All eyes are on Daisy as she finds herself in the middle of separate fights with Erika and Sai.
Photo: Bravo
I’m still not entirely sure what Bilt Rewards does (is it bonus points for using protein powder?), but it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with comedy. At this “comedy” night, there isn’t one solid joke, except that Carole Radziwill won a Steven Tyler look-alike contest. Did you see the picture of them together? They’re like the emoji of the twin girls dressed up like the bee girl from the Blind Melon video. Just exactly the same, particularly when Carole reminds us that when we first met her, she was dating the keyboardist from Aerosmith, so she got to spend lots of time with her celebrity doppelgänger. (My celebrity doppelgänger? Connor Storrie. Particularly when I take my top off.) Even though some of the other comics are briefed on the events of this season, all the other gags whiff. Sai De Silva is now “Sai De-Vorced.” Not even Dane Cook would think that is funny. Jokes about a popcorn ceiling? Two and a Half Men thinks that it’s hack.
The worst one, however, is Dan Geneen’s joke about getting hit on at the gym by Erin’s husband. No, girl. It’s Jessel’s husband who is hitting on people at the gym. This comedian is clearly not gay or he would have known the difference. After the show, he has a whole chat with Jessel and Sai about what goes on at the [bleeped-out gym name] steam room. Okay, the bleep I get, but also putting a black bar over the mouth like it’s a bit of bush in an Instagram Story? Did we need to go that far? Are they upset that we’re going to go sleuthing like when they tried to bleep out Catch and we figured it out anyway? Well, as someone who (ahem) may or may not be familiar with the cruising techniques in New York City gym steam rooms (yes, Dan is right, there is a code), there are really only two candidates for what it could be. They mention that the gym has more than one location, so it is a chain. It can’t be New York Sports Club because the bleep isn’t nearly long enough (not being long enough is the criticism I always heard in the steam room). It has to be either Equinox or Crunch. Dan Geneen does not look like an Equinox person, so maybe it’s Crunch? But do all Crunch-es have steam rooms? I do not know, so I will leave this up to r/RealHousewives to figure out.
The rumor about Pavit comes up once again when Jessel shouts at Erin and Daisy for bringing it up to Dr. Dan Belkin, who is the dermatologist at the center of this season’s feud. At the Paw Patrol benefit that Daisy and Erin attended last episode, they started talking to him about the Pavit rumor, and he immediately called up Jessel and told her what her friends were saying about her. (Based on this level of messiness, I would not be surprised if Dr. Dan Belkin knows the secret gay code word to the [redacted] steam room.) Both Erin and Daisy deny talking about the rumor, but there is footage. There is so much footage. And this wasn’t like a little mention or an aside. This was a whole, full-blown conversation that they are now disavowing like an invitation to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s. This is what I don’t get about Erin. We’re all going to see it; why doesn’t she just cop to it? Does she really not remember, or is she just trying to make herself look better? And wouldn’t it just be better to own it now rather than to be humiliated at the reunion?
But Erin isn’t at the center of the fights this episode; Daisy is. Not only is she lying to Jessel about not talking about Pavit at the dinner, but she also gets into it more than once with Erika. She claims that she wasn’t invited to Erika’s birthday party. Erika says that she was and is going to pull up a receipt. She scrolls through the phone and finds a phone call and says that is when it happened. Now, I’m not sure whether or not Erika invited Daisy (I would like to assume that she did), but Daisy is right about everything that happens in this interaction. According to CVS, the world arbiter of receipts, proof of a phone call is not a receipt. Erika could have left Daisy a 22-minute voice-mail about what she was having for lunch. Just because she called doesn’t mean that an actual invitation was made. Erika says that she didn’t put it in a text because Daisy told her not to put information in texts. Daisy claims this was only if they were talking shit about people, so that receipts don’t exist. Daisy is also correct about this. In the words of a great philosopher, “Say it, forget it. Write it, regret it.” Also, with an invitation, you want it written down. How else can you confirm the time, date, address, etc., when you’re getting ready to go to said party?
When the ladies start talking about the party again later, Daisy asks if she wasn’t invited because of all the trash she talked about Moskito Island. Uh, do ya think? She then asks if Ankur, Erika’s husband, doesn’t like her and that’s why she wasn’t invited. Erika says that she is the one calling the shots in the relationship. Of course she is. Ankur may have money, but have you seen Erika? She could get any billionaire she wants, and Ankur could never hope to do better than her. She is firmly in charge. Daisy says that Erika is different when Ankur is around. This is where Daisy is wrong and truly acting out. Has she even spent a lot of time around them? I get it, she’s hurt that she wasn’t invited, but that’s no reason to keep harping on it or lodging these claims about Erika. That’s only going to get her more uninvited the next time.
