Real Housewives: Sofa Koff!

The long-awaited reunion (part 1) of the Real Housewives of New Jersey happened last night (happened is the way I choose to explain it) - and I hate to say this again, but I have to say this again: Danielle once again won the day. Not by a lot, because there really were no winners here, including me, who watched it and am feeling a little blue because I did watch it.

The loser of the evening was without a doubt Theresa. This however, cements Theresa as the loser for the season. Bankruptcy, a house which is certainly going to be foreclosed on, legal woes, DUIs, foreheads, $11 million of unpaid bills, vendors everywhere being put into financial distress because of the Giudice's greed, leopard clothes, period ragu, mindless F-bombing rants and the IRS - ladies and gentlemen of the casino never fear, for here is the Biggest Losing Streak in the World, spray-tanned for your orangish viewing displeasure.

As I mentioned, the set this time is an Atlantic City casino, and the room is dressed up with giant playing cards with N.J. in the corners - which were actually pretty cool. Andy Cohen looked suitably natty and non-threatening in one of his usual-type, form-fitted suits. Is he Tim Ginn? No. But he's not going to get anyone's attention during this episode, so it doesn't matter.

The Housewives did not look so good.

For the occasion, Theresa had donned a large strapless thing that I am guessing she converted from a 1970s hooked bath rug to a dress-type girding device that was inappropriately short and too tight. Jacqueline was wearing a sequined dress in red that called uncomfortable attention to her shoulder-killing breast mounds, purchased on an earlier show (the breasts, not the dress, which I believe comes from the Snooki collection. In fact, perhaps both the dress and the breasts come from the Snooki collection). She had a black bra on. She was spray-tanned to within an each of her life and her hair looked like Cher's circa 1973, which is not a bad thing on Cher.

Caroline looked appropriate in purple. She also has lost a lot of weight. Good for her. Portion control.

Danielle - oh, dear. Danielle was wearing a copper-colored tube top as a skirt and one of Danny Provolone's wife-beater T-shirts with ankle boots and really dark hair extensions. I am supposing that the outfit was supposed to make her look edgy, per her new imaginary rock-star status, but unfortunately, it just made her appear to have a huge roll of fat around her middle. It was a most unfortunate ensemble.

Supposedly, the woman haven't seen each other in a year, which seems unlikely, since they all live two houses away from each other. Andy says something about how they are finally in the same room with each other, and Theresa says, finally, and Jacqueline says, without armed guards.

So that's how it's gonna be, Jackie? Danielle's eyes narrow.

The governor of "Jersey" as Andy calls him said sometime in the not-too-distant past that he doesn't like Jersey Shore, which he believes is not a good representation of the state. No one admits to having watched it except Theresa, who says she doesn't like it because the girl (Snooki, probably, met a guy and had sex with him right away). Theresa does it old school (on credit up to $11 million, I guess that means) and doesn't think you should have sex right away. Then she adds, all fake innocence and eyebrows like Nixon, "I don't think you should have sex right away the first week you meet 'em. Like certain people in this room." And then, like the cowardly asscheese that she is, she says, "But we're not gonna get into this right now. Go on, ask your questions."

And right away I know that Theresa, Jacqueline and Caroline have decided on a party line. These will be the things that they bring up. Some of them may be true. Some may not be true. It doesn't matter, because they are going to say them loud, and who will know the difference?

The problem is that some of the things they say in this show are frankly too newly minted to be credible. If Danielle and Steve had really had sex in front of Theresa's kids, for instance, we would have heard it by now. I believe that Theresa has decided that if she can make Danielle look as bad as possible, she, Theresa, will look better by comparison.

This is because Theresa is an idiot and she assumes that everyone else is even stupider than she is. Really, every time Theresa opens her mouth, she is calling every last person in the world a moron, because she actually thinks that we will believe whatever line of salmonella-smacked bullshit she delivers. It's really incredibly insulting.

"Oh, let's go back to that one," Theresa says, adding that Danielle allegedly slept with Steve a week after she met him, in full view of Theresa's children (who get to hear their mother talking about how often she schtups their Daddy one room from theirs in the Pee-Wee's Playhouse Palatial Steak & Ale). Danielle says this wasn't true, and the Other Ones screech yes! Yes, it is! Gia heard you! Milania heard you! Tilapia heard you! and this all seems very flimsy and howly but yet also a Red Flag, because if Theresa's friend Steve had been involved in this, why didn't they bring it up to Steve? It just doesn't pass the BS test.

I do seem to be swearing much today. I apologize. I think I caught it from the show, but I am definitely going to get some antivirals so it goes away.

Jacqueline undermines the story still more by saying that Theresa's kids heard it, and then she adds, you straddled him right in front of the kids.Okay - they either heard or or they saw it. Which is it? Because if it had really been the more ominous, they saw you, they would have led with that one.

