The Real Housewives of Orange County: A $36,000 dinner party turns ugly
There’s a cost to all the bad behavior in which “The Real Housewives of Orange County” indulge each week, with tears, insults and hangovers among them.
And on Wednesday’s episode, when a gossip grenade tossed by housewife Shannon Storms Beador blew up housewife Heather Dubrow‘s fabulous dinner party, we got an actual dollar amount for the damage done, too.
“You know what sucks about it,” Heather told her reality TV star husband Dr. Terry Dubrow the morning after the party. “Not to (tick) you off, but it’s expensive.”
Oh yeah? Terry replied, mostly with his eyebrows. How much?
“All in, I think Nobu was probably 10ish,” Heather answered. “Alcohol, five.”
Add in such incidentals as party favors and decorations, and the total was 36, she continued, casually omitting the zeros to remind us normals that housewives live on an entirely different planet.
“$36,000? And you didn’t even get to dinner?” Terry replied. “That is infuriating.”
It really is, Terry! Your missus spent the equivalent of a year’s salary for someone making $17.31 an hour — or $10 an hour more than federal minimum wage — on a dinner party for 11 women that stalled out between the sushi and the steak courses.
The episode picked up where the Season 16 premiere had left us cliff-hangin’ a week earlier.
Shannon had a secret: That Heather’s friend Nicole had allegedly sued Heather’s plastic surgeon husband years earlier. And that, given Shannon’s apparent inability to keep a secret on TV, meant housewives Emily Simpson and Gina Kirschenheiter soon knew the rumor too.
At the party Gina was beside herself over the gossip, appointing herself the Miss Marple of Newport Coast.
“Fact: Nicole has a long history with plastic surgery, specifically regarding her boobs,” Gina declared, index finger raised high, in a camera confessional. “Was it Terry? We don’t know.”
Of course, Gina’s not much better than Shannon at, you know, minding her own business, so off she went to find Heather and spill all the tea. Shannon sees her reputation being drained like a glass of expensive champagne and rushes over, prompting Heather to get up and leave.
And by leave, we mean, leave the show. In a rare glimpse of the production crew filming the housewives, we see Heather hold up a hand to block the shot. “No, no, no,” she says as she turns to find her husband upstairs. “There’s no filming, show’s over.”
Meanwhile, Emily is grilling Nicole over what happened, and at first, it’s friendly enough, as Nicole says on camera that as a young model she’d been “forced” to file a lawsuit against Terry over complications from her procedure.
But Emily can’t stop serving unwanted advice so Nicole tells her, “Right now I don’t need your advice,” which sets Emily off for some possibly champagne-related reason.
“Don’t get in my (bleepin’) face and start saying (stuff) when I have been your friend the whole night!” Emily shouts.
Nicole, accurately, points out that they’ve known each other approximately 20 minutes. Then she orders Emily, who is seated, to sit down.
“I am sitting,” Emily replies
“Sit!” Nicole insists.
“I am sitting,” Emily repeats.
“Sit! (Bleepin’) sit!” Nicole says louder, because that always works.
These are grownups, mind you, and they’re not done yet. When Emily, a lawyer, starts to call Nicole stupid, we’re getting close to something really bad erupting.
“Go eat your sushi!” barks Nicole, who adds on an unpleasant term, and if there’s not a T-shirt with that on it by morning someone isn’t doing their job.
Emily replies in a depressingly similar manner, before Gina, bless her heart, tries to calm them down.
“You know what, I feel like there’s still potential here,” she tells Emily and Nicole, who surprisingly don’t unite to tell her to get lost in so many words.
Then Heather and Terry appear, looking serious, and for a moment it looks like things are going to get worse. But then the couple both prove themselves to be something you don’t often see on “The Real Housewives”: reasonable adults.
“You sued me,” Terry says, and Nicole, looking miserable, sighs as she says she felt pressured to do so.
“It is OK,” he continues. “You dropped it. It went away. It’s fine.
“By the way, can I just say something? Thank you for dropping it,” Terry says. He and Heather burst out laughing at that, and Nicole looks like she’s starting to realize she might make it to another day.
“It’s not a big deal,” Heather says in a camera confessional. “Nicole is our friend. She’s allowed to have a fresh start; we all are.”
Terry asks if they can “hug it all out and move on,” and that’s exactly what they do, unserved wagyu and all.
The rest of the episode squeezed in small bites of screen time for new housewives Noella Bergener and Dr. Jen Armstrong. Noella emerged as Shannon’s new friend, and by the looks of it, maybe her only friend left.
And Jen and her husband Ryne went out to dinner with Mr. Puppers, the chihuahua we see Ryne kiss more than his wife.
“I met Ryne shirtless with a chihuahua and I go home and he’s still shirtless with a chihuahua,” Jen tells the camera. “All the time!”