other girls. That underhanded bitch! And this is after the whole creepy snake-stroke that Danielle gave her. (Was she looking for the mark of the Death Eaters? I think so. [I need to grow up.]) So anyway most of the girls were like "Ha, good." T.T. was like "She's a dirty whoo-ah with dirty whoo-ah breath." Caroline stabbed the table with a knife and yelled "I will have satisfaction!" But Dina? Dina, though she doesn't enjoy Chanteese, said "I don't like that talking behind someone's back stuff." About Jersey Joan! Good for you Deenz. You're one of the good ones.

Lastly we turn our doleful gaze to little Jacqueline. Remember her? She has a puppet's wig and a kind face and a teenaged daughter. Oh and she had another baby! Remember last season she was having problems keeping pregnancies, but then at the reunion she was knocked up? Well, she had the baby and it's a little boy named Jacqueline, because when the nurse came to ask the name poor Jacqueline couldn't think of anything so she just said her own name. The boy's full name is Jacqueline Itsaboyballoon Jacqueline. She couldn't even remember her last name. Ah well. So yeah that's great. The daughter situation? Not as great.

Basically the girl graduated from high school (yay) and then promptly moved out the damn house because she couldn't deal with all the rulez. She's a grownup now, one of those modern grownups who don't have checking accounts and have brothers named after things their mom spotted in the room the day they were born. This worried Jacqueline, who knows all too well what too-young independence can do. Oh, yeah, and the daughter is living with her 23-year-old boyfriend, a smirking Blockbuster employee. Seriously, he works at Blockbuster. I was honestly unaware that any Blockbuster stores still existed or that young slacker boys still worked at them. What is this, a '90s teen comedy? Anyway. Jacqueline was respectably upfront about wanting the kids to be safe when they play bedtime games of Restock the Romance Section, and the two dopes were just like "Ughnahuhuh duhduhh ughnnhuhhuh..." while Jacqueline's husband glared at Jamie Kennedy, the boyfriend, and shook his head. Oh the kids. Ohhh the kids. I wonder what would happen if we put Jacqueline's daughter and Albie in a room alone together. Two years ago (bon voyage, Albie!) I think he wouldn't have given her the time of day. Now? Now he just might. Let's find out, please Bravo???

Well, it's getting late and the candle here is flickering and my potato sack shrug is starting to chafe, so I must be off. Goodnight, New Jersey. We're glad you're back. Honestly! Honestly glad. These shows are good for the first two seasons. After this, Jersey will stink like driveway sauce farts. When the ladies start writing books and starting skincare lines and stuff. But for now? For now it's just fine. The strong are still surviving.

What'd you think?

(Oh, and sorry for the brevity and lateness of this. I am looking at apartments and it eats up time like Caroline's pitbulls eat driveway sauce.)