Real Housewives of Beverly Hills: Please, Stay in Vegas
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Last night Adrienne Maloof got her Bravo sponsored commercial for her Vegas property, The Palms, and Lisa Van der Pump got sweated on by a male stripper. If only what happened in Vegas stayed there, but it leaked all over our television screens.
Yes, everyone was trying their luck in Sin City and the women brought their various and assorted slots to the same location but couldn't manage to give a craps about hanging out with each other. It all has to do with the Hundred Years Housewives War of Stupidity waged by Dame Adrienne Maloof against Lisa of the Pumps because Lisa would not have her daughter's bachelorette at the Maloof's casino but instead let her rich friend throw the party at Planet Hollywood. This continues to be the stupidest fight in Housewives history, and in retaliation to this perceived slight that Adrienne pulled not from her ass but out from underneath the gold weave in her hair, Adrienne took her own group of women to Vegas.
We learned quickly that Kyle couldn't go to Vegas, so instead Lisa was bringing the aquarium full of electric eels known as Taylor. Yes, Kyle had very very important things to do. She and her pinched-faced bestie Faye Resnick were planning the annual homosexual circuit party, The White Party in Palm Springs, and they had booked Susan Moribito and Junior Vasquez and all the other essential relics from the '90s, but they had not done anything about the decor. They went to the Beverly Hills Chandelier Dept and Nene Leaks Earring Museum to pick something out. You see each one of Nene's enormous earrings is hanging in this shop and, with a little bit of wiring, it can serve as a functioning chandelier. There was one chandelier that Faye was really interested in and it was $75,000 and she took it off the ceiling and they handed it to her and she thought, for a brief second, "Wouldn't it be fun if I just dropped this right now to see what kind of sound it makes?" It wasn't a sincere thought. It was kind of like when you're standing on a high balcony and you think, "Maybe I should just jump off?" or when you're waiting for the subway and think, "What if I just jumped on the tracks right now?" or you see Michael Fassbinder's enormous penis in Shame and you wonder, "Do you think anyone would mind if I touch myself right here in the theater?" It was a question like that, one not meant to carry an action with it, but next thing you know she dropped that damn chandelier and broke it. Then she and Kyle just laughed about it and didn't even consider that the museum had a "you break it you bought it policy." Housewives never have to pay for their mistakes, do they? They didn't even think about Nene, who wept that day for her fallen earring. Oh, a sad sad day for everyone.
That's what Kyle was doing. Oh, that and she was doing a photo shoot for her book that isn't even done yet. That is so like a Housewife to have a cover to judge the book by, but nothing else at all. Actually all Housewife books are blank on the inside. They're just a cover with a clever title and then blank pages. It's more of a journal or a sketchbook with a Housewife on the cover than an actual book with words that you read. You have to fill up the Housewife book with your own thoughts. Like the actual Housewives, a Housewife book is an empty vessel. So, Kyle was sprawled out on her dining room table in a ball gown taking her book cover photos. Why do Housewives do that? No book cover ever in the existence of books has ever had a woman in a ball gown on a table as the cover. This is just not going to work. Sure Johannes Gutenberg dressed his wife up as the Virgin Mary and plopped her down on the kitchen table for the cover of the Gutenberg Bible, but since then it has never happened again.
Alright, so, Vegas. Know what? Vegas with the Housewives is kind of boring. Even when one of them basically owns a big chunk of the town and can do whatever the hell she wants. So on Spite Trip 2011, Adrienne took Bradi, St. Camille Grammer, her acolyte D.D. (who Brandi insists on calling DiDi), and walking Brookstone catalog Dana to Vegas to whoop it up and show Lisa that she doesn't need her stupid bachelorette party to have a good time. Kim Richards was supposed to come to Vegas too, but when Adrienne called her she was like "Oh, I'm moving. I'm still moving. I have to drive the moving truck myself because I'm the only person in California with a Class M license who can drive moving trucks, so that is why this move has literally taken months to do and I'm so sorry I really wish I could be there." Kim, really? You should be an expert at making excuses by now, how about you come up with a new one? No one believes this moving ruse anymore.
