The women of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” may be ladies of occasional leisure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t often find a lot of them at the gym, on the golf course, working with personal trainers, and the like.
And so it’s not a surprise by any means that this week on the Bravo series we find Shannon Storms Beador, Jenn Pedranti, and new housewife Katie Ginella running up and down a long cement staircase at the beach.
Well, not a surprise to viewers, at least. Katie, she’s still figuring this stuff out.
“My idea of exercise? My husband, late-night activities,” she tells the camera in a post-workout confessional. “I can’t be the only woman in Orange County that doesn’t work out.
“If I could, I’d drive my car to the mailbox,” she adds, to which we say, How do you know you can’t?
The second episode of Season 18 is a little snoozy after the previous week’s premiere. We get know Katie a little bit more. We witness a rising feud between Jenn and Gina Kirschenheiter that closes out the episode with each calling the other a joke.
And, to get things started, we wrap up the premiere’s cliffhanger confrontation between Shannon, who used to date John Janssen, and Alexis Bellino, who now does.
“He broke up with her!” Alexis tells Jenn and Gina while they’re still on speaking terms, her words drifting over to where Shannon is sitting now.
“We can lower our voices just a little bit, OK?” Shannon tells her like a school marm with expensive hair and makeup.
“Was I raising my voice out of control?” Alexis asks Jenn and Gina.
“You were. You were quite loud,” Shannon replies.
“I just got scolded!” Alexis continues. “I will not be shushed.
“Any storm that Beador wants to create, find another tornado,” she says, murdering a metaphor in a particularly brutal fashion.
Heather Dubrow, whose luncheon this us, calls the women to the table.
Check that, the menu says this is a “Dunch,” which the dictionary we consulted defines as either “an insubstantial meal eaten between lunch and dinner” or “a push or nudge with the elbow,” both of which are entirely plausible outcomes for this particular gathering.
Heather proudly explains that the tiny bites that rest on bent spoons on their plates are amuse bouche, because Heather firmly believes she knows all of the fancy things and suspects that her friends do not. Gina knows that this ain’t what she needs right now.
“I don’t understand why everything is Not Bread,” she whisper-whines to Katie, who correctly agrees that Not Bread is the worst kind of bread there is.
In the background is one of those clear glass booths that when you turn on its fan it sends small pieces of paper, usually cash money, flying around. Because it’s a Heather party, though there’s a higher concept at work here. The bits of ·paper have questions printed on them for each housewife to grab and answer.
“How much money is in there?” asks Jenn, whose inability to pay her rent has resulted in her eviction from the house Gina found for her to rent. Now she’s living with her brood of kids with boyfriend Ryan.
“She should just stay in there the whole time,” Emily tells the camera. “Maybe she can get some rent money. Or some car payment money.”
Alexis grabs a slip of paper in the booth that asks what her friendship goals are for 2024.
“I would say for Shannon Beador and I to kill all our animosity to move forward,” she replies, using a verb that doesn’t exactly suggest the most peaceful resolution to their problem.
“You might have to stop banging her ex-boyfriend,” Tamra says not-so-sotto voce.
Tamra steps into the glass booth and promptly strikes a “seductive” pose and licks the inside of its glass wall. Because of course she does.
“You just got the flu,” Gina shouts, and on it goes like this.
Here’s what else went down on Thursday:
• Katie accidently provided more insight into Jenn’s boyfriend Ryan, who in May surfaced in the middle of the investigation into the gambling scandal that snared the former interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Otani.
“What does Ryan do for a living?” she asked Jenn after her “workout” at the beach.
“Well, nothing now. He did mortgage for years and years, and then he’s done like real estate development since then,” Jenn replies. “He just kind of … I feel like he just sits around and plays in the sunshine. He just lives the dream life, I tell him.”
• Shannon, Gina and Emily meet up at a gym to practice for an upcoming flag football game between the housewives. Shannon, who was arrested for DUI after the last season aired, apologizes to Gina for not being particularly nice to her when she got her own DUI several seasons ago.
“I see Shannon being honest for the first time ever,” Gina tells the camera. “She was an open book of (bad stuff) and now she’s willing to look at the things that she doesn’t want to look at. And it’s really (crummy) to have to do that, but it’s also really respectable.”
• The Jenn-can’t-pay-her-rent storyline takes up more time than it’s worth, but it peaks with a coffee date between Gina, who’s upset that the eviction of someone she recommended might hurt her new real estate career, and Jenn, who tries to apologize for that but ends up only making Gina madder. Especially when Jenn walks in with full makeup, professional hairstyling, and new clothes.
“Honestly, it’s a slap in my face,” she says. “At least look like you’re on hard times, (bad lady).”
It goes downhill fast from there and ends with Gina and Jenn each calling the other a joke. You know, the usual way grownups deal with their differences.
