Real Housewives of New York Finale: Middle-Aged Wasteland
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We have reached the end of another season of Blonde Leading the Blonde and, as usual, it went out with some song and celebration, fighting and forgiveness, and the miracle of a modern day virgin birth.
But before we can even get to Ramona's delusion of having a bun in her broken down oven, we need to talk about Crackerjacks very important meeting with musical guru Hitz St. Cloud. We hear Crackerjacks newest single "Chicks Say Levy" playing as traffic rolled through New York City, as if every cab in the city was playing the song on the radio. Ha! No one listens to the radio anymore, so unless people were watching those awful taxi TVs showing Crackerjacks performing on Andy Cohen's Half-Hour Make Me Famous Hour, then they weren't hearing the song in a car at all. Of course, the song was only being played in Hitz HitzMaking Studios, where Crackerjacks was putting the final touches on the song. When they were done, Hitz said, "Oh, I have a friend of mine I'd like you to meet," and Crackerjacks thought he was going to roll in the drummer form Golden Earring again, but this time it was Natalie Cole.
Natalie Cole, you know, is the musical ghost whisperer who sung with her dead father, the King of Gnats. Natalie and Hitz knew each other from back in the day when Natalie's arms were full of Grammys and Hitz nostrils were full of coke. They were on top of the world back then, rubbing shoulders (and their gums) at parties at Quincy Jones' house, and summering on David Geffen's yacht. Now they just get together in a seedy bar behind the Port Authority and talk about the good old days. Well, that's just for Hitz benefit. Natalie is making a mint off her line of skin-care products for aging African-American women, and from the looks of it "It Don't Crack Creme" is doing a fine job of preserving Ms. Natalie (if you're nasty!). Crackerjacks tells Natalie that she is having an anniversary party for dating her boyfriend for one year, and after the question marks and exclamation marks fade from Natalie's eyes, she says that she'll come to the party. And she'll even sing. Oh, but not so fast. She'll only sing if Crackerjacks will duet with her. CJ is so excited that she runs out in the hall to plan what they're going to do. Once she's gone, Natalie looks at Hitz and says, "The negatives, please!" He hands her a manila envelope and says, "Guess this is the last favor I can ever ask, sweetheart." Natalie just smiles and walks off into the sticky New York afternoon.
Ramona is having Alex and Simon and Sonja and Brian (unfortunately not this Brian) over for a dinner party. Suddenly they start talking about Ramona wanting another child, mostly to please Avery, who has always wanted a sibling. Avery saunters into the living room and says, "Yeah, you should totally have a baby, that would be awesome." That's such a mean thing to do, Avery, make your parents have a baby right before you head off to college so that you never have to see it or deal with it. That's like giving your boyfriend a dog and then dumping him. From Avery we learn that Ramona still has her period. Well, looks like that Avery is just like her mother, blurting these things out to a room full of people without thinking it might make anyone, especially her mother, uncomfortable. Ramona was so embarrassed, she didn't turn red, she turned zebra print, which is what happens to Housewives when they get really really flummoxed.
Alex, sadly, has to leave the dinner party early, because she has a big photo shoot the next day for a magazine called Edge or Curb or Rayzr or something else that is short with sharp surfaces. It's a super trendy magazine. Well, it hasn't really earned the "maga" part yet. It's part of the semi-ironic "zine" revival that is happening on college campuses all over American right now, where the kids appropriate arcane technology, like cameras and Xerox machines, and make little booklets out of them. This zine is run by a bunch of gay FIT students and specializes in Housewives and reviews of sex parties in Brooklyn.
Simon shows up at the shoot, and man, is his Grindr buzzing off the charts. Suddenly there are like 20 hot homosexuals all within 20 feet of him and he's just chatting away in a chair, totally ignoring Alex. After awhile, he sets up a meeting at 6pm, but Alex and the rest of the FIT queens are having such a great time dressing up as Veronica Lake that they don't realize what time it is. It's getting closer and closer to Simon's meeting time and he doesn't know how to get them out of there so he can go meet the man of his dreams. He gets rampantly impatient, trying to be both supportive of his wife and keep his promise to a boy named Weston somewhere in Greenpoint. It's very very hard for Simon, and eventually he has to cancel—once again doing the right thing and sticking by his lady.
Speaking of ladies, it is now time to discuss my third favorite topic (you'll have to guess what the first two are): Sonja T. Morgan. The T stands for Tremendous, people, because Sonja is amazing. She sets up a meeting with Zombie Cindy, because Cindy was a rude bitch at Sonja's PJ Slumber Party Breakfast Party last week and she wants to bitch at Cindy for a bit and then get her to apologize. Naturally this meeting is not held in someone's home or a cafe or bar or restaurant, it's done in a flower market. Sonja is like the fucking Real Housewives Godfather, and she has meetings in her shell businesses because if things go horribly awry, no one will get shot. Sonja knows how to, as the kids say, keep it gangsta.
Sonja sits Cindy down and tells her all the ways that Cindy offended Sonja, just lists them out in a long litany. Cindy, being of the Zombie culture where all confrontations are decided by either being hit in the head with a shovel or eating someone's brains, doesn't understand her role here. Her role is to say, "You're right, Sonja. I'm sorry." That is all you are allowed to say. If you say anything else, there is going to be a fight. Sonja has decided that you were rude (and really, you were) so you can either apologize or not. Those are your two options.
But no, Cindy wants to argue and explain all the ways she wasn't rude to Sonja. She starts by saying, "I thought you could learn something about business by listening to my conference call." Oh, please, Cindy. That is like thinking your kid is going to get her MBA from Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. It's also a mean rationalization for behavior that is completely inexcusable. Ugh, Cindy is the worst.
