RHODC Recap And Fact-Check

Article from the Washington Post.

Time-travel, crashing 101, and old news: D.C. "Housewives" recap and fact-check (#4, Aug. 26)

Welcome back to "The Real Housewives of D.C." -- the episode with seedless grape-stomping, family mysteries, and, best of all, time travel! It's also the episode when the show's producers finally started to catch up with the nine-month-old headlines (i.e., party crashing) that spoiled all its suspense long before it aired. (At least in OUR world, that is. In recent days, we've seen TMZ break the astounding news that someone has sued Tareq Salahi for an alleged unpaid debt of $4,000, and RadarOnline reveal that he's embroiled in a feud with his mother. To which we can only say: OLD! Those of you who choose to get your "Housewives" recaps from The Paper That Brought You Watergate already know that for the Salahis, a $4,000 lawsuit is chump change -- a Post investigation last year found at least 30 such lawsuits filed against them since 2004, many in the five figures -- and the messy, sad family feud over Oasis Winery has been simmering in our pages for three years now.)

Photo: Bravo

It opens with Lynda Erkiletian, in her Georgetown Ritz condo, cooking for her boyfriend Ebong... and her roughly college-aged kids, two of whom are wearing colorful patterned footed PJs. (Maybe they felt the need to ramp it up, personality-wise, so as not to get lost on Bravo's cutting-room floor.) She talks more about her search for a new home (she sold the Ritz place around the time this was being filmed last fall and moved to McLean). "The apartment just is not big enough," she tells the camera. "I'm going to miss Georgetown -- nothing like security and a concierge and 24-hour room service." (True, actually -- that's what it's like living in the Ritz.) But, "everything I've put my family through in the last five years, I owe it to them to give them a yard." (Aren't these kids too old to need a yard? Of course, one's never too old for footie pajamas...)

Stacie Turner sits in her living room with three women identified as her sorority sisters (she is a Delta Sigma Theta), back in town for Howard University Homecoming. One of them asks (in an apropos-of-nothing way that I'm sure wasn't prompted by a producer) for an update on Stacie's search for her birth parents. Revelation: Her birth mother, it turns out, was white, of Scandinavian descent -- and her birth father was a Nigerian man she met in the Peace Corps. Who doesn't know that Stacie exists. And the birth mother is doing nothing to help Stacie (who was adopted out of foster care, now her big cause) find him, and has been keeping Stacie a secret from her white family, which Stacie finds hurtful. And frustrating -- she wants to know who her people were. (This is easily the most interesting thing to happen on this show thus far, so obviously producers have to cut away from it pretty quickly.)

Mary Amons arrives early at the opening of Ted Gibson's new salon in Chevy Chase. She tells the camera that she feels responsible for getting him established in D.C. "People like to call Washington the Hollywood for ugly people," she explains. (Someone supposedly said this once, but mostly it's lazy feature writers using it in the same indirect way Mary does -- "It's been said that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people..." -- so they can pivot away with a cheesy transition like, "but whoever said that must not have met THESE eligible bachelors/stunning singles/Beltway trendsetters/whatever blah blah blah...") Anyway, says Mary: "I want to put us on the map." But then Michaele shows up in a white backless dress, hugging Ted over and over and saying she loves him. We see Mary bristle, a bit jealous; and wary, too, as Gibson thanks Michaele for "sponsoring" the opening party. All Michaele did, says Mary, is bring some wine.

(And hey! It turns out that this party about to unfold is the ur-D.C. Housewives party, the big camera-mobbed party last fall, the one that pretty much confirmed who the main Housewives would be. You know -- the one we keep running the same damn picture from. That was so far back we didn't even know yet who the mysterious blonde British woman was.)

(And hey again! It also turns out that we are time-traveling! This party, according to the Reliable Source archive of all things Housewives, was way back in September -- just a few days after the America's Polo Cup event we saw in the first episode. And the Gibson salon party was a couple weeks BEFORE the Washingtonian best-dressed party we saw in that same episode, nearly a month before the Paul Wharton birthday party featured in the second, and at least a few weeks before the Turners' Paris trip we saw in last week's episode. It could be that Bravo is taking reality TV to the next level by experimenting with the non-linear narrative form so well deployed by Fellini, Altman, Tarantino, and ABC's "Lost." It's an approach that, upon second or third viewing, renders the hugs and "I love you"s exchanged here by the recently feuding Michaele Salahi and Lynda no longer nonsensical but deeply poignant -- we're in the past, you see, before the ugliness began and they were still friends. Or maybe Bravo got lazy, kind of like when they accidentally inserted footage that made it look like a 3rd District D.C. cop car was escorting the Salahis to a party instead of a Park Police vehicle. Reality!)