Andy knows it's BS, too. He makes them move to his own topic. There is some stuff about how Danielle says "woman" instead of  "women." They bring up "ethnicity," rerevnovated," "sangwich." They are all in agreement about how nice it is to have their own languages. For a minute, it all seems happy. We are all so unique and delightful!

On to the kids. Danielle's kids are great and their careers are great. Jacqueline and Theresa squeezed out some kids. There is some nonsense about fertiility bracelets and contractions. Babies and leopard pajamas and talk of goddaughters. During this scene, all the Other Ones are smiling proudly and even Danielle smiles sentimentally. Babies and stuff. Go back and check for that smile; as batshit crazy as Danielle is, she is human, and that's more than I can say for Gorilla Giudice.

The question from the (not-too-bright) caller is: why didn't Danielle call Jacqueline after her baby was born? Oooh! oooh! I can answer this one myself! Because Jacqueline told her not to! She said to Danielle, don't you ever talk about or come near my baby. Danielle's mistake was to think that by saying this, Jacqueline meant, don't you ever talk about or come near my baby. How can they have it every way? We don't want you near us, dammit, but don't you forget to send a freakin' baby gift, bee-yoch!

Jacqueline is going to be pissy over this, because the baby is only like two years old by now, so Danielle says congratulations, he's beautiful to which Jacqueline says, super-pissily, I know he is and this is going to be a fight. You can tell that Jacqueline is revving up the Baby Huey Theresa, and there's going to be bloodshed.

Dina is not there, and everyone is mad - but the Other Ones get to see her all the time. It was Danielle's fault, they all say, and Danielle doesn't care. But Andy brings up the conversation last season where Caroline, weeping hysterically, accuses Danielle of trying to do some mysterious thing to Dina.

I have to say that Dina is gone and I don't miss her. Perhaps I am in the minority. It's not that I have anything against Dina - it's just that I really don't care. Any of these women could be gone next week and I wouldn't care. They would be a blip on the edge of my radar and sometimes manybe when I saw someone in a too tight dress, with tacky furniture and a spray tan and too much Botox, my brain would fart "RHONJ." And then it would go away, and I would think, I need to buy orange juice and a printer cartridge.

So, anyway, apparently Danielle is accused of trying to get Dina's daughter taken away. Danielle says she would never do that; she doesn't believe that Dina is an unfit mother. Theresa hears what she wants to hear, which is unfit mother and she's all, "Let's not talk about unfit mothers," which seems to me to be the wrong reaction, considering that Danielle didn't actually call Dina an unfit mother. Then there's some talk of silencing people (by which I think Jacqueline means "gag order," and Danielle says that maybe her attorneys did in fact put a gag order on Dina.

And the judges wouldn't put a gag order on Dina if Danielle had said something bad. Caroline says we can't talk about her sister (because Caroline thinks everyone should just blindly obey her), and Danielle says that she is allowed to clarify the story now that it;s been brought up (which is true, legally). Danielle says she never tried to have Dina's kids taken away.

And this may be true. The story I read was about child support, not custody.

Caroline does her bully thing, do not speak about my sister. Caroline confusingly welcomes Danielle to her world, and Danielle says she doesn't want to be in her world, and Caroline says that's the best gift anyone could ever give her. (Headed to the ER for my whiplash injury; Caroline will be hearing from my personal injury lawyer).

Jacqueline waves her arms menacingly and talks about proof and crap and she looks like a stuffed crust pizza that's been glittered in red by Martha Stewart, who also happens to be from New Jersey. Why isn't Martha Stewart on this show? I could learn handy tips for the holidays at the same time that I am learning about whatever it is I am learning about on this show. Martha would judge the crispiness of the biscotti and it would all be over with. Nobody gets to feel good about themselves if Martha is on the show.

Back at the set, Shut your mouth you piece of garbage shut up shut up shut up says Jaqueline, and I see what Ashley is in 20 years, a glittery sausage yelling her own random brain-tweets and then telling everyone to shuddup shuddup shuddup.

Theresa says that Danielle didn't even acknowledge their babies, which is ridiculous, because they told her not to, and Danielle says something about how Theresa didn't even acknowledge her own nephew. She must mean that Theresa didn't mention it in a blog or something. Who cares? Why didn't Theresa just say whaddevah?

Because that's not what this is about. What this is about is that somebody in the Giudice family (maybe Joe's sister who married a - gasp!- black man, or maybe Joe's mistress, who had sex with Joe - hurl!) had a baby, and the Giudices weren't planning to acknowledge this.

Yet another Giudice secret - with the important point being that in this case, Danielle had done her homework.

