This week “The Real Housewives of Orange County” broke new ground. That’s right. For the first time in the history of housewifery, Mr. Snuffleupagus was briefly the main character of the show.
You know Snuffy from “Sesame Street,” of course, a show where you will never see Big Bird do body shots of tequila or Bert and Ernie go the medi-spa for a his-and-his botox treatment.
Oscar the Grouch, we’re not so sure about. If Tamra Judge were in one of those moods, he’d probably match her shot for shot until they both crashed out inside his trash can.
Snuffy showed up midway through Wednesday’s episode when Emily Simpson was taken aback by Heather Dubrow’s suggestion that she looked like Mr. Snuffleupagus. Something about how she’d jumped from a 36-foot-tall platform into a deep black cenote, emerging from the water hole looking a little bit worse for wear.
“Heather thinks I’m mean, but she is, too,” Emily tells the camera. “Isn’t she doing mean things when she says I look like a Snuffleupagus? It’s a big, huge furry Muppet!”
Later, after a water aerobics class for which the women all wore swimsuits printed with photorealistic images of muscular male torsos on them, some complete with hairy backsides in back, the debate picks up.
Heather explains that Mr. Snuffleupagus was her imaginary friend – typical Heather, trying to steal Big Bird’s imaginary friend – and that she loves him and so Emily should take it as a compliment.
“It’s very on-brand for Heather to have an imaginary friend who can’t talk back,” Gina Kirschenheiter tells the camera.
Shannon Storms Beador and Tamra, women with children who presumably might have seen “Sesame Street” once or twice, are mostly mystified by what on earth he is.
I don’t know what a Snuffleupagus is but I’m assuming it’s like super hairy and big, Shannon says.
“You know, the hairy guy who runs in the jungle,” Tamra says. “Sasquatch! He’s like Sasquatch and an elephant mixed up.”
Then Tamra proceeds to imagine how a Sasquatch and an elephant might accidentally have a child together, but that’s not something we want to explain in detail in the newspaper, is it?
Emily accepts Heather’s explanation, or maybe she is just tired of the conversation. We look forward to next week when the housewives debate which one of them looks most like Po, the Purple Teletubby.
For most of the rest of the episode, the housewives enjoy a sunny day, sweeping the clouds away in favor of ATV rides, cenote plunges, spa treatments, and a trip to the waterpark. But dark clouds arrive during a game of Truth of Dare, when Jenn Pedranti has the misfortune to pose a question to Vicki Gunvalson, who shows up a day or two late to the trip to surprise all the others.
Vicki chooses truth. Jenn suggests that since they don’t know each other maybe someone else should ask. Vicki pays no mind to that and decides that her truth will be to tell Jenn that she’s probably in love with the wrong guy and Vicki says she knows this for two reasons. One, it happened to her once, and two, Tamra has been spilling all the tea in Newport Beach about Ryan to Vicki.
Jenn absorbs this blank-faced as usual, which the other housewives are increasingly finding odd. Why doesn’t she react? Gina wonders. Why doesn’t she stand up for herself? Emily and Taylor Armstrong agree.
Be careful what you wish for, maybe, because the next day, Jenn goes off.
At brunch, Tamra and Jenn get into the whole thing all over again, and when Tamra tells Jenn that she “ruined her whole family” to leave her husband and be with Ryan, Jenn goes off.
It’s too much depressing back and forth to get into here – Jenn probably should have put a stop to this weeks ago – but at one point Jenn does nail the reason why all this mean gossip keeps going around, I think.
“If you need my (stuff) to make you more (bleepin’) relevant, good for (bleepin’) you,” she tells Tamra.
If only the mic had dropped then and there, but alas, you don’t need to be Snuffy to sniff out that this storyline is going to be with us for the rest of the season.