Adrienne and the girls sit down to dinner and Dana puts on her best QVC voice and says, "Girls, you will never believe what this is. Can you even guess? This is 125 carats of diamonds right here on the necklace. Isn't it gorgeous. But just look, you can open it up and there is a lollipop inside. It's a $1 million lollipop holder. Can you believe that I bought this? Well, I can sell it to you. I can sell it to anyone. It's for sale. Yes, you can have it today for, what, $100,000. That's negotiable. We can work it out. But doesn't everyone want a diamond-encrusted lollipop holder? It looks like a gorgeous necklace, but who would think it's for lollipops." St. Camille Grammer looked at her and said, "Yeah, it is for suckers!" and then cocked her head and looked at Dana out of the side of her eye and dug right back into her salad.
Then, after dinner, they bowled. Yes, there is a suite in the Palms with a bowling alley right in it, and these girls all bowled. Camille bowled in her high heels. They all did, and they were all awful. They were all lousy at bowling, except for Brandi, who spent a summer wearing hot pants and a too-tight top renting out shoes at the Bowl & Berger where she grew up. On Tuesdays, when it was slow, all the employees would take turns on lane number 16 and after weeks and weeks of this, Brandi got quite good. Strangely, her skills on the waxed floor made her even more attractive to the people who hung around at the joint and Brandi liked that. She likes any kind of attention and before she got her boob job, this was the best way she knew how. But here she was at the Palms, in the bowling suite, and she's crippled by her broken ankle. She did not have a good showing at all. She won't get any attention for her strikes and splits and spares. She needed something else.
She got her chance when Adrienne took all the ladies down to the nightclub in the hotel and got them their own private table. Brandi saw Camille doing her patented nightclub dancing, which is like rubbing her rump on a stripper pole but the pole has magically disappeared. If I liked Camille less, I would say that is what her entire life was like, but she is the holiest of holies, so I will not say that. Brandi saw her chance and she took her blinged-out carpel tunnel wrist brackets over to Camille and started rubbing them all over her. They were dancing close, their hair entangled on Camille's shoulders as their bodies bristled together and the sparkly fabric of their attire clung together like Velcro, the static electricity passing between them freely in a million little sparks.
They were getting into their groove when they could hear a strange sound over the bass of the music. SCCCCCRRRRAAAAAAAAAAPPEEEEEEE. They both turned around quickly and saw D.D. on the banquette with a scowl on her face and a knife and whetstone in her hands. She was staring right at Brandi. Camille laughed it off. Oh, that D.D., always sharpening her knives and trying to kill her rivals, but as Camille turned around and started gyrating again, Brandi locked her eyes with D.D., who picked up her Bowie knife and drew it across her throat as threateningly as she could. "I, uh, I gotta go to the ladies' room," Brandi said, making her exit. That was it for Brandi. She went up to her room, took an Ambien and went to bed. That is how exciting Vegas was for her.
Things weren't that exciting for Lisa and Taylor. Taylor was shockingly well-behaved, for her part, even if she was trying really hard to fit in with a gaggle of 25 year-old girls. Man, I really don't want to talk about this bachelorette party because bachelorette parties should not be encouraged. Sorry, ladies, but they are a scourge on the earth. So are bachelor parties, honestly, but the bachelorette party now has some sort of Third Wave Feminist righteousness attached to it so it's not only annoying but ideological as well and that makes me want to kill myself. Just look at that scene where Lisa, her daughter Pandora (inventor of that new form of charm bracelet), and Taylor go backstage to meet the Chippendales dancers. They can't even have a conversation with them because all of the dancers are deaf, their eardrums continuously punctured by the shrill screams of groups of women under the influence of Long Island Ice Teas, pheromones, and pectoral muscles. Just think of the poor, crippled Chipplendales dancers.
