The Real Housewives of New Jersey Recap: Valley of the Blow-Up Dolls
This is really a show about a group of guy friends and their wives who hate one another.
How are these kids still not at college already? How many good-bye dinners, packing montages, b-roll of them when they were young and cute, and misty conversations with their parents do we possibly need? This is way too many. I get it, we have both Antonia Gorga and Gabriella Giudice going to school, but it can’t be that interesting. This is something that about 40 percent of kids in America do. Why do we need to spend 90 percent of a Housewives episode talking about it?
The one thing I am obsessed with, though, is just how much shit Gabriella is bringing with her to the University of Michigan. When I went away to my freshman year in college, all of my possessions fit in the back of my father’s Jeep Cherokee (if the model hasn’t been canceled, the name certainly has), and there still was too much junk lying around my dorm room. Here is Gabriella with multiple wardrobe boxes being shipped to Michigan, any one of which is probably bigger than the closet of the average dorm room at a state school. What about the non-hanging boxes? What about her school supplies and knickknacks? Where’s it all gonna fit?
Not only that, she’s having a whole moving company ferry her stuff out there. Is she taking furniture? Is she taking sculptures? What is she bringing that requires a moving truck? I’m sure that she got “promotional consideration” from Oz Moving for letting them show the truck and movers, but this is nuts. Based on my extremely cursory Google, Michigan students aren’t required to live in the dorm freshman year, but 97 percent of them do. Unless Gabriella is of that 3 percent, she has overpacked by a factor of about 27 quadrillion.
Other than talking about college like a straight man thinking about the Roman Empire (gay guys have a similar thing, but it’s Sparta), barely anything else happened. Joe Gorga had a birthday party, and he finally sat down and had a little heart-to-heart with his mother from another brother, Frank Catania. What did they talk about? Antonia going to college. Jesus. Are these two Rodney Dangerfields about to do the triple lindy? It’s absolutely exhausting.
At the start of the episode, everyone’s talking about Nate’s “He’s Not Dead Yet” Party, and Jen Aydin says it’s hard being at parties with Melissa where she won’t talk to her. She tells her houseguests that she has no idea what she did to Melissa to make her that upset. Melissa reminds us, quite succinctly, that Jen spread a cheating rumor about her last season that ate up even more airtime than college, if you could imagine such a thing. Jen tries to play semantics to get out of this, saying that it was really Danielle who brought it up on-camera and she heard it from Margaret so that she should be absolved. I’m sorry, but that is totally bullshit. It’s like someone spiked Melissa’s drink and Jen says, “Well, it was Margaret who bought the liquor and it was Danielle who handed her the glass so I had nothing to do with it.” Yeah, except you put the liquor in the glass and told Danielle to give it to her! You forced it all to happen! I feel like every recap last season found ways to disprove that Jen wasn’t guilty of this, so just go read those. We get a montage of Jen apologizing to Melissa, and she says Melissa should apologize to her for a change. Um, except Melissa hasn’t done anything wrong to Jen, at least that I remember. Melissa says it seems like Jen is searching for a reason to be mad at her and I completely concur with this assessment. and that’s not only because I want an invite to Missy G’s Party Palace this summer.
When Dolores tells the people staying at MGPP that she’s staying at Bill and Jen’s and it’s weird they weren’t invited, Joe Gorga does the right thing and reaches out to Bill to tell him to come by the party. As I keep saying, this is really a show about a group of guy friends and their wives who hate one another. Bill declines the invitation, saying that Jen is still upset with Melissa and that they can’t really hang until the ladies hash their shit out. Call the Guinness Book of World Records, because this is the first time that Bill has had his wife’s back on camera, but you can tell he said all of this through gritted teeth. At least he’s learning.
When Marge tells Rachel about this invite at the party, Rachel says she wouldn’t have shown up if she were Jen. I wouldn’t either. Save your pity invite. You think I want to sheepishly sit around a giant bread sculpture that says “ciao” and eat cured meats that are stapled to a board to look like the Leaning Tower of Pizza?
Back in New Jersey, when Teresa has a conversation with Luis, a man whose face is the same color as a box of Red Hots left out in the rain, Teresa tells him that she can’t believe that the rest of the girls thought she was saying that John Fuda was the biggest drug dealer in Bergen County now. She never said that. She meant when he was 16 or 17. This is why I can’t with Teresa. Here is a woman who kicked off a whole season of drama because she couldn’t understand an analogy that Jackie made using Teresa’s daughter as an example. Now Teresa expects us to plumb the depths of semantics so that we can understand she was trying to sully the name of a teenage John Fuda, not adult John Fuda. God, she’s just the worst.
Down the shore, Joe has his party and John Fuda brings a blow-up doll named Josephina, and she gives the best performance of the entire episode, not only providing us with endless sophomoric jokes but also giving all the guys shots right out of her butt hole. I don’t mean her anus, I mean the hole where her butt is supposed to be. It may also be the hole that inflates her butt — while I am an expert in inflatable sex dolls, I am not intimately familiar with this Josephina model. Also at the party are two ringwraiths named Kayla and Jamie whom I may or may not have to remember for the rest of the season. I’m confused why they keep popping up; we haven’t really met either of them yet.
At the party, Frank tells Dolores and Paulie that he’s going to propose to his girlfriend and the kids told him that he should tell Dolores before he does it. Dolores hears the news and is like, “Yeah. So? Good for you!” Then she ate an arancini made in the shape of Topo Gigio. (If you got that joke you are so old that they hadn’t even invented college when you were 18.)
There’s also this crazy conversation between Marge, Jen Fessler, Rachel, and Jackie. Rachel is mad that Jenf is being friendly with Teresa when she feels like her family. I don’t know, I’m kind of on Rachel’s side with this one. Yeah, Teresa has never done something specifically to Jenf, but if she is as close with Rachel as Rachel makes it seem, then she should have enough loyalty to her friend to stay away from Teresa. I don’t think she should be fighting Rachel’s battles, which is what Jenf thinks they’re implying, but if someone upset my bestie the way Teresa did to Rachel, I might say hi to them at the party and keep it pushing, but I’m not going to sit in a corner with them and giggle for an hour when everyone can see it. No way!
Jenf is right that she doesn’t need to be Marge and Rachel’s soldier, but she also doesn’t need to go over to the enemy camp and play the banjo with them around the campfire. There is a balance here that Jenf seems to be missing and, yes, it seems like she’s doing it so that she’ll have more clout on the show. That’s what is so frustrating about the ladies of the Dirty Jerz. Teresa is still the top dog and she has very few allies, so anyone who wants a long life on this here reality-television program could easily get one just by cozying up to the Wicked Witch of the West Brunswick Turnpike. It’s absolutely infuriating to watch, and I can’t wait until everyone is at fucking school already so that we can start talking about some things viewers might actually care about.