The Real Housewives of Orange County Recap: British Bulldogs
I can’t believe that we are 18 seasons into the Real Housewives phenomenon and this is only the second mammogram party I can think of. Kyle Richards and Lisa Rinna went during season nine of Rich Women Doing Things, but that’s it (I believe). Why isn’t every show having mammogram parties? This is the best possible storyline. It gets the women together and they can talk about what is going on in the show and then, when they’re finished, we can all watch in real time while their brains melt at the possibility that they might be dying of a terrible and debilitating disease. Yay! Doctors! Hospitals! Death! Drama! Boobs!
As for what is happening in the show, we get a mini recap of the last episode where Jenn tells them about how Alexis Bellino freaked out when she got Shannon’s text disinviting her (“Uninviting” her? “Non-inviting” her?) to the London trip. Then Shannon reads off Alexis’s email that she finally sent in response, stewing over it for about one-tenth of the time I took her to think up and rehearse, “There’s the door, Shannon Beador.” In the text she says, “Since you’re hosting this amazing trip to Europe with our friends, surely you can scrounge up the funds to pay my future husband his $75,000 that you borrowed and owe him.” Ugh, this terrible, terrible woman. Shannon offered to pay the money back, but John just wouldn’t accept it, so trying to paint Shannon out like she’s poor and withholding is not the move.
Then it’s time for the doctor to examine every woman and I have to give Heather Dubrow mad props for making everyone go in what seems like genuine concern but also a boon for the show. We find out that Shannon hadn’t had a mammogram in 10 years. In the U.K., the NHS recommends that women aged 50 to 70 get one every three years, so Shannon has missed a few. At the appointment, we learn Jenn has a lump in her breast that she didn’t get investigated for five months. I have never had a pair of breasts, I have never had a mammogram, so I shouldn’t really be telling women how to live their lives, but if this stupid show can just get a few more women to get their boobs checked out and we save just a few lives, then all of the terrible things this show has perpetuated in our culture might be worth it.
It turns out Jenn’s lump is probably just a scar from her implants, and the weird lump they found in Gina’s mammogram was just a lymph node, but Gina didn’t even know that you can find a lymph node in her lovely lady lumps (check it out!). We really needed this doctor’s visit. As everyone is getting ready to leave, they’re comparing their results, and Shannon says, “Turns out my breasts are still very dense, even at 60.” After that, everyone stopped talking, went about their days, and no one asked Heather Dubrow how she was feeling.
Later, at the London dinner, Tamra asks Heather about the results of the test. (I’m sure prompted by either Heather, a producer, or someone.) Heather wells up and says that not a single person asked how she was doing. Heather! Why does someone need to ask? When Shannon talked about her dense breasts, that was her cue to say, “They say I have dense breasts too and they’re worried because my risk is high.” Why does she need to be asked? You’re in a room with your friends, you can volunteer information about your life, especially if she’s seeking comfort. These are your friends. Open up. Don’t just be on the lookout for something to be aggrieved about. (I will give Heather credit for saying that she has a risk factor of 40 percent and it’s usually 11 percent when the doctor told her it’s 39 percent and 12 percent. This is an acceptable amount of hyperbole to add to her story without flat-out lying.)
The big happening of the trip was that everyone piled into JetBlue’s Mint business class seats for a lovely, promotional consideration trip to London. On the plane, Emily brushes her teeth and rinses with Dr. Pepper, which is the only nastier combination than Malibu rum and Diet Pepsi. They land in London and head straight to the May Fair hotel, which is in Mayfair, on the Upper East Side of London. It is also the same hotel where Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Icy Hot Morgans washed her face in a bidet during a RHONY trip to London in season five.
Ugh, I’m not sure how I feel about having these ladies in my adopted hometown of London. I have never heard someone say “cheerio” or “spot of tea” in my six years here. There is a butcher near my house who unironically calls customers “gov’nah” but that’s as stereotypically English as you’re going to get. I have also never eaten a crumpet unless by crumpet you mean an English man’s backside, then I have eaten plenty. Also “trousers” means pants and “pants” means underwear. Oh, and you pronounce Thames like “tems,” you pronounce Leicester Square like “Lester” Square, and you pronounce King Charles III like “justice for Diana, down with the monarchy, abolish the House of Lords.” I hope that helps (and that no one sees this recap when I apply for citizenship in four years).
When they arrive at the hotel, Heather makes a meal of Shannon flirting with the sexy daddy concierge. Maybe that’s where Shannon got the idea to put their keys in a bowl and have each of the women pick. She wanted a swingers’ party, but all she got was this. It was kind of an efficient but boring way to select the rooms. Katie is in the “Opium” sweet, which is vaguely Asian-themed, and are we sure that’s not a little bit racist?
The ladies then go on a boat ride down the Thames, but it’s a rocket boat, and it looks scary, and, of course, Heather Dubrow wants no part of it. If it is fancy, yes. If it is fun, no way. Heather Dubrow has a lot of things — several dining room table runners, an enormous thong collection, a dead chipmunk where her empathy should be — but fun is not one of them.
