The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Bum Voyage

As my good, dear friend David Mason always says, Miami is the Mariah Carey of cities. It’s slutty, it’s cheesy, it’s seen better days, and it thinks it’s a little bit better than it really is. The people who love it really love it and the people who hate it would much rather be at a Celine Dion concert and you can’t even stand them. No matter what you think about the tackiness, it’s still a whole lot of damn fun and every time “Emotions” comes up on a Spotify playlist, you know that your booty will shaking like a strong Jell-O shot.

I bring this up because Miami is the only city that Bethenny’s bleeding uterus will allow the ladies to go to. They tried Mexico, they tried Hawaii, but in the end, the fibroids always get what they want and they wanted a bottomless brunch at the Fontainebleau and to grind up on some Latino strippers in the back hut of Twist. This is what Bethenny gets for delaying her surgery. If she had just had it in the first place like her doctor told her, instead of monkeying around with that holistic bullshit, she’d be all better now and everyone would be going on an ATV tour of the locations that Lost used on the Big Island and then watching Sonja rip off her bikini top while under a waterfall. Thanks for ruining everything, Bethenny’s baby oven.

I love how Dorinda is forced into dragging everyone to Miami. “The bottom line is, we have to get out of the city,” Dorinda tells us, failing to mention that one group vacation outside of the tristate area is contractually obligated because there hadn’t been nearly enough conflict during this back half of the season. It wasn’t so much a bottom line as a fine print. (Also, a bottom line is also what happens when everyone is checking their coats at the Eagle.)

Now I don’t really have a problem with Luann, but she’s really getting on my nerves with all of this bullshit about her soul mate and how incredibly in love she is. The only other topic that people drone on about that I care less about is CrossFit. Is Tom like Luann’s Workout of the Day? The most telling scene of the whole episode is when she’s on her friend’s yacht (which she is trying to make everyone think is Tom’s yacht) and she’s dancing by herself, just bopping along to music that no one else can hear. That is Luann’s life right now. It’s not a group number or even a pas de deux, it is just her celebrating with herself — intoxicated on joy that no one else can feel. It’s like she’s one of those jerks who sing along to the music on their headphones on the subway.

You can’t really blame the other women for being wary, especially because of everyone’s misgivings about just what went down between Tom and Ramona and Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Beaver Cap Trading Company Morgans. Ramona was the most vocal about her previous relationship with Tom, but after much goading, it seems like Sonja, who has been schtupping him for the better part of a decade, is the one who really has major misgivings.

It’s hard to blame Sonja for the way she feels, and there’s something about Luann’s way of sweeping both of these relationships under her lube-stained carpet that seems a little off. Instead of denying that they ever occurred, I feel like it would be more gracious to acknowledge their relationships with Tom. She’s correct to think that everything that happened with her man before they met doesn’t really matter to their relationship. I mean, we all read “The Dead” our senior year in high school. However, it’s different when all those women who came before are obligated to spend a certain amount of time with you every year in front of a camera.

Sonja tries to vocalize this, saying that when Luann attempts to dismiss everything that is “BL: Before Lu” (which sounds like a straight-to-video movie starring Antonio Banderas) she ultimately dismisses Sonja and whatever relationship she had with Tom. I don’t think Sonja is brokenhearted over it. She knew that her shenanigans with Tom were a limited-time only — like Christmas lights or the McRib — but that doesn’t mean she wants to be erased from the picture because Luann decided to marry this dude like three weeks after Dorinda set them up.

Speaking of Dorinda, she is for realsies “stirring the pot.” I am growing to really hate this phrase, especially how it is misappropriated here at the Real Housewives Institute. It’s like when Ramona was being a horn dog and requesting names, occupations, sexual orientations, and Tinder profiles of every single gentleman who was going to be Luann’s second in a never-ending string of engagement parties. “You’re stirring the pot,” she says to Ramona. No, she isn’t trying to make trouble; she’s just being annoying. Two different things.

I don’t think Dorinda is trying to cause problems. I think that she’s the only person in the group who is talking to and on good terms with every other member of the cast. She’s not really stirring the pot; she’s just serving as a conduit between parties to let them know how they all really feel. Naturally, that is going to get some people riled up and cause conflict. Okay, fine. You’re right. Dorinda is totes stirring the pot. Fine.

All I will say is thank St. Camille of Grammer, patron saint of self-restraint, that Sonja is sober for all of this. The only thing that would make this boat party even more of a flaming mess than it certainly will be is if Sonja gets trashed. Her loose lips, for the first time in history, would literally sink the ship. Luann isn’t even worried about her. She’s worried about Ramona and she says, “This evening is going to go off without a hitch.” Seriously? In the eight seasons this program has been made publicly available for scholarly research here at the Real Housewives Institute, has she even once attended a Real Housewives party? Has any evening ever ended without fights, recriminations, and spouses yelling at women dressed in ridiculous costumes for some ludicrous theme?

Anyway, this was such an odd little trip. Everyone was very disjointed. Carole didn’t show up until later because of some unspoken errands she had to run and Jules makes a stopover in Boca Raton, where the world stops over before that ultimate journey. She visits her parents and at no time does she offer her mother a cut of her business even though she’s stealing all of her mother’s recipes for Gut Magic or whatever the hell she’s calling her line of diluted tonic elixirs. Bethenny, well, she is in Miami after using her bleeding lady flower to get out of Luann’s engagement party.

Someone else wasn’t even there, she was back in New York and unable to find herself a ticket down to Miami at the last minute. She couldn’t let this all happen without her, she had to make sure that all of the pawns were right where she needed them to be for her big reveal. Bobby dragged her to a dinner party on the Upper East Side and she was sitting next to a mutual friend of her and Bethenny’s while she seethed about what she could possibly do. Then, as fate would have it, her neighbor got up for a moment to talk to the hostess in another room, leaving her phone on the table.

No, it wasn’t possible. Could it be? She picked up the iPhone very gingerly but without raising any suspicion. She put her thumb on the center button and hoped that the great deity above loved her and she would be lucky. She pushed it and instead of a lock screen she got a home screen. This bitch left her iPhone on the table unlocked! She could hardly contain the glee from spreading over her face like algae on the surface of a pond. Contacts. Frankel. Bethenny. Message. “Hey Bethenny,” she typed, her manicured nails clacking on someone else’s screen quickly before this woman would return. “I just heard the weirdest thing about that guy Tom, your friend Luann’s new fiancé …”

She pushed send and then started another message, weaving a story of infidelity and betrayal, moral turpitude and sexual perversion, embezzlement and petty crimes against delivery drivers he never tipped. It was so outrageous it was totally believable and, since Bethenny thought it was coming from a reliable source, it was a targeted missile headed straight for the leaking tip of Florida — both a cluster bomb and a surgical strike all at once.

Just then she heard footsteps behind her and she got up with the iPhone still in her hand. “I was just coming to get you,” Jill Zarin said, handing the phone back to its rightful owner. “You left your phone on the table and I didn’t want it to be a part of anything awful.”

“Thanks. I’m such a loony sometimes,” the owner said, taken a little bit aback by Jill’s strange phrasing.

“It’s my pleasure,” Jill said. “Really.” Jill brushed passed her, her heels ringing out on the prewar parquet as she made her way to the bathroom where she was so elated with the chaos that she needed to take a little whizz.