Last night’s Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills told us, once again, about the manipulative webs spun by the busiest little spider in Beverly Hills, Lisa Vanderpump. But alas! There is also a praying mantis awaiting in our midst named Yolanda Foster! Once she extracts herself from her bathrobe cocoon, that is.
Despite disliking all the women Erika Girardi throws a dinner party to introduce Tom. Naturally this is the perfect occasion to wear a microscopic leopard-print negligee and call it a dress. Hostess with the mostess vag! #ThisIsYourBrainOnErikaJayne
Minutes before guests arrive, Yolanda cancels, FaceTiming from bed, wearing her magical-mystical bathrobe (upon impact Yolanda must instantly post a sick-selfie! ). Yolanda’s eyes and brain are swollen because of miscounting spoons. My husband observing from the side of the room, noted, “That sounds like a ‘washing my hair’ excuse.” Erika is understanding because as Yo’s Sequiny Solider she must protect the Lymes of Power.
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With Kyle Richards and Eileen Davidson unable to attend, this means Erika’s party consists of one little sniper-spider-alligator (Snidergator?) who must leave early, Lisa Rinna, and Kathryn Edwards. Plus Ken! Are you thinking what I’m thinking that this oughtta be baaaad and not in the way Erika Jayne thinks she’s baaaad. I mean like bad-awful.
And it is!
Kathryn and Lipsa ride together. In the limo Kathryn already seems off – has she been webbed by LVP? – I don’t know if she had a few too many glasses of champagne or what, but she was on a tear from the moment she arrived!
First Kathryn harasses Lipsa about not eating, teasing her mercilessly about how she won’t eat bread. Even when Lipsa tells her to stop in one of those ‘joking with an undercurrent of serious’ chats, Kathryn persists. It’s awkward for everyone and sets an off tone for an already askew evening.
It gets worse!
Meanwhile, LVP put on her game face (since she has EIGHT eyes, she sees all as the omnipotent observer). She’s all: I came for the food. The food is you.
LVP and Tom tease each other. He has no idea of LVP’s issues with Erika, because Erika doesn’t bother Tom with “petty stuff.” What’s up with these two? Erika is on pins and needles all the time, desperate to not upset him. Furthermore, if you have an overly-sensitive, cranky, petty-hating husband who needs to be in bed by 8pm with a glass of Metamucil, why on earth would you PLAN A PARTY and invite women you are currently not getting along with?! These are not questions Erika asked herself before sending out the obligatory speakerphone invitation. These are not questions Erika thought to consider, because in real world logic, people come to your home and behave with a smile, even if they’re annoyed with you. They eat their impeccably catered dinner, make small-talk over champagne, and wait to let their bitch out on the ride home. That’s called manners. But manners and Real Housewives are mutually exclusive.
Over dinner, Kathryn tells Tom she should have been a lawyer because she likes to argue, then she works overtime to prove her point to the prosecution. She’s exhausting, tiresome, and rude. “Girl relax,” snarks Erika. Dinner literally was the Unhinged Kathryn Edwards Show.
Kathryn is frustrated because Erika is so hard to get to know and Kathryn doesn’t speak Erika’s language of “false eyelashes.” At first Erika is sort of condescendingly detached, explaining that it takes time and it has to be mentioned that after Kathryn promised to be Erika’s one true girlfriend, she ran as fast as her little insect legs could carry her to LVP’s spiderweb and spilled everything. Erika is candid that it hurt their barely blossomed friendship, but Kathryn doesn’t agree. She argues that Erika is “losing the argument” that Kathryn violated her trust, even though Erika is telling her RIGHT NOW that she did.
Remember how Tom said Perry Mason inspired him to be an attorney? I think Kathryn believes she attend law school after watching the Saved By The Bell episode where Zack Morris joins the debate team.
LVP takes Erika’s point that she’s hard to get to know and likens it to her own demeanor, which is what led to her being called a “spider” with webs. It’s all very CUPS – you know the shell game where something is being hidden under one of three cups, then the cups are shuffled super fast, and the object is to guess which cup the item is under?
