There’s a sign at the door of The Quiet Woman restaurant which, in so many words, warns all who enter that no table-flipping will be tolerated.
“If you think that you have some entitled right to insult, demean, dismiss or harass anyone here – YOU DON’T,” reads the placard in the window of the Corona Del Mar restaurant where Vicki Gunvalson arrives on the episode of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” that aired Thursday, July 23.
“I love that sign in the front,” Vicki tells Julius, the restaurant manager, as she breezes through the door. “Did you do that because housewives have eaten here sometimes?”
Julius just laughs and leads Vicki to the banquette, where Tamra Judge and Shannon Storms Beador will soon join her.
“The last time we were at the Quiet Woman wasn’t so quiet,” Vicki says in a camera confessional. “If Tamra doesn’t stay calm and not use any bad words – ‘drunk,’ ‘broke’ – this will be a Code Red. This will be table-flipping, this will be plate-launching. This will be everything we don’t want it to be.”
What Vicki wants it to be more than anything is a truce between Shannon and Tamra, who have been at each other’s throats for the last few seasons.
What Vicki wants is a reunion of the Tres Amigas, as she, Tamra, and Shannon once called their girl group. What Vicki wants is to whoop it up with her BFFs again.
It’s a tall order, but Vicki is determined.
“Oh, this is the infamous table where Shannon threw the plate,” Tamra says upon arrival, and a holographic ghost-like image of Shannon doing just that is superimposed over the table in case you’d forgotten.
Vicki workshops what Tamra will say when Shannon arrives, with suggestions that include a no-frills apology, something Tamra rejects out of hand.
Shannon arrives. A pause so pregnant hangs in the air it might give birth before the drinks arrive.
Tamra finally delivers her opening, which Shannon shuts down almost immediately.
“A month ago, you sat at a booth with a bunch of women and said I was a drunk, and I would never get a man, and that I have no money,” Shannon replies. “How do you think that makes me feel?”
“How do you think it makes me feel – ” Tamra begins before Vicki cuts her off.
“No. Answer the question,” she orders, and Tamra, for once, does what she’s told.
“OK. Probably not good,” Tamra tells Shannon. “And I am sorry that I said that. But how – “
“‘But. Sorry, but,’” Shannon says, looking like she’d just bitten into the lemon in her water glass.
“No. How does it make me feel when you get on a live [stream] and you say something about it was a gift from you to even film with me?”
It goes on, tensely, for a few more minutes, Tamra and Shannon resurrecting old slights, Vicki refereeing the match from her seat between the other two.
“Aging has taught me a lot about friendship,” she tells the camera at one point. “That we can’t take these for granted. Nothing has been that bad that they can’t move on.
“They haven’t slept with each other’s boyfriends or husbands,” Vicki continues. “They haven’t stolen from each other. They’ve just got sharp tongues.
“I just want them to get back together. Like the good old days. The Tres Amigas days.”
“I just want to be around you in that happy place,” Tamra says after finally making a sincere apology, no ifs, ands or buts.
“I am absolutely willing to move forward and laugh and have fun,” Shannon replies. “And again, I don’t want to hurt anybody. It’s not my intention.”
“I know,” Tamra says. “I don’t think any of us want to hurt anybody, but sometimes it happens.” She pauses and looks at Vicki. “And it’s usually your fault,” she jokes.
“I’ll take the blame,” Vicki says, and they lived happily ever after, or at least until next week’s episode.
Elsewhere on “The Real Housewives of Orange County” this week:
— Emily Simpson calls Heather Dubrow to share some tea about the birthday gift she got from new housewife Carmella Garcia. When she opened it at home after the birthday party seen in the previous week’s episode, she found a gold Christian Dior clutch inside.
After a bit of internet sleuthing, we found the Miss Caro Top Handle Pouch on Dior.com for $2,600, and like Emily, we wondered what the heck the new girl was thinking by giving such an expensive gift.
“Are we really thumbing our nose at a Dior clutch?” wondered Heather, the Material Girl of the Housewives, in a camera confessional.
“Maybe the intent was to show the other women, ‘I’m a baller,’” Emily said in her own confessional.
“Can a friendship be bought with a designer bag?” Heather asked as the confessional commentary continued. “I mean … yes?”
— The pricey handbag wasn’t the strangest thing about Carmella’s gift, Emily went on to explain.
“There was something else in the bag,” she told Heather. “And I pulled it out, and it was a vibrator.”
“OK, that’s weird,” Heather replied.
Later, we hear about it from Carmella, when her teenage daughters give her a hard time about what they’d seen on Amazon under her recent orders after the 14-year-old logged on to buy groceries.
“I’m not like a vibrator connoisseur,” Carmella told the camera. “So I ordered like seven to make sure the vibrator fit inside the purse.”
— Tamra checks in with her BFF and podcast cohost Teddi Mellencamp, whose battle with cancer last season was a key part of Tamra’s volatile storyline.
They share a sweet moment in which Tamra is as kind and sincere as you’ve ever seen her – you really get how important Teddi is to her – and Teddi delivers some truth as only a best friend can.
“You’re so used to being disappointed that you’re then going to be [a jerk],” she tells Tamra of the problems Tamra has had with her RHOC friends in recent seasons. “But then you’re the bigger [jerk] than anyone else.”