The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Champagne Wishes, Caviar Screams

The Real Housewives of New York City

The Cavi-art of War

Season 7 Episode 8

Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

The Real Housewives of New York City. Photo: Bravo

You know that feeling you get when you leave a really good party, like you’re just elated and a little bit breathless and there are Champagne tickles all up in your nose and you just feel like a skirt that is being lifted up into the air because a little girl is spinning around? That’s the way I felt after this episode of The Real Pigs in a Three-Year-Old Frozen Blanket. Just like leaving a good party, I’m not entirely sure what happened or what to say about it, but I know that I really enjoyed it. You know, spending time with friends, checking in to see how they’re doing, engaging in a little bit of light gossip, and then having a long discussion about Latino Show magazine, a publication that may or may not exist in the real, actual world.

The most fun, absurd story of the whole evening was Carole running for the board of her condo, an election whose stakes are so low that Tracy Flick wouldn’t even bother throwing her hat into the ring. I could have watched an entire hour about Carole and her sort of fake, totally ridiculous run for a board seat so she can get to decide what kind of detergent they sell in the vending machines in the basement laundry room and who has to tell Charlene in 6D that she needs to stop cooking cabbage because the whole hallway smells like a fart trapped in a lunch lady’s girdle.

This whole thing was stupid, and here I use stupid as a compliment. Carole knows it’s stupid, too. She has a mock war room at a restaurant around the corner where she and a bunch of friends pretend like she is actually taking this thing seriously, but we all know that she just wanted to have a little plot for a reality-television program. This was just an excuse to get Carole’s hair more camera time, and her hair has been looking so good this season (seriously, it is almost at Connie Britton levels of amazingness) that it deserves all the camera time it can get.

Carole knows this whole thing is stupid, too. She likens her victory to the time when she won some basketball contest in seventh grade and got a giant trophy, because she knows the effort she put into this and the consequences are about the same. Really, no one cares if Carole wins. Not even Carole cares if Carole wins, and that is why I liked it so much. It was just an excuse to have two silly little events and get everyone to laugh at the fact that she has never once cooked in her tiny kitchen except for some three-year-old canapés that her friend left in her freezer. Carole, please don’t go a-changing. Well, except for maybe those driving gloves you wore to CB2 with Bethenny. You might want to change those.

And while I could watch a whole hour of Carole’s run for office, I could watch a whole series of Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Panama Canal Morgans walking down the street wearing a forest-green faux fur and a pair of sunglasses like she was possessed by the demon spirit of Carrie Bradshaw herself. I don’t know if any of you caught it, but the three seconds of Sonja walking to Carole’s party was the best thing that this show has ever possibly aired. When I die, I would like that to be played at the funeral for about six hours in lieu of a eulogy. Here lies Brian James Moylan, president of the Real Housewives Institute. May he forever be watched over by the ghost of Sonja T. Morgan Stanley (I died in 2074, and by then Sonja had gotten remarried) walking down the street in a pair of oversize sunglasses and a green fur jacket.

Speaking of Sonja, she was on the cover of Latino Show magazine, which, shockingly, is not about Jane the Virgin. It may not be a magazine at all. I think it might actually be a website that one of Sonja’s interns printed out all the pages of at the Kinkos, had perfectly bound, and passed around at an Upper East Side boutique where they held the launch party. Seriously, did you notice that there was really only one copy of the magazine at the party?

The magazine, Sonja’s dress from her line, and Ryan Seacrest’s ex-girlfriend are all the same in that only one of them exists, and no one believes it’s real. What was so funny about the party, though, is that people are actually starting to believe that Sonja might not have been making up that clothing line all along. Dorinda said that she finally might have pulled the rabbit out of the hat, and Bethenny said that this is not a toaster-oven box with no toaster in it. But wait, do any of us really see the rabbit? You all know that Sonja is my favorite floozy, but I’m with doubting Heather on this one. Just because she got one sample dress made and had her picture taken in it and wore the same dress to the party and the ad is in a magazine that no one has heard of and that she happens to be gracing the cover of does not mean her business is actually a thing yet. I mean, let’s not get hasty. It’s silly that Sonja has to do so little for everyone to think she’s a success. It’s like that kid in third grade who never did his homework, not even once, and then one day he turned in the ditto he was supposed to complete with his name written at the top and a raspberry-jam smear somewhere in the middle and the teacher gave him a gold star anyway because at least he ate some jam.

