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This week on our favorite show, Rich women doing things, rich women do things. They leave their phones and purses at home before a road trip, so they call their sister and talk to the woman who works at home. What’s her name? I DONT KNOW. “The lady”, apparently. They have a pop-up picnic with two hours’ notice, and a delicious table on the beach springs from a Pottery Barn catalog, except for the fornicating seals (or are they sea lions?) another. They arrive an hour late for dinner at their own hotel and never really apologize for keeping everyone waiting in their tasteful black dresses. They fall asleep in a sound bath that they had planned for a little girls trip because the last time they did one, at one of Kim Kardashian’s baby showers, it was so much fun that Kendall Jenner almost drank a Pepsi.
Of course, all of these things are done by Kathy Hilton, our current court jester and, really, some sort of folk hero. Add to that his confusing “camel toe” and the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” which could be the same depending on how many pairs of yoga pants you see on a daily basis. There’s also the moment when she assumes everyone loves her because, well, why wouldn’t you love Kathy Hilton? Oh, or when she doesn’t know how to open the wine and forces her sister to do so or when she’s passed out in her pajamas for a nap under the covers (the deadliest of all nap variants). This episode is like a compilation of Kathy Hilton’s greatest hits.
Which brings me to my point: Kathy Hilton is a full time housewife. She is only a friend in name. Yes, people like Marlo Hampton in Atlanta film almost as much or more than Kathy, but there is a distinction here. The way Bravo has always separated full time from friend is that we never see friends back home alone. They are only presented in relation to full-time women. So if we’re visiting Marlo’s house, it’s because NeNe stopped to drink champagne in her closet or shit like that. Not only is Kathy planning this trip (usually a no-no to friends), but she’s been seen at home packing her bags on her own for it. So, according to the rules Bravo has set for itself, that means she should hold a diamond in the opening credits and her slogan should be “Why spend a night in Paris when you can own the whole hotel?”
Kathy chooses a great hotel to visit. Well, it’s an empty hotel whose rooms are decorated in some sort of old-fashioned country-club chic. This place is made up entirely of colonial furniture with brocade upholstery and patterned wallpaper on walnut chair rails. It’s a golden toilet and a COVID epidemic far from Mar-a-Lago. Garcelle is right: this place is haunted by the spirits of dead whites who hate Jews and food stamp programs.
The location is a bit odd, but the transportation they use to get there is even stranger. It takes longer to get to some targets in Reseda from Beverly Hills than it does to San Diego, so why is every woman in her own Range Rover? Couldn’t they at least team up so they can tell each other some bullshit on the record?
The best thing Kathy does on this trip, however, is something she learned from her sister, Above-producer Kyle Richards. When they have dinner, everyone walks around the table to talk about how they are feeling. Kathy says, “I feel anxious because I feel there are unresolved tensions.” Yeah. Perfect. As if this line had been transmitted to him through an earpiece. Make women talk; make them crack on their problems and their reproaches. Great job, Catherine.
The unresolved tensions she talks about mostly belong to Erika and Sutton, and the reason they are unresolved is because Erika has no interest in resolving them. When Sutton came to the hospital with a sprained ankle (she came back in a wheelchair and had not take a pot), the other women talk to Erika about her at lunch. Erika says she doesn’t like being called a liar, which we knew about her years ago, and that she has no interest in fixing her relationship with Sutton. Instead of trying to temper the way she acts at Kyle’s dinner party, she doubles down. “I don’t care if she feels threatened,” she told the group. “She should feel threatened.”
This is exactly the wrong tactic to take. It’s a bit like betting on any team against the Harlem Globetrotters and then doubling or nothing when they inevitably lose. It comes back to dinner after Kathy’s comment. When Sutton tries to explain how she felt at dinner, Erika says, “I don’t care” and continues with “Why are you talking to me? I have nothing to tell you.”
The insistence on shutting down Sutton doesn’t help Erika, especially since Sutton is part of the show. It’s his job to listen to what Sutton has to say. She doesn’t have to apologize, she doesn’t have to do anything, but she has to listen to him. Yes, I think Sutton must answer for calling Erika a liar, which she did, but Erika must answer for using scare tactics against Sutton and continue to do so. This whole business is built on conflict and conflict resolution. If she can’t pretend she wants to solve it, then that doesn’t serve the formula. It’s like making a soufflé and then refusing to put it in the oven.
Later, we find out that, at dinner, Erika already knew that her future ex-husband, Tom, had had a jurisdictional hearing and that the restaurateur wanted to put him in a nursing home. Erika calls Kyle and Rinna, the friendliest of the Get Along Gang, into her hotel room to talk about it. She says she cared about this man for 22 years and doesn’t want to see him put somewhere “to rot”. I understand that she’s worried about him, but he might end up in a worse place very soon. Instead of being in a house, he could be in jail. It’s a probable and deserved possibility if he did the things he was accused of.
It’s crazy that we were watching Erika react to these things in real time, to take in that information, to see how totally different her life was from what she thought, and to record her immediate feelings. I’m sure fans will argue that she shouldn’t be thinking about Tom’s welfare or her own welfare when it comes to the concerns of the victims that Tom (allegedly, but come on) defrauded. I wonder how she feels now that she has had time to think it over. I can only imagine that she reacts viscerally, emotionally, and without thinking more than this man to whom she has devoted herself for so many years. Objectively, this does not sound like the “right” reaction, but what is the right reaction? Does such a thing exist? And if we react incorrectly in the moment, can this ever be corrected? I do not know. Erika doesn’t know. The staff at this haunted hotel don’t know because they were stuffed into G. Gordon Liddy’s golf bag and thrown into the sea.
The other crazy thing that happens is a fight between Dorit and Garcelle that I don’t quite understand. I don’t see why Dorit is upset that Garcelle says she doesn’t feel like she belongs to “this group”, which is Esperanto for “here, damn reality show”. If that’s what Garcelle feels, that’s what she feels, rational or otherwise. It seems a little crazy to me that none of the women thought it could be a matter of race, and even though Garcelle says it isn’t, it clearly is.
The Get Along Gang set (minus Erika, who says Santeria comes out in her mind trying to magically explode Sutton’s head) prompts Garcelle to “tell the truth”. Garcelle speaks his truth; they just don’t listen to it. She says it’s like it was with Denise last year. This is the thing about the GAG and the truth; they think what you say is the truth only if it is their truth, and they’re going to keep talking about it and yelling at you until you bend or break.
Garcelle is finally getting there, but it’s quite different from what they think. Rinna wants Garcelle to say that she doesn’t like some of the women around the table, but it’s really just a manifestation of the otherness Garcelle has felt her entire life. “Do you sometimes walk into a room and feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t belong there?” She asks rhetorically. “Yes,” Kathy Hilton replies. Bursting into tears, Garcelle retorts, “Try to do this all your life.” And that’s all. This is the tweet or, in this case, the emotional heart of the matter. Garcelle doesn’t feel like she fits into this group as it seems like it would be difficult for her to fit into any group of white women. Rich women do things, but most of them don’t have to be black and they have no idea how Garcelle will react differently in this game they all play, this game that almost no one cannot win. Well, except maybe for Kathy Hilton.
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