As the rookies find their place among the cast, Jessel and Erin reopen their feud and trade insults.
Photo: Bravo
New taglines just dropped, and I have to take my hat off (I’m not wearing a hat) to Hailey Glassman, whose line — “When they go low, I get high” — is an instant classic. Conscise, witty, building on a well-recognized phrase, and immediately showing us the character that she wants to create. I would give her an award except she took Jessel to go play pickleball and, I swear, this is a scourge that must be stopped. Every single woman on every single show has done this now. It’s the new vaginal rejuvenation. It’s the new Roaring ‘20s party. It’s the new having a vow renewal and then getting divorced two years later. Just make it stop.
The episode starts with pickleball, but it’s really just a round robin to get to know a little bit more about the new girls. Hailey watches Jessel miss touching so many balls that she is officially a lesbian now. Then they talk about Hailey’s past. Apparently, she had a tennis scholarship until she got arrested for weed and had a terrible mugshot where her eyebrows look like they were scribbled on with a ballpoint pen while she was riding the Staten Island Ferry. Oh, so she’s a stoner of some renown. Okay, respect. She then explains how she came to be dating John Gosselin shortly after he was separated from his wife. Turns out he was family friends with her parents and was living with them so that no one would know that he and Kate (whose maiden name is Plus Eight) were separated.
I feel bad for what Hailey had to go through in the tabloids back then. As I mentioned, the scandal was playing out when I was at Gawker 1.0 (RIP). While the whole affair was a little too trashy for us to cover, I know what other tabloids were up to at the time. She explains they sent someone to her school to spread terrible stories about her. This is on top of Perez Hilton and plenty of other sites (Gawker included) that would just flat-out insult people, draw nasty things on their pictures, and just generally malign them. We didn’t know better back then, and I feel bad that Hailey had to go through it. She says that it changed her whole life and gave her PTSD.
Speaking of PTSD, that is what Jessel has when she goes over to Daisy’s apartment and sees that she has a popcorn ceiling. Jessel, if it’s good enough for Martha Stewart to look up at while Daisy does her lower eyeliner, then it is certainly good enough for you. Also, it is a rent-controlled apartment that her husband has been living in for 21 years. Daisy is right; you don’t give that apartment up. If anything, you rent a whole other apartment to keep all of your shit in because you are never going to find a deal like that again. I need to know how much they pay in rent. You know Daisy would tell you. She would see it as a point of pride. I’m surprised she’s not wearing a pin on her coat that says, “$1,232.67 a month,” so everyone knows.
Then we stop off at Erika’s rent-controlled apartment that she most likely owns with her billionaire husband, Ankur. Okay, what is this guy doing on the show? He doesn’t need to be here. There are poorer guys who haven’t supported their wives as much on this “platform.” Also, he is cute, he is funny, and he is a billionaire with a motherfucking B. I would leave my husband for him faster than Jessel can whiff a pickleball ball. (What do you even call a pickleball ball? Is it a pickle? Is it a ball and you’re the pickle? Has seeing a hot, funny, billionaire fried my brain?)
Erika and Ankur, who she met when he was taking her boxing class at Equinox, are having pizza night where they are making pizza with their private chef. Um, doesn’t having the private chef show you how to make your dinner, I dunno, sort of negate the point of having a private chef? Is this like the fake farm that Marie Antoinette had installed at Versailles so that she could ride around on mini ponies and pretend to be Lisa Vanderpump, I mean, so she could pretend to be like one of the poor people? Erika does tell us about her fertility journey and how she can’t have her own children because of her fucked up liver. No matter how rich (and handsome and funny) your husband is, problems always find us.
The best scene of the episode is when Jessel and Erin meet for lunch to talk about their issues. At Daisy’s house, Daisy and Erika tell Jessel that Erin was talking shit about her 30 seconds after she apologized for talking shit about her the first time. Jessel sits down at this meeting with Erin, and she takes out her notecards with all of her insults pre-written on them. “Ahem,” she says as she clears her throat and looks up from her first card. “One-man Ponzi scheme.” She then shuffles to the next card. “Bootleg Houdini.” Shuffle. “You think you are Zendaya, but you are Blossom.”