Highlights of the party: Mary tells the camera she thinks the Salahis "use their wine to get into places and get to know important people." She smirks to Catherine Ommanney about "people who get into charity just to promote themselves -- social climbers." And Cat exclaims, as if the two of them have discovered some rare affinity, "I despise social climbers!" (Poor social climbers. Won't someone stand up for them?) Then Mary tells the camera, "In D.C., there is a certain standard of integrity that you must demonstrate, otherwise you're not going to make it." (Make up your own joke. I'm getting tired.)
In McLean at Mary's home, we see her oldest daughter Lolly talking about her new job as an executive assistant and her hopes to find a place of her own -- which Mary reminds her better have room for her big, heavily shedding dog Kona. (We met Kona in episode two; Mary has since clarified on her Bravo blog that he is part Bernese mountain dog, part English mastiff.)

Michaele places phone calls inviting everyone to come grape-stomping at Oasis Winery. Lynda can't make it on account of her son's ball game, but she tells Michaele how much she'd like to see her: "I miss my old Michaele-ah." (Lynda appears to be the only person who pronounces the name this way.) To the camera, though, she says "I prefer to save my energy for people I love and care about."

Then we have a scene with Mary, Cat, and Ted Gibson's husband/partner Jason Backe at Contemporaria furniture store in Georgetown (and briefly meet its owner Deborah Kalkstein, who is said to have been in talks early on with producers about maybe being a Housewife; didn't happen, obviously). Mary is irked with Cat for dissing her idea of painting her dining room high-gloss black, and for making fun of the chairs in the store. (Or so it seems -- a definite sense of pique is at least suggested by the editing of this scene, but who ever knows.)
And then, in another magical apropos-of-nothing moment, Jason announces, "I've been dying to tell you this story all day" -- which turns out to be the story of how the Salahis crashed the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner. He says the Salahis invited him and Ted, but when they arrived, it seemed the ticket only said, "admit one." But the Salahis told him not to worry; they maneuvered their way past security, and once in, started working the room and looking for empty chairs. Until finally, "five or six Secret Service walk over" and escorted them out. Mary is horrified, considering that she'd used some of her precious social currency to introduce Ted and Jason around town: "It does not look good to sneak into a party, especially when Secret Service is involved." Says Cat: "I'm really embarrassed for everybody!"

(So, this was a real thing. The news of this particular breach broke last November, a few days after the Salahis became world-famous for crashing the White House state dinner in November. The Salahis, asked about this incident in their first post-crash interview on "Today," insisted that they were there properly as guests of their lawyer Paul Gardner -- which then compelled Gardner to hire his own lawyer. What a mess, huh? However, this is the first we've heard that Ted Gibson and Jason Backe were along for the madcap ride; in Jason's telling, it seems the hairstylists did not get bounced out with the Salahis. We tried to tease out some more details from the hair guys, but Gibson's publicist responded that he's not discussing this.)

A black stretch limo drives around to pick up the whole gang, or much of it, for a day of grape-stomping -- Stacie and her husband Jason, Cat and Mary (both sans husbands), and Jason Backe. (Hey, where's Paul Wharton this episode? Not the same without him!) Meanwhile, Michaele and Tareq are raising an Oasis flag at the winery. "We're back!" Michaele explains, before telling the camera: "This is the first time we've had guests here since the ruling from the judge. It was two and a half years of litigating." (Hmmm? Yeah, this is the family feud we keep telling you about. Tareq's parents Corinne and Dirgham, the founders of Oasis Winery, sued him a few years ago for an amount that ultimately reached $3 million, alleging he ran their business into the ground by embezzling funds and taking wine without payment for his own enterprises; Tareq countersued. Eventually, the winery filed for bankruptcy, as did Tareq's business, and the judge last year dismissed the suits after both sides essentially ran out of money. His parents also filed to evict Tareq and Michaele from their apartment at the winery.)

The drama appears not to have subsided, though. Tareq and Michaele have hired private security, to ward off any interference from his mother. "My mother disrupts everything we try to do," he says. Corinne is on the property (her face is fuzzed out; apparently she didn't sign any waivers to join this little goat rodeo), and the couple fusses that she has beckoned a reporter to the scene. (We know him! Dan McDermott, publisher of the Warren County Report, which has diligently covered the drama around the Salahis in Front Royal and Hume, Va. Dan was either saddened or relieved today that he didn't fully make it on screen. Last fall, he told us about his surreal adventures stumbling upon this shoot -- read about it here, at the end of our story about the making of Housewives -- which involved producers at first shooing him away, and then -- after Tareq delivered to Dan an on-camera soliloquy about how screwed up his family was -- kissing up to him to get him to sign a waiver. Alas, in the end, they didn't use that scene.)

