We’re in the latter half of the season and still have the cast trip to go, but it seems like our orange holders are running out of steam. This episode lacked forward momentum, and it could be due to several reasons. Katie, who was somehow the driver for a lot of the story, even though she did so little, is absent from everything but the cast photo in the beginning. Then we have Tamra stuck in a never-ending non-forgiveness loop with Jenn and Shannon where she just tries and tries and gets no movement at all. It’s like she’s jumping up and down and waving her arms in front of the automatic door at the supermarket, but doesn’t realize that the market is closed, the door is locked, and nothing is going to get it open. The only person giving us a little iota of anything is Gretchen Rossi, and that’s only because she got so drunk that she put on her annoying baby voice and was unfiltered. I don’t mean in her language; it’s just that the camera can’t apply the interminable filters she uses all over her God-fearing Instagram.
This episode is still a tale of two trips. While Tamra’s trip to Temecula, named after the pagan god of strip malls, is the one with the more traditional Housewives pyrotechnics — fights, walkouts, drama — it is also the one that is less interesting. That’s not just because it didn’t have male strippers, though the strippers were a consideration in my decision.
After dinner, where Gina and Tamra discuss their concerns about Shannon’s drinking, they return to their villa, put on oversized shirts with bikinis painted on them, and wear the most grandma-style swimming caps you can find on Amazon with next-day delivery. Gina, California sober like all the greats, including Demi Lovato, DJ James Kennedy, and myself, decides to get out the joint that she had rolled at Heather Dubrow’s marijuana bar way back at her birthday party. I was hoping for some stoned out Shannon-igans in the hot tub, but it seems like everyone else abstained. Maybe that’s because Shannon won’t smoke because she’s had a cough since 2008. I do love Shannon Beador, one of our most gifted physical comedians, but she is totally one of those people who thinks she’s dying of mold even though that isn’t really a thing.
In the morning, Shannon uses her Sur Le Table suitcase to make breakfast for everyone, including some muffins made with egg whites and hash browns made from cauliflower rice. I have had hashbrowns all over this great nation of ours, and there has never been cauliflower, rice, or cauliflower rice in any of them. The conversation at breakfast isn’t as bland as the food itself, as Shannon talks more about how she grew up in a chaotic atmosphere where she never knew what was going to happen next. She tells a harrowing story about how her mother told her and her sister that she was divorcing her father, Gene the Machine, before she told him. When he didn’t get served before the weekend, they had to spend the whole weekend with him pretending everything was normal.
This explains so much about Shannon as does Tamra’s comment about how, back then, Gene was an alcoholic, something that Shannon previously told Tamra in confidence. Shannon is right to get pissed that Tamra brought this up on camera. The ladies always say that families are off limits, and I think that includes parents. Shannon tells us that Gene is a different person now and doesn’t want it out there, and I think that’s totally legitimate. Yes, I do believe that Tamra brought it up to draw a parallel between Shannon’s drinking and how she grew up. After all, children of alcoholics are four times more likely to be alcoholics themselves.
I also think that Jenn and Shannon’s reading of Tamra’s comment is the least generous. I don’t think it was a “dig” in that she was coming after Shannon or trying to make her or her father look bad. I think she was trying to give more context for why Shannon is how she is and how she might struggle with drinking more than others. Still, this is not something that should have been said on camera. Shannon, to her credit, draws that boundary there, and she and Tamra have another tense moment as they work on repairing their friendship.
I feel two ways about Tamra’s Redemption Tour, which stars just as many white women who can’t dance as the Eras Tour. (Pray for my mentions.) I just want them all to forgive Tamra already so that the group can go back to having fun. No one on this trip is having fun. This is like watching four coworkers travel to a terrible convention they don’t want to be at and are gritting their teeth until they can return to their regular lives. The show requires a kind of fast reconciliation that is not like real life. However, I appreciate that Shannon and Jenn aren’t being calculating and behaving differently because they’re on a show. They’re sick of Tamra’s very predictable pattern. I don’t blame them for not wanting to get back aboard Tamra’s fun bus because you never know when she’s going to pull it over to the side of the road, shout at everyone, and abandon them in the middle of the desert. Or, even worse, in Temecula.
Heather makes some great points about Tamra while at dinner with Gretchen and Emily. Heather says that she used to be afraid of Tamra because she was mean and because Tamra reminded her of her own father. Heather tells us that they’d be on a trip or at a restaurant and he would have these public blow ups that were both terrible and embarrassing, especially for someone like Heather who is more buttoned up than a corset on a never nude. But it also reveals how, sometimes, Heather can be more sympathetic to Tamra than the others, because while this kind of indeterminate rage is triggering to her, it is also very familiar. It’s also a testament to why Heather seems to want control over every aspect of her life, something she clearly didn’t think she had as a youngster.