Kathryn admits that she mostly she just told LVP to rattle Erika, and get a reaction, but as Lipsa points out, she ended up hurting LVP in the process! A perplexed Tom wonders, “Do you do this all the time?”
Throughout dinner Kathryn won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise, she keeps putting her finger up and saying things like, “Wait – let me finish” – even to Tom! Lipsa, hopped up on carbs and their sugars, starts yelling “HALLELUAH” when someone Tom cuts Kathryn off.
LVP is really stuck in a web over accusations about her own web. Erika never bothers to point out that she actually called LVP a “sniper,” because honestly spider sounds better than sniper!
The dinner just gets more and more obstreperous, until Tom is forced to try and dismantle the drama, “But what about my web?!” “Get to my web!” LVP interjects teasingly, and Tom, forgetting it’s not HIS wife for moment, tried to shush LVP for interrupting (That was an interjection, not an interruption – a conversational aside. Socializing is not a courtroom!). Ken reminds Tom, snidely, “You’re a lawyer, not a judge!” Then, as Tom is explaining to Kathryn the ways of Erika, and Erika tries to make a point about herself, Tom chastises brusquely, “I’m talking, ERIKA.” It was so awkward! So creepy-awkward.
After that, everyone had the appetite of Lipsa and just wanted to escape. LVP had to leave early for a charity event, anyway. Tom and Erika escort Lipsa and Kathryn to the door for their limo, which isn’t even there, so they’re both standing outside, on the driveway, waiting forever for this limo. “I’m done,” laughs Lipsa, in that nervous way people laugh when there’s so much crazy no other reaction seems to cover it. Kathryn doesn’t get that she truly has been annoying. Poor Lipsa always gets stuck in the car with crazies!
The bottom line is this: Erika is pissed because she’s been exposed. Everyone now knows she’s been getting information from Yolanda, which means her plans to infiltrate, from the side, like a sniper have been blown up.
On the surface Erika is furious over how rude the women behave in her home, and she’s legit angry that it all happened in front of Tom.
The next day, Erika visits Kyle for a game of pickelball. Frankly I’m surprised she wasn’t grounded by Tom. I’m pretty sure she lost dessert for a week though and had to spend the rest of the night in her room. The Erika Jayne pseudo-empowerment act is starting to make a lot more sense given that Erika is beholden to Tom’s totalitarian regime at home.
Erika recounts the disaster-dinner while Kyle just “wide-eyed shock faces” through the entire conversation. She has bigger limes to squeeze – later she’s visiting Yolanda to discuss ‘The Email”.
Meanwhile Lipsa must confess her sins to Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills‘ conscience and arbiter of sanity, Eileen, so they meet at the beach. Lipsa launches into a diatribe about LVP’s manipulations. After “owning” the Munchausen comments, Lipsa is now blaming LVP for encouraging her to bring it up in the first place. She’s frustrated that LVP won’t fess-up to her involvement, but instead is letting Lipsa be the bitchy gossip who stands alone to face the wrath of Yolanda. (Although LVP has been really defending Lipsa to Yolanda, as has Kyle.).
Lipsa also alleges that LVP and Kyle laughed about Yolanda’s health behind her back and texted each other snarky photos. Hmmmm… I’m betting Lipsa knows about said texts because she too was part of their group message! Lipsa has kept all this to herself because she was protecting LVP, whom she really likes and considers a friend. Does she?
This is ridiculous – are we or are we not dealing with grown women? Owning that you were “manipulated” is foolish, and I refuse to buy the argument that Lipsa, a 30-year veteran in the entertainment industry with a successful career is such a “people pleaser,” she can’t assert herself to Lisa Vanderpump!
Eileen is not surprised to hear these allegation against LVP, but she is shocked to hell and back again by the bomb Lipsa drops next!