Tareq calls the gang in the limo and leaves a message advising them to pull up to the right of the winery, since "we've had some issues with my mother trying to disturb the day." This gets the gang talking. Mary offers that the only time she's ever seen Michaele without Tareq was way back in the day "when she was behind the counter at Nordstroms selling me makeup." (Catty? Maybe. But true.) Jason Backe tells everyone the story of the CBC gala, which freaks out Stacie. "It's just rude, disrespectful, especially to the African-American community." And when she hears that Tareq has guards at his place: "I've got two young kids, I can't be walking into something with security in the middle of Virginia!" (For a beautiful moment, it seems that Stacie is about to say, "Hey, I didn't sign on for a TV show like THIS!" Bless her heart, she stays in character, doesn't break the fourth wall... but you know that even nine months before the Whoopi-Michaele smackdown, that's exactly what's what she's thinking.)

At the winery, Tareq explains that "my mom is unpredictable, you never know what she is going to do." Cat tells the camera (months later, judging from her grown-out bangs) that all this security is ridiculous. Tareq, in jolly host mode, insists that everyone's going to have to stomp out three gallons of grape juice; he blows a whistle at them. Cat thinks this whole scene is weird, and says so. She refuses to play: "I'm not stomping, I'm spectating... I hate being bossed about." There is much griping about Cat being a bitch, but she endears herself (to us, the viewers) by gaping at the weird staginess of the whole thing: "Is this my life? Is this my life?" Mary and Stacie gamely get into the grape-stomping vat with Michaele (everyone absurdly wearing at least one item of white clothing into the vat), but soon Mary is badmouthing the whole scene to the camera as well: The grapes, she said, aren't legitimate winemaking fruit but the same as the "seedless grapes I have in my refrigerator." (Dan McDermott tells us he learned from a Front Royal grocer told him the Salahis came in that morning to buy a big crate of grapes and tried to haggle over the price. Have we already mentioned that Oasis is more or less defunct, the vineyards no longer producing grapes?) Still she and Jason insist on declaring the event was "great" and "fun," to which Cat replies several times, "Bollocks!" Then, of course, she leaves early with Jason Backe.

The remaining visitors sit down to eat in the winery's vat room, and Michaele starts gossiping about the just-departed Cat. (The following conversation is poignant, because you sense that Michaele is still under the illusion that this is just another season of "Housewives," where they sit at dinner tables and talk about the others, and that Cat is the antagonist character, the Teresa-the-table-flipper if you will, and she herself is the heroine.) Mary sorta defends, or at least explains, Cat -- "If she gets the sense she's not into it, she's out." Says Michaele, "It's not good to insult people -- or do you feel good about that?" (This is a tautology comparable to hating social climbers.) Mary is nudged by the invisible hand of the producers to bring up Jason's story of how they crashed the CBC gala -- and the Salahis sort of dismiss this by saying, well, that's ludicrous. Michaele, to the camera: "No one gets into a place where the president is speaking without tickets!" (On her Bravo blog, Michaele acknowledges there was "a little drama" that night, but denies that "Secret Service" escorted them out. She's splitting hairs here -- CBC officials made it clear the Salahis were escorted out, but by a different breed of security personnel working the event, not Secret Service.) And then she turns it into a why-are-you-talking-about-me-behind-my-back thing, and oh god, we're back to the debate over whether Lynda said that Michaele is too skinny (FOUR episodes they've devoted to this!), with an added back-and-forth about was Mary making fun of Michaele before the Ted Gibson party, or was that just Lynda and Cat. (Ladies, please. If you can't say something incendiary enough to start some table flipping, maybe best to say nothing at all.)

And then, the invisible hand nudges Mary again to look at the tense-faced Tareq and say, "You have something to say." And he say, "I'm just going to say something..." -- and, cliffhanger! The previews make it seem very exciting: Mary asking if Tareq is implicating her daughter, and Tareq threatening that "everybody's going to jail!" and Mary weeping. (We think this involves a criminal charge that Tareq attempted to file against friends of Lolly Amons -- we told you a little bit about it at the end of this story about reality TV hijacking the news cycle -- but we'll just wait to get into it next week. Hell, it's all old news anyway, if it's even news at all.)

Who wins this round? Stacie and Cat, for subtly revealing their deep remorse for being on this show. Cheers!