The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: A Need for Speed

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
A Match Made in Beverly Hills
Season 15 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

This week on our favorite show, Single Women Doing Things, the single women did things. They all showed up in LBDs (that stands for Limos By Daniel, an elite carpooling service that all reality productions use) and little black dresses to go on a bunch of speed dates, and one of them brought a Mini-Kelly. They went to help their daughter pick out flowers for her wedding and slapped a giant, green ostrich Birkin on the table. They met for lunch to talk about finances, and there was a seat just for a Birkin, which they all joked about stealing.

I’m tired of the fucking Birkins. We get it. You’re rich. You’re carrying two pounds of leather on your arm that costs as much as a car. Good for fucking you. And I know that some are Kellys and some are Birkins, and I might be calling a Kelly a Birkin and vice versa, but, know what, I don’t give a rip. These bags are dumb, they’re ugly, and the only thing they do is signify that you have enough money and met a Hermès sales associate who was happy to take it from you. The worst part is, they’re all carrying them around unclasped all the time. I thought maybe it was a cool girl thing or perhaps that they wanted to spill their secrets on the sidewalk between the car and the Chanel store on Rodeo, but no, that’s not even it. When I talked about this on my girl Amy O’Dell’s podcast, the commenters said it’s because it’s tough to work the clasps on these bags. Shut the fuck up. You mean I’m going to pay $30,000 for a bag, and closing it is going to be a chore? For that much money, you’d better send me a robotic Labubu that opens and closes that thing for me and lives in a pocket dimension inside the bag so that it doesn’t take up any storage space. Even worse than the money, even worse than the Skittles colors all of the women buy them in, even worse than the faulty hardware is that they do not connote anything, including exclusivity. Everyone has one now. It’s not like Samantha Jones has to steal Lucy Liu’s anymore. Each of these women buys them to say, “I’m in the club. I’m in the club,” and it’s just this club of rich assholes with no fucking taste. Who wants to be in that club? You have the fucking money, why don’t you buy some taste or at least a stylist who has some who can show you a better place to spend your cash that might show you have an eye or an interest or a perspective outside of late-stage capitalism. Show that you don’t need a club, that you are the fucking club, that you make your own club. You are a club of one, and you are special and gorgeous, and all the guys at the singles party want to fuck you because absolutely no one cares that you have a shelf full of fucking Birkins. AAAaaaaaand scene.

Yes, Boz has all the women over for a speed-dating event because, like the best seasons of The Real Housewives of New York City, most of the gals are single. I love this concept, like a mini episode of Love Hotel, and I love that Boz dug through her own Rolodex (I know we’re all old here and get this reference, right?) to find these guys herself. You know she’s not messing with any ugly guys with terrible jobs or bad personalities. As I suspected, there are multiple lawyers, a real estate agent, the guy who invented ComicCon, and a comedian. Now wait a second. A comedian? Whose name do we not know? Is he filler? We saw a couple of the ladies balk at the nerdy ComicCon guy, but do you know how big that is? Do you know how much money he’s making? These ladies need to pull a Jen Tilly and get some of that nerd money that never stops flowing.

The whole sequence with the dates showed a different side of the ladies: Dorit was flirty, Erika was scared, Sutton was game, Kyle was demure, and Rachel was like, “Screw this whole thing, no one here appreciates my outfit or my love of Coldplay.” I don’t think any love matches were made during the event, but we did get to see the women mourning their relationships, both at the event and afterwards. 

Let’s start with Sutton. She did like Rick, a lawyer at Boz’s house, but he gave his card to Erika instead, who passed it to Sutton in an act of generosity, but also with a little edge that said, “I don’t want the man you want, but okay.” After the party, Sutton goes to Rachel’s house to discuss the whole thing, but instead ends up talking about how her ex asked for her marriage to be annulled, which is such an asshole thing to do I can’t believe the woman stayed married to him for that long, even if she still gets $300,000 a month in alimony.

In confessional, Sutton says that, even after the divorce, she thought that she could get Christian (that’s the ex) back any time, but when she found out from the church that he wanted an annulment, because he didn’t even have the decency to tell her himself, she knew that it was finally over, like a ghost stopped haunting her living room. That has to be the hardest thing about this: he’s taken everything, and she had no power over it, and she still doesn’t. But now she’s thinking of changing her name back to her maiden name. Rachel gives her great advice, “You’re not a Stracke anymore. De-Stracke yourself.” She then asks Sutton for her middle name, and when Sutton tells her it’s Thurman, Rachel says, “Well, that’s harder.” Oh, Rachel. Crack me up, already! But, yes, Sutton should totally be a Brown and put some fame on that name instead of Christian’s tired old annulment-ass name. That’s it. I’m calling it. Hear ye, hear ye! From now on, in these pages, Sutton will forever be known as Sutton Brown. Long may she slay. 