Other than that, it was just misbehavior as usual for a bachelorette party. Yawnsville. Taylor didn't even have a breakdown, so how much fun is that? But Taylor and Lisa did share one very nice and tender moment. Lisa told Taylor a story about her son Max, how every day he would come home and he would throw his backpack on the ground by the pool and strip off all his clothes and jump right in and Lisa would come out and yell, "Max! Pick up your damn backpack and put on some trunks, for Christ's sake." But then, one day, Max wasn't home anymore and Lisa walked out into her empty back yard looking for that backpack and it was gone. It just wasn't there, and neither was he and she missed it all: the yelling and the fights, and the blurry sight of his butt cheeks underwater as he breast stroked his way toward the shallow end. That's what Taylor had to look forward to, that sadness, that gnawing emptiness that would only be occasionally plugged with the joy of fulfillment from raising them right. Taylor said she knew, but she didn't. She didn't know at all. She thought the backpack was Russel, but it wasn't. She thinks everything is about Russel. It's not, Taylor, but it soon will be.
Speaking of sad stories about children, man, did Kim Richards get messy last night. When Kyle was filming her book cover, she called Kim again and again and got Kim's voicemail which said to leave your name and number and time you called after the beep because she lost all of her contacts (probably in the move) but then said she doesn't listen to voicemail, so what is the point anyway. Oh, Kim Richards. She still thinks she's a Disney star and someone should write down all her phone calls on those little pink message pads and deliver them to her trailer. That's how her world still works, where she's still famous and time has not progressed.
Anyway, somehow Kim and Kyle orchestrated a meeting at their sister Kathy's upscale thrift store. Oh, Kim came in looking like a paper bag that someone had been hyperventilating into for about an hour. She was thin and wispy and had a Band-Aid on one of her fingers from some mysterious prick that she may or may not have completely imagined. She looked like the back of a Volvo after it had flipped over the railing of the highway. That is what Kim always looks like, but it was somehow worse than usual.
What was the matter? What ever was the matter with Kim? It appears that her move had not worked out well. We all thought she was happy playing house with Pumice, her stoney boyfriend, in their Sad Valley Ranch. We thought she was happy to stay home and miss parties and just be calm and sober curled up on the couch with a hunk of rock with a face painted on it watching HGTV on an endless loop. We were wrong. Apparently Kim's children Kimberly Jr. and Brooke do not like Pumice and they want to spend more time with their mother and they resent her happiness. They say she doesn't call every day anymore, even though she does. They say that she can't spend all of her time locked in the house pretending that a stone she picked up at the end of the driveway is a real person and not showering and forgetting to take her meds and letting the garbage just pile up in the corners and not collecting the mail so it looks like she has been on vacation for seventeen weeks and forgetting to wipe her ass when she shits. They say all of those things are bad and they want their mother to break up with her rock and find some help.
Poor Kim, she is so conflicted. She loves Pumice so much and she wants to make it work. She wants to be happy, even if everyone else thinks that her happiness is crazy. She has been alone for 18 years and she has devoted everything to her children and now that they're all gone, why can't they be happy for her? Why? Why can't they come back and leave their backpacks by the pool? Why can't they need her? Why can't they be with her so that she's not alone? Why?
This is sort of what we deciphered from Kim's heaves and sobs. Oh, what can you make of Kim? Nothing but a mess, sadly. Oh, Kim, you pile of regrets and head shakes. Kim, you big blubbering blob of memories and yesteryears. Kim, Kim, Kim, you freckled freak of forgetfulness. There is nothing we can do with you. There is nothing at all. We wish we could give you your delusions, to let you live in a sloppy happiness of your own creation. We wish your arc was headed toward recovery, to a nice, quiet life with a man where you are happy with finally being out of the spotlight. But none of that will every happen, will it? Kim will just always be a quivering chihuahua of a woman, tottering on her skinny legs under the weight of her weary.
And there is nothing Kyle can do either. Nothing she can say, nothing she can do, but hug her sister and cry with her, for entirely different reasons. They sit there, in that store, the two of them alone, wishing that their famous sister would join them in this. But she is not there. She has sent them to her proxy, this land of dresses that used to be worn, spangles that used to sparkle. They sit there, in Kathy's house of commerce, just two more discarded things, waiting for just the right occasion to be worn out again.