From the orange county weekly -
Episode One: Jeana’s children are monsters! Jeana’s husband is a monster! Jeana (our plump real-estate agent) is no great shakes herself! Jeana’s daughter Kara whines soulfully when her older brother Shane gets a new car and she has to drive his hand-me-down convertible Mercedes. Shane grunts angrily when Kara gets cold hard cash for making the volleyball team. Kara demands a new car. Kara gets a new car. Meanwhile, Shane gets drafted by the Oakland A’s in, like, the 1,000th round, and dad Matt Keough, who used to play for the A’s and still works in the organization, calls home to find out how the draft went. Father and son share a monosyllabic conversation. “I think he’s proud of you,” Jeana says, noncommittally, flatly and without affect, after the phone call. “He thought you were going to do a lot worse.”
Kimberly (our outgoing transplant) makes fun of how everyone in OC has breast implants. But Kimberly likes her own breast implants. We call this “cognitive dissonance.”
Slade wants 24-year-old party girl fiancée Jo to stay home and be a housewife. The camera lingers as she sits on the kitchen counter, staring at the phone, wondering what the fuck she’s going to do with her day.
Vicki (self-made insurance lady) is a bitch, and Lauri (the broke-ass divorcée who suffers under her) is a victim.
Episode Two: Jeana’s son Shane goes off to kill some bunnies for the neighbors, who are tired of replacing their impatiens. He has an arsenal at his disposal, but it’s a lot of Elmer Fudd for nothing. No rabbits were harmed in the making of this series.
Kim goes to buy a new car. “I don’t care about my car,” she says, not at all shallow like her neighbors, “but in this area . . .” But oh, as the car salesman is showing her all the great places to stow your kids in the SUV, he lets fly with “grandchild,” as in, “Here would be a great place to put your grandchild.” Everything stops for the smallest of most perfect beats. Kim does not buy the car.
Slade, who is a freak, does tai chi in his underwear and what appears to be an ice mask to reduce puffiness before showing us his power outfits for his big meeting. He yammers on about needing to appear wealthy so the dude he’s meeting will know he’s capable of . . . what? Being wealthy? Then he climbs into a Hummer, and I laugh and laugh.
But then he meets with the guy, and the guy is so unbelievably rude I thought it was a put-up job. I mean, no one acts that way. Not even Trump times 10 acts that way. The guy is seriously, seriously damaged—and wait till you meet his wife, who puts cubic zirconia on the pink rims of her monster truck! The wife is really pretty awesome.
Lauri notes, about being rich, “I really miss those things. I’m the maid now.” The observant viewer will note her Mizrahi bedding, which I saw on my shopping sojourn through Target just today. It’s cute—giant orange blossoms, splashy and colorful—but again, if Lauri still had her status, she would only shop at Target for the maid’s bedding. Which, of course, I guess she did.
Vicki’s son Michael is an asshole.
Jeana’s son Shane is an asshole. But let me elaborate: Shane and his little brother Colton, who is 13, are in Mexico with their family and go to some dirt-racing track. Colton stalls his dune buggy thingie a bunch of times—because he is 13—before he gets it right. He then beats Shane’s time on the track. Shane’s only possible recourse is to keep making fun of him for stalling. “It’s my first time driving a stick, Shane!” Colton points out sensibly. “Come on, give me a little credit!” Shane grunts angrily and, like an asshole, says, “The first time I drove a stick, it was a Ferrari.”
Lauri’s daughter Ashley is an asshole, but that doesn’t come till episode four, and I’m tired of recapping the episodes, and I will stop.
Except for this: Lauri’s son Josh actually seems like a sweet kid, so he spends most of the season in juvie. It seemed like the teacher he scuffled with was the asshole, but it was off-camera, so we’ll never really know. In any case—go juvenile justice system!—they kept him doped up in juvenile hall to make sure he didn’t have a mental illness for more than a month before they sentenced him to an additional month because he’d been caught with pot in the past. So when he calls home, all lonely and fucked-up and locked away while big sister Ashley is having a party, she hears his voice and instantly hangs up on him with the same guilty manner with which you hang up if a woman answers when you call her boyfriend. That was my little brother calling from juvenile hall, she tells her friend bemusedly. Should I have talked to him, do you suppose?
BARBARIANS AT THE GATES
I drove behind the gates of Coto de Caza last week to meet with the women—all except Jeana, who was out of town seeing her asshole son, who’s playing ball at an Arizona community college. The country club where we coffee’d was hushed, even desolate on a rainy morning—the dark woods you would expect, the sweet selection of teas. Framed in the ceiling-high windows behind the women’s heads, the ridgelines of Coto de Caza were perfectly populated—not too many houses, or too few. It still had the natural beauty you’d expect of John Wayne’s old hunting grounds—his actual hunting grounds, not the bars of Balboa.
The women were nice, and ladylike, and funny and outgoing, and they looked far prettier in person than on the telly. Kim had looked manly on the teevee; in person her features were softer and sexy. Lauri had looked plastic, the light and video catching awkwardly on what seemed to be less-than-organic features; at the table at the Coto country club, she was gorgeous. Vicki still looked like a rabbit, but I probably would have found her less rabbity if I had liked her as a person.
Vicki was a trial. She instructed the others not to answer questions about themselves she’d deemed too personal and tried to micromanage everything, from what photos we would be using to how much Kim should talk.
Outgoing Kim was saying something outgoing—perhaps it was after I’d complimented her for going out with her girlfriends and dancing and flirting with little people and people in wheelchairs (I thought that was nice!) and she’d responded outgoingly, “I am very much an equal opportunist!” So naturally Vicki sniped, “Oh, it’s the Kim Show again.” Kim thanked her genuinely for reining her in, said she was well-aware that she often needed it, and apologized sweetly for monopolizing (she wasn’t) the conversation. She begged to hear what Vicki had to say. “Nothing, really,” Vicki answered peevishly. “I don’t really have a piece to say.”
Not only was she schoolmarming Kim, she was treating me as if I were her 18-year-old daughter—the same daughter she tried to browbeat into quitting her job rather than missing a family weekend at their second home (they have four) at the River. To her husband’s credit, he firmly (for him) explained that quitting your job for a weekend’s play is not a good life lesson for a teenager.
My sources also tell me that, after I left, Vicki demanded of the Bravo publicist, who was in attendance with the series producer as we all had coffee and fruit, that Bravo pay for a $150 flower arrangement Vicki had bought for her coffee table in anticipation of a visit from Access Hollywood. As a person who makes a good, decent middle-class living—a living that, if the Real Housewives were making it, they would probably declare bankruptcy—I would like to say that I frequently buy myself flowers because it makes my house look nice. And I have never, not once, demanded someone else pay for them. But maybe that’s how you get four houses.
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