It’s just a day at the beach for “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” and everyone is there to play volleyball – badly – and eat boxed croissants.
Everyone except for Katie Ginella, who, after the previous week’s lie-detector test, is being shunned like Regina George when she violated the Mean Girls code by wearing sweatpants to school on a Monday.
Then Emily Simpson suggests a game to cheer up Shannon Storms Beador’s daughter Sophie, who came home from New York City for the weekend after being dumped by a beau. Let’s all share our worst breakup stories! Emily declares, despite half the women at the table wincing at the idea.
“I don’t know if this is the best route for cheering somebody up since most of us around the table have had relationships crash and burn,” Gina Kirschenheiter says in a camera confessional.
In fact, Gina came to beach day with Britt, the current partner of her ex-husband Matt, with whom she had a volatile breakup. Meanwhile, Tamra Judge came with her friend Jo De La Rosa, a former housewife who was dumped by her fiancé Slade Smiley, who for the past decade has been engaged to former housewife Gretchen Rossi, who was sitting at the table, too.
Heather Dubrow’s breakup story is very Heather. In middle school, her boyfriend broke up with her on the soccer field with all his bros watching him do it. When he grew up, he came out as gay, Heather says, as if that’s the only reason someone would break up with her.
Jenn Pedranti’s story is her typical blend of dizzy and sad. In high school in Oklahoma, she liked a wrestler who drove a Bronco – half the housewives tut-tut knowingly over that detail. After going to a house party and getting close with him – it’s what you did in a small town, Jenn explains – he had his buddy drive her home.
But then Tamra tells her tale, laughing throughout it as if it was the funniest, most normal thing ever. It was 1989, and Tamra and the One Who Got Away were living together when he told her it was over. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t get her key back, so one night, when she knew he was out on a date with a new lady friend, Tamra dropped by.
“He had a leather jacket and I took the leather jacket,” she begins, and here she demonstrates going all Norman Bates on that leather jacket.
“I walked in the garage and still had the knife in my hand,” she continues. “And he opened up the garage door and I’m standing there like that, and he’s got the girl in the car.”
Wow. The only thing this story is missing is a bunny rabbit in a pot on the stove.
Earlier in the episode, Katie mounted a weak effort to come back from her failure in the lie-detector tests that Emily sprang on all the housewives when they showed up for Persian New Year’s party at her house. Katie meets with Jenn, her last hope for a friend on the show, with a manila envelope inside of which she’s printed out several pages from a website that employs Wendie, the polygraph tech with a Bettie Page haircut.
The website, RealityTVpolygraph.com, is an agency run by a polygraph examiner who boasts on it that “he has tested since the 1980s and has more than 1000 filmed appearances, TV and social media” and “over a billion views as ‘the most filmed polygraph examiner in the world.’”
Katie tries to convince Jenn that it was a set-up by Emily and Gina to prove she is a liar – the whole mess boils down to whether or not Gretchen told Katie some salacious gossip about Tamra, which Katie then told a “Real Housewives” podcaster.
Katie’s stronger argument for her truthfulness lies within the call log of her husband Matt’s cellphone. You’ll remember that Katie and Matt were at dinner with Gretchen and Slade and Jenn and her fiancé Ryan when Gretchen said what Katie insists she said about Tamra, which Gretchen, of course, insists she did not.
Matt and Katie are seen talking on the show this week about how Slade allegedly called him frequently to ask him to get Katie to say Gretchen never said that, and the videotape goes to the call log and a whole lot of calls from Slade.
“He essentially said Gretchen is going to deny it and Katie needs to hold the line,” Matt recounts on camera to Katie. “I said I got ahold of Katie, I told her what you told me, she said she’s with Gretchen.”
Then he shows a screen of texts with Slade in which Matt tells Gretchen’s guy, “Katie finally fought back. Gretchen and Katie stayed aligned.”
That’s not the most shocking thing the log reveals. We also learn that Matt has Katie in his phone contacts under a nickname that I’m pretty sure Katie’s kids would call cringe.