Just as Lipsa was losing friends and isolating people, she admits her “trust issues are though the f–king roof” because after Yolanda bailed on Erika’s party, pleading sickness, Lipsa saw a bunch of photos of Yolanda hanging out with Kim and Brandi from the very same day! This makes no sense to Lipsa: why would Yolanda bail on her “very good friend Erika” for Kim and Brandi. “These are your friends?!” asks an incredulous Lipsa.
Eileen is all “I’m not touching this,” but wants to believe Yolanda was just really tired after lunching with the two most exhausting human beings on the face of the planet and couldn’t rally for dinner later. However, even Eileen concedes it’s bizarre to schedule two grueling events in one day if you’re so sick, and is curious about why Yolanda would waste precious “I barely got out of this bathrobe” energy on Brandi and Kim.
Then Lipsa goes ahead and vocalizes what all the women are thinking but are afraid to say: Yolanda uses her illness “to her advantage in a lot of ways.” After all, no one can call out or question Yolanda without looking like an asshole being mean to the extremely ill woman on television who barely crawls out of bed for less than $10,000 a day or A-list vacation with My Love.
Lipsa departs with a warning that Yoanda is more manipulative than LVP. “It makes me want to run for the f–king hills,” she announces. Yeah, David got that memo too!
This is why I refuse to believe Lipsa was manipulated by LVP – she’s had her own suspicions about Yolanda. She believes (as does Kyle) that a large part of Yolanda’s ‘symptoms’ are her “head not connecting to her heart,” with Yolanda not addressing some things happening emotionally. Instead, Yolanda is emotionally blackmailing all the women. Lipsa obviously confided the Munchausen suspicions to LVP for a reason – they both knew something was amiss.
Next Kyle makes the pilgrimage to Lymeland to discuss Yolanda’s email. Yolanda is relaxing while Daisy, her HEALTH ADVOCATE, makes her a latte. Uhhhhhhhhhhhh… this is nursing and advocating? Or is it personal assisting?
Yolanda spews BS that makes no sense about her reasons for sending Kyle a condescending email and CCing all the other women. She resents Kyle inserting herself in Yolanda’s drama with Lipsa when they had already hugged it out. Yolanda decides to forgive Lisa’s comments because, “I’m not going to focus on some crazy woman calling me names in public.” Kyle is like whatever, OK, sure, sounds great, groping blindly for the door, desperate to escape – what if the crazy or the Lyme or the Munchausen is catching?! Yolanda is receiving some award by the Global Lyme Alliance, so she invites Kyle to attend, shockingly Kyle agrees.
Finally the ladies meet to build Habitat for Humanity houses for The Agency’s team. Of course, it quickly descends into a mess of ‘Housewives Problems’. Erika is rattled by the women joking about LVP’s webs and spiders. She goes and sulks by herself eventually confiding to Eileen that she’s super pissed over Kathryn’s behavior at dinner and because now everything is awkward between herself and LVP, so they can’t be friends.
Eileen decides Kathryn and Erika should work it out, so she calls Kathryn over. Instead of a civil conversation over painting, it erupts into an arguing mess about bad friends. First of all, I applaud ALL the women for calling Kathryn out on her motivations for telling LVP what Erika said. I also applaud Kathryn for calling Erika out on why she had theses opinions on LVP. Erika keeps repeating that now she and LVP can’t have a friendship because of Kathryn. Which is odd – why would Erika WANT a friendship with a woman she called a manipulative sniper? I really think Erika is just pissed she was exposed and is pissy that it was Kathryn, someone she assumed would be her stooge, is the one who did.
Also, Erika is basically taking out all her frustration over Tom punishing her on Kathryn.
Finally Kathryn apologizes, Erika forgives her and they hug. Although Erika makes it known she hasn’t forgotten.
Across the lawn, Kyle and LVP are painting and giggling, LVP secure in the knowledge that everyone is hot-stepping around her approval. Little does she know that Lisa Rinna just put her on blast…
TELL US – DO YOU BELIEVE LVP MANIPULATED LISA RINNA? WAS LISA RINNA RIGHT ABOUT YOLANDA? WILL KATHRYN AND ERIKA BE ABLE TO MOVE FORWARD?
[Photo Credits: Bravo]