I have some notes on Jessel’s pre-planned insults. Erin is correct; a one-man Ponzi scheme does not make sense. Neither does thinking she’s Zendaya, but she’s really Blossom. It’s because Zendaya and Blossom have nothing in common, and neither of these things has anything to do with Erin. It would have worked if she said, “You think you’re Sydney Sweeny, but you’re really Sweeny Todd.” Like Erin thinks she is gorgeous and perfect, but she is really the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But then I guess that means that she is also one of Sondheim’s best musicals, so maybe that’s not an insult. All I’m saying is that there needs to be some kind of parallel structure. Like how about, “You think you’re Halle Berry, but you’re Marion Barry.” That works!
Now “bootleg Houdini.” That is a slapper. She’s saying that Erin is trying to make up things about Jessel out of thin air, and that is accurate. “Also, she really gets Erin when Erin says that Houdini was a great magician and Jessel replies, ‘I said you were a bootleg Houdini.” I LOLed IRL. (Also, if you bootleg “Houdini,” Dua Lipa is gonna get mad at you.)
Other than the canned reads, what I love the most about this scene is that Erin and Jessel are both absolutely right about each other and neither can stand it. Erin is right: Jessel is a clout chaser. She is snobby. She is not nice to people she thinks can’t do anything for her. (Just look at how mean she was to Dorinda about her Lady Gaga costume on Ultimate Girls Trip.) This is all accurate. Jessel says that Erin is wrong about Dr. Belkin; he didn’t say she was rude to him. We then get a flash of her talking to him on camera, and he says, “Yes, you weren’t that interested in talking about me, but I wasn’t offended at all.” What do you expect this man to say on camera to one of his clients? Also, that he even admitted she didn’t want to talk to him pretty much proves Erin’s point.
Jessel is also right about Erin. She is projecting all of her own shit onto Jessel, saying that she comes after people but then plays the victim. She is right that there are stories out there about Erin not paying her bills while she pretends like she has a perfect life. She does make things up about the other women and talks mad shit about them. She is a bootleg Houdini. Jessel’s one low blow, and it happened earlier at Daisy’s, not at this lunch, is when she says that Erin’s flooding at her Hampton’s home might have been some kind of insurance scheme. Come on. We all know that if a Housewife is going to attempt insurance fraud, she is going to fake a robbery. (Zing!)
After this, they see each other again at Daisy’s seder, which she’s holding at her parents’ house in Brooklyn where she grew up and used to sneak out to go drink Zimas with high school boys. (Same, sis.) While there are three Jews at the table, none of them know that much about Passover, so they’re letting “Rabbi Erin,” as the chyron calls her, inform them about everything. Erin doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about either.
Jessel, who is two hours late, is wondering when they’re going to eat. (“Are we going to pass over dinner?” is her pre-written joke in confessional) The only food that Erin is thinking about is strawberry jam. Last episode, Hailey told Daisy and Erika that Erin is like “strawberry jam.” She’s just always on the table at the dinner and is kind of boring, and no one really wants it. She’s not wrong (though I wouldn’t have picked strawberry because if I was going to use one of the Smucker’s packets on a diner table I would reach for strawberry first). Daisy must have told Sai about this, and Sai told Erin, and now she’s got her panties in a considerable wad.
Erin tells Hailey she has a gift for her and a card. She gave her a little pot of jam and enrolled her in the jam of the month club, so that she can always have jam on her table. I bet Hailey is such a stoner that she wouldn’t even spread the jam on toast; she’s probably just stick a sticky finger in there and slurp it off while watching repeats of Who’s the Boss? on Tubi. Then Erin says that she may be boring, but at least she didn’t break up the marriage of a man who has eight kids. This is so annoying, as if breaking up a marriage with more kids somehow makes it worse. Breaking up any marriage is bad, whether they have zero kids, one kid, or more kids than Erin has past-due bills. But I can see exactly how this whole stunt happened. Erin heard about it and said to someone, “Oh, she thinks I’m jam. I’m going to give her a jam of the month club.” And that person lied to her, lied straight to her face. “That’s hilarious!” they said as plagues collected around them. “That’s so funny!” they said as hail rained down and shattered on the windows of skyscrapers, as frogs took over Central Park, leaving its pathways covered in slime, as boils broke out all over the faces of the models walking the runways at New York Fashion Week, as darkness plagued the outer boroughs and the inner boroughs and the subway and the Roosevelt Island gondola and the buses and the horse-drawn carriages that somehow still exist. “Do it!” they said as a smile formed into a crooked rictus. “Do it! Do it! You have to do it!”