The next day on the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of one of the most brutal massacres in Housewives history, Erika texts Daisy that she was clearly misremembering what happened and that she was quite rude. She also suggests gettting Prevagen brain supplements. I like that Erika is standing up to Daisy and pointing out her rudeness, but this is not the read that she thinks it is. I mean, what even is Prevagen? Who helped her come up with this read? Jessel and ChatGPT?
Daisy’s biggest fight is with Sai, and they’re still sorting out what happened at Erin’s party when Sai was shouting Carole’s name across the room. (I swear they have softened Sai’s voice in the flashbacks of this scene, because it sounded a lot louder the first time we heard it.) This argument is indicative of a philosophical difference between Daisy and Sai. Daisy thinks that Sai should work a bit harder to get along and build friendships in the group, and that by pushing her to do so she is protecting Sai. Sai thinks that one should always be authentic and direct and that Daisy critiquing her is trying to control her. The thing is that they’re both right. Sai says that Daisy, by trying to appease people, is fake. Sure, that may be fake, but it takes some fake to make it through the world. If we were always brutally honest with people, then you might end up like Sai, with few friends and fewer allies. But also, there is something about being true to yourself despite what other people say and not wanting your friends to criticize your actions. But because they differ so much in tactics and can’t respect the other viewpoint, it seems like a relationship is impossible.
But Sai has multiple complaints about Daisy. She says she always complains about everything but also says that she changes what she says so that people will always like her. Daisy asks, “Am I a hater because I’m constantly picking on things, or am I fake because I withhold my opinions? Those are two totally different things.” I can see where she’s coming from, because it is a contradiction, but it does seem like two facets of her personality. The constant carping seems like it’s almost compulsive, like Daisy doesn’t know how to stop it or that she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. It’s just the way she interfaces with the world. I think she also does it to form quick bonds, trying to hate on the same things with the people around her. She also seems overly conscious of how she is perceived and wants to be liked, but, again, that seems at odds with also hating on everything. Anyway, after Sai makes that comment, Daisy storms out, and the conversation is over.
The episode ends with three personal scenes that I connect with in different ways. I’m having a hard time connecting with Erin and Abe’s story about not being able to find Mezcalum, the world’s first mezcal brand in America. Oh, you might not make payroll because you have to renovate your Hamptons mansion. Boo-freaking-hoo. It’s about to be winter, and I can’t afford to heat my house. Hailey goes shopping with Sai and provides her usual comedic relief, showing up in a cowboy hat with the cardboard still inside it and her under-eye patches still on her face. Hailey talks about how she doesn’t know if she wants to remain in her marriage anymore. Since we don’t know much about Hailey’s personal life and have never met the husband, I’m also having a hard time connecting with this. Yeah, I feel for Hailey, but we have never seen them together, so we can’t really make our own assessment. Until then, it’s just a snooze.
The final scene is the best one. Jessel and Pavit have lunch together, and they do an exercise that Devyn, the new friend-of, recommended, where they write down everything that annoys them about the other person. I love my husband dearly, but if I had to detail all of those things, then my list would be longer than 17 of these recaps, and it would start, like Pavit’s, with the fact that he can’t load the dishwasher if his life depended on it. I bet this is an issue in 98 percent of marriages, and in the 2 percent where it isn’t, one partner never puts anything in the dishwasher at all, and that is its own kind of issue. While Jessel’s list is pretty deep — he’s not aggressive enough, he doesn’t look after his health, he can’t connect with his emotions, he seems to despise her, he can’t communicate — all of Pavit’s are pretty superficial. There is the dishwasher, that she snores, and that she screams, but when her tone gets a little pointed, he says that is screaming. No, that is not screaming; that is emotion. That is what couples need, and Pavit’s inability to recognize that is part of the problem.
In this conversation, particularly in his confessional, where he is sarcastically saying that he wasn’t being sarcastic, he reminds me so much of Shane Simpson, Emily’s husband on RHOC. It’s this sort of ironic, glib persona that they think is cute and winning, but it’s just annoying. It’s just a way, as Jessel and Emily will both tell you, of preventing them from feeling their emotions. The thing that’s also clear about both of these men, as exasperated as they sometimes seem, is that they clearly love their wives. Then why are they afraid of it? What will caring do? Will it rip them open and put their innards on a plate for everyone to examine? Will it shell them like so many lobsters, with the buttery meat out there and their defenses just a pile of detritus on a tablecloth? Will it expose them, like walking into a steam room and trying to find their place as their eyes adjust to the darkness and the mist, as they muddle around in the heat as the sounds of emotion, the slapping of longing, emerge from the mist as shapes of so many men with their bodies intertwined?
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