After the party, Dorit has lunch with Boz and newbie Amanda (who appears to have a bedazzled AmEx black card hanging on her wall) to talk about how things are going with her soon-to-be-ex husband, PK, a Birkin whose clasp won’t shut. (Sorry, I’m not over that.) We learn more details we already knew: they didn’t have a prenup because he was broke when they got married, he handled all the finances, and he’s paying the mortgage on that Encino house they can neither afford nor sell. But we also learned some doozies. Everything is in Dorit’s name, so if he stops paying for things, her credit score is going to go down like the hockey players in Heated Rivalry. Also she has no clue if there are any retirement savings, so she doesn’t even know what she can go after in the divorce and you know that PK, a used toilet bowl clogged with a dead rat, is going to hide all the assets he possibly can.

Amanda knows that the financial picture looks grim; she knows that Dorit doesn’t know as much as she should, and, while her training is as a therapist, not a financial analyst, she knows that Dorit and PK, a pissed-in pot, don’t have a pot to piss in. When Boz asks her to give Dorit some financial advice, Amanda tells her to decide what kind of provider she wants to be. In confessional, Boz can’t contain her laughter. It’s like she got Suze Orman on the phone and said, “Listen to what this bitch said…” and then the two of them cackled while not buying a latte and instead putting that money in a Roth IRA. 

The craziest conversation is the one that Kyle has with Boz and Rachel right after speed dating, where Boz is pumping Kyle for answers but asking things in such an oblique way that she won’t mention a name that rhymes with Oregon Spade, an entirely fictional lesbian private detective that I made up that Kyle may or may not have been dating and may or may not have been in love with for years. What we can parse from Kyle’s statements is that she and Oregon were dating and that she was in love with that person, but that love is over and it was not her choice. We kind of got all that in the last episode from her conversation with Erika.

The interesting part comes when Kyle says, “Ask me what you want to ask.” Boz doesn’t know what Kyle means. Kyle responds, “I could go Brad, or I could go Angelina, that’s what you want me to say, right?” Boz asks her if she’s serious, and Kyle says, “I’m half joking but not fully joking.” Oh, I don’t think she’s joking at all; even saying that is as if all of the walls around Kyle’s sexuality are crumbling. She says in confessional that one of her biggest worries when “dating someone” — and I think she means someone from Oregon — is what Mo, the girls, and the public are going to think about it. Yes, Kyle was concerned about everyone thinking she’s a lesbian. 

Here she is, acknowledging that she’s not as straight as she once thought she was, and I give her credit for acknowledging it and still saying she doesn’t know what is up. And she doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need labels; she doesn’t need to tell us one way or another, but it is nice to hear that she is open, questioning, unsure, and looking to connect with a person rather than a gender. When Boz presses her about what she’s looking for, Kyle says she doesn’t know. Rachel comes in once again with great advice. “To be honest, I don’t think you have to know,” she says. “You have been with Mo forever. It’s okay to be like, ‘Now I’m being fully me and whoever I connect with the most.’” 

Kyle, like all the women, is in mourning over her relationship, and the thing that struck me after speed dating is that the women were surprised she wasn’t open to meeting anyone. They said she’s “three years in,” meaning that is when she split with Mo. But that’s not it at all. Her breakup is as fresh as everyone else’s because the relationship she’s mourning isn’t with Mo, it’s with Oregon Spade, a private eye with a huge collection of Kemo Sabe hats. 

But still, when she’s talking about Alexia’s wedding, she’s still questioning what’s up with her and Mo. She says she doesn’t want them to go through the pain that they’re going through now as they continue to trudge through the world’s slowest-moving divorce. She says she wants Alexia to look at her wedding day and see that she got everything she wanted because Kyle got everything she wanted on her wedding day. She wants Alexia’s husband to look at her the same way throughout their marriage as he looked at her on that day.

But that’s impossible. That’s not the way people work as we grow and change, and our circumstances grow and change, and our affections grow and change and ebb and flow, and the sex comes in waves, and the money comes in barrels or not at all. That’s not the way science works either. Nothing can stay the same. Every cell in your body is replaced in seven years. The DNA may be the same, but the proteins aren’t. The skin, guts, and brains are the same but made of different things. It’s all a bunch of cells morphing, changing, and dying. No, it’s all a bunch of atoms, the remains of stardust, bonding and attracting and rejecting each other in tiny unions and breakups, the tiniest stuff of the universe doing the heavy lifting, skittering around each other like Hershey Kisses thrown out of an open airplane door. You are never the same person for more than an instant. You never look at the same person twice, and trying to hold that in your hand, trying to put that under glass and keep it somehow permanent, is as impossible as trying to find each one of those Kisses and somehow put it back in the bag.