As a private jet carrying “The Real Housewives of Orange County” touches down in Las Vegas, the cameras cut to the longest, pinkest SUV limousine we’ve ever seen and a statuesque Las Vegas showgirl in her fully feathered finery waiting to greet them.
The limo heads straight for the Showgirl Bootcamp Experience where director Stacy and costume designer Pieter await.
“We feel like every woman has a little showgirl in them,” Stacy says, hyping up our housewives for the makeover to come. “We’re going to teach you all the secrets. We’ll put all the show makeup on, we put in you in costumes, we teach you some choreography.”
Tamra Judge has a question: “What if we can’t dance?” she asks.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors, baby,” Stacy replies, and then hands them off to costumer Pieter.
“We’re gonna pin you and we’re gonna nip and tuck you and make you look like a million bucks,” he promises, and off they go to choose their bedazzled bras, G-strings and bodysuits.
Beyond the undergarments the makeover involves a massive amount of pink and red plumage. Somewhere in Vegas a thousand naked ostriches curse the day the housewives came to town.
Gina Kirschenheiter and Emily Simpson start gossiping about Heather Dubrow — she’s apparently launched a whisper campaign criticizing them for always sharing a room on these girls trips — when Jenn Pedranti steps out of an aisle of costumery and stops them dead.
“Oh. My. Word,” Gina says as they look Jenn up and down in her skimpy outfit. “Wow.”
Jenn, as always, the sweetest of the housewives, seems almost embarrassed, bless her heart, by their appreciative gaze.
Stacy teaches them all the same eight steps of choreography and to their credit the housewives get it down. Well, Vicki and Shannon Storms Beador do almost fall down at one point but then recover and that’s showing progress for those two.
“I dare anybody, especially Emily, to call me a Debbie Downer now,” Vicki says in a confessional.
“That’s what I want,” Emily says in a confessional of her own. “I want that Vicki. She’s iconic.”
Bootcamp wraps up just as I think it does at Camp Pendleton — all the recruits in their feathers and sparkly undergarments shouting “Showgirls” as they do a champagne toast.
“Think I’d rather be a hooker,” Tamra adds at the finish.
Back in their Sky Villa in the Octavius Tower at Caesars Palace, the Battle of the Bedroom Buddies kicks off again as soon as Gina and Emily announce they’ll share a room for the umpteenth time since they joined the show.
“You guys are in trouble for rooming together,” Tamra whispers as Heather stomps off into the suite she’ll share with Shannon and Jenn.
“Oh well,” Gina replies.
“If somebody thinks it’s a problem then it’s their problem,” Emily adds.
Heather had earlier told Gina that “a lot of girls are triggered by it.” Apparently it’s not fair for Emily and Gina to be together to talk about the others all night.
Housewives: They’ve got big houses, nice cars, fancy clothes, yet somewhere deep down inside their inner middle-schooler still worries about what other people think and say about them.
Meanwhile, Shannon has a room problem of her own. Apparently, her room backs up to an elevator shaft and she thinks she can hear it groaning as cars go up and down. That would be annoying, though none of the housewives she drags into her room can hear anything.
But Shannon being Shannon, she’s also convinced herself that the elevator shaft is emitting “electromagnetic radiation” and she wants someone to swap rooms with her — never mind that it would mean Jenn or Heather then get zapped by the radiation in Shannon’s place.
“Girl, you’re [bleeping] crazy,” Jenn says in a confessional. “There is nothing wrong with the room. What is wrong with the room is that Heather got a better room in Shannon’s opinion.”
Neither Heather nor Jenn are willing to swap with Shannon on grounds that they’d already unpacked in their own rooms. If you’ve seen how housewives pack for a three-day weekend away you know this is a perfectly valid excuse.
Does Shannon go quietly into defeat? Do you know housewives? Do you know Shannon?
Elsewhere this week on “The Real Housewives of Orange County”:
— Shannon and Jenn open the episode with a trip to Lymphatic by Siane where the attendant asks Jenn if she’d like to try a Brazilian lymphatic. “What is that? In the vagina?” Shannon ask. [Housewives like to say “vagina” like guys like to say “butt.” Some anthropologist needs to study this phenomenon.]
— Carmella Garcia continues to prove herself a worthy addition to the cast this season. Her boyfriend Danny comes over to her Corona del Mar crash pad she’s rented in addition to her family home in Rancho Santa Fe.
“I need window treatments pretty soon,” she tells Danny. “The entire neighborhood is tired of seeing me naked.”
Carmella, we should remind you, is a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, so it’s not like her neighbors are the only ones.
She takes a moment to inject herself with an insulin pin and explains the backstory there.
“I went in for a ruptured breast implant” — as one does — and I did the pre-op bloodwork,” Carmella says of her diagnosis with late-onset adult diabetes.
She and Danny then get into a serious conversation about her continuing anger over his infidelity four years earlier. Danny tells her he’s a different person now. Carmella isn’t ready to forgive and forget.
“I’m not ever getting over it,” she tells Danny. “I may get through it, but I’m not getting over it. We’re in a relationship that has been seriously fractured.”
Then, having shown a good deal of emotional intelligence, she shows off a sharp-elbowed sense of humor too.
“All right, let’s put a pin this,” she tells him. “Let’s park for Vegas so I can cheat on you and you can know what it feels like.”