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So then, they get into a fight about who treats the staff better. Watch. And really, are we going to fight about who treats the staff better, because I think that Michael, the butler Sonja buttles every damn morning, thinks he is treated pretty damn fine. Better than your "25 year old from Long Island," who probably weeps everyday on her return commute to Massapequa Park because of how you treated her, Cindy. Cindy gets so fed up, she just storms off and is like, "I hate you so much, I don't even want to eat your brains anymore." Goodbye.
They're going to meet again shortly at Crackerjacks' one-year-of-dating-Balki-Bartokomous anniversary party. She decides to throw it on a boat circling the Statue of Liberty, because it reminds Balki of when he first came to this country. All the girls are there, of course, to celebrate the big night. Ramona is there too, with her hysterical fetus in her withered uterus.
OK, so Ramona thinks she's pregnant because her period is late. I can't say it any better than Jill Zarin, so I'm just going to quote her, "When you're this age and you're late, it's not because you're pregnant, it's because menopause is knocking at your door. Cluck, Cluck, Cluck." Way to tell it, Jill. Between that and her amused skepticism about Crackerjack's anniversary party, Jill was really the voice of the people last night. It was like a glimmer of the old Jill that we knew and loved shining through. Maybe she finally has changed, and wiped that nasty seaweed film of fame off her body.
Alright, so Ramona thinks she's pregnant and tells Mario (see above). He's like "What the fuck! You can't have another baby. I can hardly deal with parenting you!" So, he dispatched her and Sonja... OH WAIT! Sonja and Ramona show up at the party wearing nearly identical leopard print dresses, obviously. This isn't like dealing with an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, because every Real Housewife has a leopard print dress (probably several) so the chances of two of them both wearing one to the same event are pretty high. I could probably figure that out, but I was also pretty high through most of statistics class, so I'm just going to point at them and laugh rather than getting out my graphic calculator.
OK, so Sonja and Ramona go to the bathroom together to take a pregnancy test, because, you know, this is what normal people do. Yes, it's strange, but this is one of the reasons I love Sonja T. Morgan. She is always down for a caper. If you're having a stressful moment and want to do something wacky and a little bit weird, Sonja will show up in a leopard print dress to do it with you, and make dirty jokes the whole time. God, I love Sonja.
While they're in there, Jill Zarin is like, "Why the fuck are they all in the bathroom at once? This is weird. I want to know what's going on." When they finally get out of the bathroom, Jill confronts them and is like, "What is going on?" I don't blame Jill at all. It's like two people whispering a secret to each other right in front of you and laughing about it and when you ask what is going on, they're like, "Oh, nothing." God, that's fucking annoying. Jill finally pieces it together and rolls her eyes so hard the boat takes a giant sway from port to starboard, nearly knocking all the wine glasses off the tables. Ramona, you are so fucking crazy if you think that your uterus can produce anything but dust and agony. The only thing that is in your body right now is delusion. It's a little baby of your imagination. You are like Capote's Miriam, dreaming a little girl into existence.
Crackerjacks wins multiple "line of the night" awards for calling Sonja and Ramona the "leopard print Bobsie Twins" and then saying "Blanche on the Golden Girls has a better chance of getting pregnant," than Ramona. Now, the internet commenters are going to be all. "God, Crackerjacks, don't you know that Blanche is dead now?" but what internet commenters don't understand is that they never get the joke. Crackerjacks chose Blanche because she knows the actress who plays her is dead. That's the joke. A dead person has a better chance of getting pregnant than Ramona. It's like my favorite joke ever. "Why can't Helen Keller get pregnant?" Because she's dead!
Speaking of deaf and dumb, that's what happens to you if you listen to Crackerjacks sing with Natalie Cole, who saunters down the stairs at the boat party to sing "L.O.V.E." with Crackerjacks. Oh, it was such a sad thing. It's like David Cooperfield doing a trick with your Uncle Donald because he's so good at pulling quarters out from behind the ears of children. But thanks to this one favor, no one will ever see those pictures of what Natalie Cole did backstage at the American Music Awards with Michael Bolton back in the late '80s. Her debt to Hitz is forever paid, and now they can go back to being friends, tossing back Jaggerbombs at Port 41.
Then it was time for my favorite part of the season, the final title cards. You know, where they show each lady and let you know what she's been up to since the show aired. Jill's said, "Jill has changed and still needs a hobby." Alex's said, "Alex continues to model in shows of designers you never heard of." Sonja's said, "Sonja may lose her shirt, but she finally found her lost panties. ;)" That's like exactly what it said for real, including the emoticon. Cindy's said, "Cindy was fired from this show." Kelly's said, "Kelly Bensimon has confirmed she is, in fact, Kelly Bensimon." Ramona's said, "Ramona isn't pregnant. #Duh." And Crackerjacks, well, it didn't really say anything.
No, there were no words for what Crackerjacks was feeling at that moment, no way to sum up what had transpired after the boat finally got into dock and the women finished spilling champagne on each other on the bow, Ramona doing her "King of the world" joke for the hundred millionth time and Jill, again, rolling her eyes so hard that Sonja almost pulled a Goldie Hawn and tippled over the side to be pulled out of the water in the body of a poor woman. No, there were no words for any of that. Crackerjack's title card was just a deep, raspy laugh. A hearty cackle that rippled along the East River like a pelican angling for its supper, tickling the white caps and soaring up with the wind, up over the bridges with all their people going to and from the city, past the buildings full or residents fighting or fucking or curling up to watch Netflix on demand, past the parties and the nightclubs, the cabs and the radios, the fat cats and the hookers they pay for, all the way out to the Statue of Liberty, where it dinged off that cooper beast and made a deep abiding echo that sounded like a bell, a guttural chime that was less of a celebration, and more of a warning.