At dinner at a rooftop lounge that I will be visiting post-haste to see if we can still smell Shannon’s perfume, Katie opens up to the women about her upcoming trip to Korea to find her birth mother. Katie says her mother was 15 when she had her and almost gave birth on the factory floor because she worked right up until she went into labor. She tried to keep Katie but, after three days, realized she couldn’t. Katie says she wants to go back to tell her mother that she made a good but hard decision and she’s had nothing but a wonderful life. OMG, what is this moisture that is suddenly appearing on my face? Is it sweat? Is it mist? Is it toothpaste and Dr. Pepper? It can’t possibly be, is it … tears?
What happens next is not as sad but way more dramatic. Tamra and Heather decide to bring up something that Shannon said on Jeff Lewis’s radio show. Between this and its prominence in the new season of RHONY, this radio show is taking over all of Bravo. On it, Shannon said that she and John were talking about money and he said, “I wish you could get a low interest loan,” and Shannon said, “Well, you have money.” That makes it sound like it was a loan. Also, when Jeff Lewis asked Shannon if John might have heard her DUI, she said she never thought of it before, when she had already told a similar story to Heather when they were all on that trip to Sonoma.
Heather is attacking Shannon because she feels like she was used to promote Shannon’s propaganda about John. Tamra is saying that Shannon is caught out in a lie, because she said she hadn’t thought of it before when she really had. Shannon gets all mad about this and storms (Beador) away from the table. The problem is, the table is on the other side of a wall of bars so while she’s waiting for the elevator, the women are still talking shit about her and she’s yelling through the bars about how she’s not a victim because victims sit around and feel sorry for themselves but she’s moving on with her life. Okay, I get Shannon’s point about victims, but that is not entirely accurate. Kevin Bacon was a victim of Bernie Madoff, but he still moved on with his life. Sometimes people are victimized and how they respond to it doesn’t really matter.
The problem here is that Heather and Tamra are right. Shannon totally set Heather up in that scene. She found out that John and Alexis have videos of her that they were going to release so she went to Heather’s room to spin her own narrative about JJ Squared. This seemed fairly plain even as it was happening. We all know Shannon told her good buddy Jeff to bring up the thing about John not hearing the accident so she could respond to it. As Tamra points out, Shannon does it all the time on this reality show.
We know that Shannon did all this and, honestly, I don’t think most of the audience cares. Shannon never did any of this proactively, she only did it reactively. Alexis is the one who showed up telling everyone about the videos and when Shannon found out, she dropped a bomb of her own. Then she went on Jeff Lewis to talk about the suit for an hour (something Tamra keeps pointing out) only after JJS sent the story to People and made it public. Shannon wasn’t there trashing them; she was there responding to them (and, in the process, rightfully trashing them). So, yes, Heather and Tamra are factually correct, but they are not emotionally correct.
After Shannon runs off, we see Tamra in confessional saying that Shannon was probably going to the bar and the next footage is her ordering a Diet Coke and a vodka soda from the bartender. The editors have never been crueler or funnier. But when Gina joins her, we get another wonderful revelation. Shannon tells Gina that when she texted Alexis to uninvite her, she discovered that the texts shortly above that are from 2018 when Alexis threatened to sue Shannon. At the start of the season, she said she had nothing to do with Jim Bellino’s very expensive lawsuit against Tamra and Shannon. In the text, Alexis says, “We have engaged an attorney,” and, “You will be hearing from our attorney.” So, yes, it does mean that Alexis has now been part of two lawsuits against Shannon, and she’s the biggest liar of all.
Just think about Alexis, back in Orange County, lying in bed trying to compose her text. She knows this will be her final act of the season, before she returns to be thoroughly excoriated at the reunion. Her nails click on the screen as she types out her message to Shannon, deletes the whole thing and then starts again. “Johnny, what about this?” she yells over the sound of running water as he rinses off from their 14th love-making session that day. She mentions the suit, she mentions Shannon having money, she thinks it is short and clever. John agrees. But there’s one thing left. Which emoji should she end with. She thinks first of her go-to the “see no evil monkey,” as if Shannon should be embarrassed if she’s poor. Nope. That’s not it. She thinks about the Union Jack or maybe the Beefeater guard, who comes in a variey of shades and genders. But which to choose? Nope. Too complicated. What about “wad of bills with wings.” No, that might be hers and John’s money flying out into Shannon’s pockets.
Alexis flips through the emojis one after the next, screen after screen of tiny images making her squint, giving her something like a cramp just between the eyes. Finally, she gets to her most used emojis and sees the one in the top left corner. The one she uses all the time. The one that means everything to her. She chooses the “hands making a heart” emoji like she’s a contestant on Love Island making her introductory video. Yes, it’s perfect. It’s everything Alexis stands for. It’s love, but a cheesy kind of manufactured, performative love. It’s the spectacle of caring without any of the emotional hard work. It’s saying love, but it’s ironic, it’s giving hate, it’s masking hate, it’s hate fucked in the ass by love until love comes out of the hands and forms a little heart. Yup, this is the one. This will do. Alexis presses send, and as the text makes a whooshing sound, she thinks it’s the noise of her soul finally leaving her body to meet Space Jesus.