That’s why I have to say that Kristen’s apology to Sonja was probably a little bit premature. When she’s advertising for a line and wearing the clothes before they are even available, and when the people backing her line are continuously talking about the deals they are trying to line up without harvesting any concrete details, it’s time to remain a little bit skeptical, don’t you think?

Oh, while we’re talking about hilarious women I love who need some additional employment, the Real Housewives Institute would like to extend a job offer to the young woman who applied for a job at Ramona’s sports bar, AOA, who said that the business machine she knows how to work is a stapler. We currently have an opening for Front Desk Representative and Head of Lori Patterson Document Collation that we think she would be perfect for. Please report to the Institute next Wednesday at 11 a.m. sharp to start your first shift. We’ll provide the stapler.

I guess we should talk about Bethenny and how bitchy she is even to her therapist, but I really don’t want to. I kind of want to talk about how she had a breakdown on Carole in CB2, and the two have a really interesting dynamic brewing, but mostly I just want to talk about that to register that the whole scene might have been planned just so that she could drink a Skinny Girl Vitamin Flavored Water Beverage on a display couch, but I don’t want to talk about that, either. Let’s just skip Bethenny this week, shall we? I think that’s best for all of us.

Now we’re just left with Ramona Singer. I am enjoying Ramona much more this season now that she’s been battered down by life a little bit and isn’t the judgmental howler monkey that she used to be. However, every once in a while she reverts back to form, and I remember just why I want to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart or make her star in an episode of Naked and Afraid or something. Case in point is the fight at Petrosian, where Ramona shares her newfound skill of talking about someone who is right next to her as if she is not in the room.

In this case, the person Ramona was trash-talking was John, Dorinda’s skeezy boyfriend. Now, there is no doubt that this walking toupee of a man has grabbed more asses than the calipers at a weight-loss clinic. In fact, John might even be worse than Kristen’s husband, Josh, a beer-pong ball with a dent in it, but that does not excuse Ramona and Countess Crackerjacks talking about how awful he is right in front of his face while he tries to eat caviar with a room full of relative strangers.

This whole fight was weird because not only was Ramona making John feel uncomfortable by talking about how she and LuAnn were relating how they don’t like him to Dorinda, she was also doing this in front of her date, Michael, who looks like every guy I stare at in the Equinox steam room until the fog clears a little bit and then I think, Um, maybe not. Also, doesn’t he kind of look like a less fit, taller, prep-school version of Mario? Isn’t Michael, as a name, the Wasp-y version of Mario, anyway? Either way, here is Ramona making a horrible impression of herself in front of this guy and in front of her friend Dorinda (whose birthday they were supposedly celebrating) by talking about John right in front of his big old noggin. Ramona has learned a lot of things, but tact and how to choose a good white wine at a restaurant are not two of them.

As Ramona and LuAnn are clamoring and clanging downstairs in the basement of Petrosian, there is some banging going on upstairs, too, at the back door to the restaurant located in the kitchen, right between the door to the walk-in closet and a giant baker’s rack full of Champagne flutes. Someone was pounding on the door furiously and unrelentingly, like the mafia was there to collect their due. After several minutes of this banging, Miss Petrosian, looking like a dove smothered in Drano in her blue corset and flirty little skirt, walked by the door and heard it.  She slowly opened the door, peeking around its edge to see who was out in the alley making all that racket.

When the door opened, she saw a woman standing there in the light snow with a mink jacket down to her knees with a hood pulled up over her head. She looked like one of the chorus members in Doctor Zhivago: The Musical! and all that you could see of her face was the large pair of sunglasses that were catching a little plastic spark from the streetlight in the alley. “It’s about time,” the woman said, brushing past Miss Petrosian and removing her hood.

“Oh my gosh, Ms. Zarin!” Miss Petrosian said, quickly closing the door behind her. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“Don’t make that mistake again,” Jill Zarin said as she started clomping down the narrow confines of the kitchen, past the racks and racks of glasses, pans, and various serving apparatuses of the caviar trade. As she was almost out of the kitchen and about to enter the restaurant itself, she swatted a metal bowl off one of the racks, and it landed with a clang and circled around, the rim screeching out an echo that got quicker and quicker as it settled to the floor. Jill didn’t even look down and just kept on walking. She had business to attend to, and her fur was already wet.