At the end of the previous week on “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” Vicki Gunvalson was shocked. Shocked, she told everyone, to find that Emily Simpson had called her Debbie Downer.
So naturally when the next episode arrived on Thursday, Aug. 6, she put that right behind her and — oh, who are we kidding? This is Vicki! These are the Real Housewives! Relitigating petty slings and arrows from years ago is kinda their thing!
“I’m not a Debbie Downer,” Vicki says twice within the first two minutes of the episode as she and Jenn Pedranti arrive at the spa, Vicki for a hydro-facial and Jenn for a mask that leaves her looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost crossed with Hannibal Lecter.
“I’m not a Debbie Downer,” she tells Heather Dubrow, Gina Kirschenheiter and Shannon Storms Beador over dinner a day or two later. “I don’t want to be called Deb,” she adds in response to Shannon’s decision to do just that.
“Oh, I’m not sitting at the end,” Vicki tells the co-owner of the Rancho Capistrano Winery, when she’s the first to arrive for the dinner she’s hosting. “When I sit at the end people call me Debbie Downer because I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
Then, spotting another co-owner behind the bar: “Momma needs a drink!”
What Vicki needs is to look up the definition of the Streisand effect — the more one tries to censor something the more it spreads — and let Deb fade away.
Does that happen? Nahhh.
“We are going to whoop it the [bleep] up!” Vicki announces as more of the housewives arrive. “I am not a Debbie Downer!”
The Lady Debbie Downer protesteth too much, Tamra Judge observes at one point.
“You want to prove that you’re not a Debbie Downer?” Tamra asks Vicki.
“I don’t have to prove it to anybody,” Vicki retorts.
“Debbie Downer’s eating you alive, Vicki?” Tamra says in a camera confessional. “How about just be fun and then not bring up Debbie Downer 100 times?”
You know who’s definitely not Debbie Downer? New housewife Carmella Garcia, who can hardly open her mouth without saying something a gazillion times more entertaining that Vicki’s insistent calls to whoop it up.
Carmella gets targeted on two fronts this week.
Vicki is annoyed that Carmella describes her career as a developer even though Carmella is a licensed real estate broker whose work includes everything from selling houses as is to building them from the ground up.
“Do you think it’s a generational thing with Vicki?” Carmella asks Emily, who’s come by for a visit. “It’s like a ’50s sitcom where if you’re a woman you’re not showing up on a construction site?”
“No, I think Vicki’s just crazy,” Emily replies.
And Gina is something beyond annoyed because Carmella, who’s still just getting to know everyone, gave Emily a birthday gift of a $3,500 Dior clutch with a purple, um, adult toy inside.
We’ll come back to that but first let’s listen in as Emily gets entertained by Carmella’s story about the time she got arrested for violating a restraining order taken out on her by her soon-to-be-husband’s ex.
“So I’m on the stripper pole,” Carmella begins as if this is just an everyday occurrence in the Ohio bar where she’d gone for drinks and found stripper poles in all the tables. “And this woman starts talking [bleep] to me and then I start saying things back.
“And then her friends takes a drink and nails me in the face,” she continues as a 2005 headline from the Gilroy Dispatch – “Jeff’s juke-joint judo queen dodges jail” – flashes on the screen. The Jeff in question is former NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia, who is now Carmella’s ex-husband.
Emily eats it up: “I just want to go to the bar in Ohio and swing on a pole now,” she declares. “That’s where I’m at.”
When Carmella arrives at Vicki’s dinner — invited by Tamra, not Vicki — Vicki pretends not to have met her as clips from two different episodes show moments of them meeting.
“C’mon, I’m not forgettable,” Carmella says with an eyeroll in a camera confessional.
Then she offers some of the others a pull off the vodka bottle she’s brought to the winery, because, well, let Carmella tell it.
“I’m not much of a wine drinker because one time in the past I had taken my clothes off when drinking wine,” she explains. “I just do risque stuff.”
It’s probably time to remind you that Carmella is a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, isn’t it?
“First it’s a vibrator, then it’s a Dior bag, now she’s got vodka in her pocket,” Emily says to the camera. “She’s like the magician that just keeps the rabbit, the scarf — just keeps going.”
At dinner, Gina finally gets her chance, telling Carmella that it was not appropriate for her to have given Gina’s BFF the kind of gift she gave her — even though Emily’s tickled pink to have a fancy new Dior bag.
“Gina is either jealous that she didn’t get a Dior bag or she felt that maybe Carmella was trying too hard,” Emily says in a confessional.
Carmella is briefly flustered but doesn’t lose her cool, even as Gina talks louder and faster at her.
“Don’t put me in a box like that, baby, because if I think something’s weird for my best friend I’m going to say it!” Gina yells across the table at Carmella.
By this point, both Tamra and Shannon have separately speculated in confessionals that Gina seems in the wrong here, which, ultimately, Gina comes to realize as well, apologizing to Carmella and smoothing things over.
Vicki, by now having declared she is NOT a Debbie Downer at least 13 times — yes, we were counting them — makes a half-hearted attempt at arguing that Carmella is not a developer but seems to have whooped it up so much that she’s run out of gas. Wah-wahhh.
“I think she’s got the word wrong,” Vicki says to the camera about Carmella’s self-identification as a developer. “She’s a flipper.”
But whose word should be take here? Carmella, who the previous week revealed she’s spending $35,000 a month on rent for her Corona del Mar pied-a-terre? Or Vicki, who earlier in the episode said this about the fishy feeling she got about Carmella’s use of the term developer:
“It doesn’t smell the sniff test,” Vicki said to the camera. “Is that what this means? The smelling sniff test? It doesn’t sniff the sniff test? Wait, what is that?”
Then finally, mercifully: “It doesn’t pass the sniff test!”
Cheer up, Debbie Downer, you got it right!