“The Real Housewives of Orange County” decide to throw a You Do Me and I Do You party this week, but relax, it’s not nearly as inappropriate as that might make it seem.
It’s a dress-up party, see, with each woman picking the name of another to come as to the shindig.
Tamra Judge gets Heather Dubrow and shows up in a brunette wig and a sweater with Fancy Pants in large letters on the back.
“Heather Dubrow here!” she announces as she arrives at the party with a dead-on impersonation of Heather’s prancy walk and golden money gun that shoots bills, presumably fake, but who knows, at the pull of a trigger. “I’ll take this chair because I look like a princess!”
Heather is not impressed: “I wouldn’t buy a money gun, it’s déclassé,” she sniffs, using the Fancy Pants word for “tacky.”
Gina Kirschenheiter gets Emily Simpson and spares no detail in her attempt to recreate her BFF in body and spirit.
“I had to grow a booty in one week,” Gina says of the costumery necessary to capture the curviness of Emily. “It’s like Spanx with booty pads.”
Emily is mostly pleased with Gina’s results.
“I am so impressed,” she says to the camera. “Except with the boobs. She might have needed to add a little more there.”
The others all eventually show up, too. Emily is Shannon Storms Beador. Shannon is Gina. Taylor Armstrong is Tamra. Heather is Jenn Pedranti. And Jenn is Taylor.
“I’m dead,” says Taylor, who you may remember is the woman in the infamous Woman Yelling at a Cat meme. “Jenn even took the time to get a Smudge the cat.”
Tamra, meanwhile, isn’t nearly as impressed with Taylor’s version of her.
“That does not look like me at all,” she complains. “She could have worn a Cut Fitness hat. She could have (chest) prosthetics. She could have worn a sign that says (jerk face). I’m a little disappointed.”
Last to arrive, and thank God and the show producers for resurrecting her, is Vikki Gunvalson, the self-proclaimed OG of the OC, who’d been bumped from the show a few years ago, but now has fallen back in favor.
Why is Vikki the greatest of housewives? She arrives at the party pulling a large bucket in which is an already tapped keg of beer. (She also arrives as herself – baller move.)
“Whoo! Where’s the party?” Vikki shouts. (Vikki’s normal speaking voice remains a shout, of course.) “Who wants to give me a keg stand?”
I’m going out on a limb now to say this will be the only 61-year-old woman you will see doing a keg stand on your TV this year.
Next Vikki pressures her old pal Shannon into following suit.
“I’m not a keg-stander person,” Shannon says. “I’m going to vomit.”
To her credit, she doesn’t, but neither does she manage to actually drink much from the tap as the women hold her aloft.
“I can’t do that thing where you can, like, open your throat and down stuff,” Shannon says, and fortunately for all of us does not elaborate.
As the drinks continue to flow, the evening disintegrates in the usual ways. First, with lots and lots of dirty talk. (If “The Real Housewives of Orange County” was an ordinary workplace their HR department would have its hands full.)
“I’m slutty Heather!” Tamra decrees at one point, and pulls her skirt above her waist to prance around the patio. “I love being Heather da Ho. Heather da Ho is the way to go.”
As Heather, excuse me, Tamra shakes her be-thonged behind at the camera, the real Heather is greatly displeased.
“Well apparently dressing up like Heather Dubrow doesn’t mean you behave like Heather Dubrow,” she says in voice that if it were any colder Vikki would chip off a few pieces and put them in her drink.
Tamra, who cohosted this classy soiree, pulls out a card game called Do or Drink, a sort of boozy, dirty version of Truth or Dare. In rapid order we are treated – though perhaps that’s not the right word – to the following Do’s:
Vikki accepts the challenge to act out a sex position. Heather correctly guesses that Taylor has had a threesome – or as Heather would say, a ménage à trois – which means Taylor, not Heather, has to down three shots. Gina has to “motorboat” the person to her right; which turns out to be Jenn dressed as Tamra, though it doesn’t look any kind of a boating activity I’ve ever seen.
Vikki next accepts the challenge of a strip tease with a shot for every item of clothing. We only see her toss her shirt and bare her bra, but maybe they’re saving the rest for the Snyder Cut. Taylor draws a card that requires her to apply her tongue to part of Emily.
“When I heard game night I thought like Monopoly or Twister,” Emily tells the camera. “I didn’t not envision my (thingamajig) getting licked. But you know what, I’m not mad about it.”
Taylor, who earlier this season told her castmates she’s bisexual, wasn’t mad about it either.
“If there’s a (thingamajig), I’ll lick it,” she says in her confessional.
If you thought this evening would end with everyone hugging everyone else and telling each other what a lovely time they’d had, well, you’d probably never seen the show before.
The swizzle stick that breaks this party’s back is the not-very-interesting ongoing storyline about Shannon’s relationship with boyfriend John and the fact that the other women have all been talking about it behind her back.
Shannon pulls Heather aside to grill her about what she had or hadn’t said, and also what other people had or hadn’t. Tamra and Gina and Emily have their own whisper fest a table away.
Shannon is upset that some of the others might be saying her relationship with John isn’t good, even though Shannon herself is the source of their information. Girl, don’t go on national TV to complain about a fight with your boyfriend and then get mad that he might hear about it from others.
“I’m out!” Shannon declares in a voice that isn’t sure whether to be angry or tearful. She tries to walk out the door, but the women follow.
“I’m out!” she tells the producers in a little tent outside Jenn’s house as the cameras continue to roll.
“I’m out!” she says at least three times in the trailer for next week’s episode.
She’s never really out though. It’s like she’s Michael Corleone in “The Godfather III”: Just when she thought she was out, they pull her back in.
Until next week … I’m out!