Emily also points out that it’s hard for Tamra to have real friends because she’s always strategizing with those around her. I think that is what I’m fed up with the most about Tamra. She’s a master of the show and has been around longer and done it better than just about anyone, but at some point there has to be some real in the reality. Shannon and Jenn are treating Tamra like a real friend, not like a show friend, but I don’t think Tamra has any non-show friends, well, at least not on the show. It’s always about finding an ally, pissing someone else off to join another side, and then defecting again when she pisses off the new person. It seems like Tamra is trying to get to a place where she plays fewer games with the cast, but it’s going to take them all a long while to get over it.
Even though she wasn’t on Heather Dubrow’s $15,000 sleepover, everything was still kind of about Tamra, which shows the stranglehold she has over these women and this show. The best part of the trip happens after Heather takes Gretchen and Emily to The Abbey, which is a gay-themed bar for straight people directly in the taint between a certain Sexy Unique Restaurant and Tom Tom. I don’t know what night of the week they were there, but the camera operators were working overtime so that we wouldn’t see how empty it was. Seriously, it looked like the only people in the cavernous bar were the Housewives, the strippers that they were grinding on, and the one drag queen who is legally obligated to be on duty at all times by the West Hollywood City Council.
Everyone got a little wasted at The Abbey and, to their credit, these bitches were having fun. This is the kind of girls’ trip I want, not sitting around a big, old house talking about who does and does not understand what happens in therapy. On the car ride home, Gretchen says that she wants to do karaoke and asks if she thinks the bar would have “her song.” Heather doesn’t remember that she had “a song,” and Gretchen corrects her that she, in fact, has four songs. She is correct: there are four songs, each more of an Auto-Tuned monstrosity than the next.
Gretchen then tells the ladies that Tamra tried to have a song too, but she couldn’t sing at all, and it was scrapped. They ask how Tamra got into the studio and Gretchen says it was when she was fucking [Bleeeeeeep]. They ask if this happened when Tamra was married and Gretchen says yes. Oooooh. I love a blind item. Was Tamra fucking Catch, the restaurant they bleeped out on RHONY? Heather Dubrow did not know who the person was but Emily Simpson said that she did as a member of Gen X.
Emily is not only the master of the one-piece bathing suit, she is also a dog with a bone. When they get back to Heather’s, Emily wants Gretchen to pull out the recording of Tamra singing that she claims to have. Apparently, someone sent it to Slade, and he’s filed it away all of these years in the cabinet he has in the garage just for the dirt he’s collected on Tamra. They get Gretchen to call Slade and request the audio, but Slade says it wasn’t a song. Well, it starts out as a song, but then they get bored and you can hear them having sex in the recording studio because no one stopped recording. Okay, suddenly this just got a lot less fun and a lot more skeezy.
In the morning, the women wake up to not one but two private chefs, so they don’t have to choke down Shannon’s cauliflower rice hash browns. Gretchen is hungover, full of regret, and looking both like she has on a full face of makeup and like she has no makeup at all, depending on how the light hits her. Gretchen tells them, repeatedly, not to tell Tamra what she told them about the song and cheating on a husband while trying to record it. Okay, sure, they might not tell Tamra, but you know for sure this is airing, it’s going to come out eventually. Emily wonders how they cannot mention “she had an affair with the guy from [bleep].” You know she’s going to say something and you know this is why Tamra cusses Gretchen out again in a few episode’s time.
This is not a lot of information to figure out this blind item. We know that he’s a singer, big with Gen X, and, from what Emily said, I would guess that he is a member of some kind of group. I was initially thinking that it would be someone like Usher or Ginuwine, but they weren’t in bands. Maybe Jon Bon Jovi, who seems like he would be Tamra’s type, but he’s not stepping out on his wife. Maybe one of the New Kids on the Block, but at least one of them is gay and one is Christian, so who knows? What about Bobby Brown? He was in New Edition. That would line up. Maybe it’s Lance Bass, and Gretchen is the last one to hear that he came out?
It’s also unclear which husband she may have been cheating on. Was it when she and Gretchen were on the show together and she was still married to Simon? Or was it later, when she was married to Eddie, but Gretchen and Slade were still collecting all of this evidence? And, if this thing is real, why haven’t they released it before? Why not embarrass her by sending the audio to Radar Online? This season is losing steam, but this is not the storyline I want, one that is old news and that Gretchen is bringing around to settle a score, one that is based on no evidence at all or, at least, evidence they won’t play for us. It’s one thing to want storylines, but it’s another to base them on lies, conjectures and half-truths, which, along with filter and Auto Tune, are the only things that Gretchen seems capable of doing.
