Warren has taken the smalls upta The State Formerly Known As Home to go bother my parents for the weekend, leaving me with just my thoughts and Murphy, the Co-Dependent Dog, for company. It's heaven! I get to do chores from start to finish, throw out things the kids never use but would whine about, eat food straight out of the fridge without getting caught, and do schoolwork at odd hours of the day.
And I get to indulge my jones for Real Housewives of Orange County.
Yes, I loves me some RHoOC. The other versions all are just ... off in some way. The Atlanta set strikes me as being perpetually on the brink of throwing down, the Beverly Hills gang takes themselves way too seriously, and I can't watch the Real Housewives of NJ for longer than seven seconds before Teresa's voice makes me want to punch her in the solar plexus. But the OC is the ne plus ultra of the franchise. This group is so internally contradictory, the entertainment is endless. They are operatically trivial. Unself-consciously self-absorbed. One moment, they are screeching in disgust and recoiling from food served to them at a dinner party, and the next minute, they're talking to the camera about how classless and ill-mannered each other can be. [An aside: Even my ultra-finicky eater, the one who refuses to eat anything at home that isn't starch and cheese, knows the expectation is that you try what's put in front of you when you're at someone else's house, and if you don't like it, you eat enough to be polite. Really, ladies, if a seven-year-old can do it, anyone can do it.]
So why do I love this show? I love this show because my problems are boringly average ones, like who's going to take the car to the garage, and what are we going to do about our aging parents, and theirs are entertainingly shallow. One woman (the blonde one) freaked out because she found *one* tortilla strip on her dinner plate, and EVERYONE KNOWS SHE DOESN'T DO CARBS. Another one (the brunette) spent her time crabbing about the size of her house while the camera panned through a McMansion of Brobdingnagian proportions because the baby's room is too far away from the master suite. I can solve that problem in a fast hurry - I will happily volunteer to let her family live in my three-bedroom raised ranch for a week, and then we'll see how big a problem it is to have too much space. One of them (the blond one again) went to a fondue restaurant and then got upset when she found out that all the food was served with cheese. Because, yeah, fondue is known as a health food.
Could anything be as unintentionally amusing as watching a gaggle of bottle-blond Botoxed bimboes with boob jobs moan to one another about how they are totally over all the drama and how they just want everyone to be real? We're talking about a group of women here who have to have their hair styled just to go outside the house; if they truly got "real" and took off the nails, hair extensions, spray tans, fake eyelashes, lip plumpers, Spanx, and all the other gear they consider necessary to get through the day, there wouldn't be anything left but a little pile of silicone and Lycra. It's what I imagine life was like for the Tier II-popular girls in high school; you know, the girls who spent all their time together jockeying for social status and boyfriends even though they couldn't stand one another. (I say 'imagine' because yours truly was nothing BUT real in high school - really awkward, really loudmouthed, and really, really far down the social scale.) Truly, it's hard to imagine the burdens these women labor under. In this world of wickedness and woe, it's nice to know that some people's worst problem is whether or not someone snuck a carbohydrate onto their plate. Carry on, Real Housewives of Orange County! And if I dare say so myself, keep on keepin' it real!