Gold star, Miss Staub!

Theresa acts as if Danielle has something horrible and true, which makes me wonder if there's some truth in it, and starts screaming "Don't you break up my family!" And then hitches her horrible dress over to Danielle and she's pointing and screaming F-you F-you F-you Bitch Bitch Bitch F-you F-you F-you! You F-in bitch! You mother-f-ing bitch! You f-in bitch!"

Andy tries to pull Theresa, who is still yelling her happy words, away from Danielle, and Theresa shoves him into a chair. Danielle gets up and leaves the set, which makes perfect sense to me. A big be-flowered gorilla shouting in my face? I'd be SO out of there.

Theresa is throwing furniture and grunting and telling profanities and Jacqueline is doing some snap-up-with-a-z-formation thing and it's really quite terrible. Caroline goes to try to calm Theresa down, saying she knows Danielle is a bitch and Theresa just keeps yelling insensibly, like a gorilla on The Jerry Springer Show.

Which is what this show is. The '90s had Jerry, and now we have Andy.

Theresa is yelling that Danielle better get her ass back to the set so that she can - what? Continue to scream? Hit her? Kill her? Daniell says that she won't go back to the set until Theresa sits down, and if she gets up again, she's done. Danielle is right - the Other Ones brought up something and talked about it, and then when Danielle tried to defend herself, they screamed about law and right and bitches.

They can't have it both ways.

Had they just let Danielle defend herself, there would have been doubt. That would have worked to their advantage in the long run. But because they all - Theresa, Caroline, and Jacqueline - decided to sceam and rant, they came off looking like bullies.

Danielle is a little upset. I would be a little upset. I actually am a little upset.

Danielle tells Andy that she won't go back unless someone is put in charge of Theresa. Andy says that he won't let her get up and that he pulled Theresa off of Danielle. I have to say that Andy looked like a complete fool; he wasn't trying very hard to get Theresa off of Danielle, and he let her stand up in the first place. I am wondering if this is why Danielle was fired - was she going to sue?

She's not worth it she's not worth it she's not worth it. Theresa is promising not to hit Danielle.

Caroline says that Lori, who may or may not be Danielle's girlfriend, tried to come after Danielle. Big deal. They had to hold Lori back. Big deal. Theresa's fault, all of it. It really made me mad that Caroline hinted after that raging gorilla f-bomb tantrum that it was Theresa who needed to be protected.

Theresa is now mumbling that Danielle was tawkking about her family. I have to say that if Theresa wants to kill everyone who is talking bad about her family, Theresa better just start making appointments for duels. She may be finished by 2189. Because everyone is talking about Theresa's family. Everyone. I bet the Queen of England says every night right before she goes to bed, "Oh, Philip, those children's hair bows are quite dreadful." I bet the Pope says, "Why, oh why are they portraying themselves as Catholic?" I bet the Dali Lama goes, "I truly hate the profusion of leopard print crap."

Caroline makes some crap excuse for Theresa about how Theresa never does this kind of profanity-laden killfest, otherwise Caroline - who is so discerning - wouldn't be her friend. Because we really believe this, right? Thanks, Caroline, for trying to make us all feel stupid. Of course, Theresa does this. Whenever she doesn't get her own way, she does this. What Caroline wants us to think is that because Caroline is so controlled and ladylike herself, we should believe her when she says that Theresa would never do this because Caroline wouldn't have a friend who does this.

Except we already know that Caroline is not so ladylike, because we saw her have her own tantrum just last week. So, there it is.

Suddenly, Jacqueline accuses Danielle of wanting to take credit for introducing her to her fertility doctor. Danielle says that she took Jaacqueline to her appointments, Jacqueline says she didn't. Who cares? Is this really something to argue about? Jacqueline says, what? Do I owe you my child? And Danielle says, you don't owe me anything, and Jacqueline is still ranting and literally baring her teeth and looking ridiculous.

Do you think you got me pregnant? Jacqueline asks, ridiculously. Caroline realizes Her Side looks stupid, and she cuts Jacqueline off.

We have to watch some stuff about how Albie probably isn't going to get to be a lawyer, and Danielle sticks up for her. Caroline ignores this show of goodwill and decency - which, even if it was manufactured, was a sign of goodwill and decency. Theresa is ready to be insulted when she brings up the fact that Gia got to be a model, and she is mad because Danielle said during the season that Gia wasn't a supermodel. Danielle explains that Gia is eight years old, and by definition is not a supermodel. Danielle says in the reunion that she hopes Gia gets all of her dreams. She adds that she thinks Gia is beautiful and did a great job on the runway at Fashion Week.

Then Theresa wants to know about the lace and crinoline comment in which Danielle said that when her children were small, they wore lace and crinoline. Her dogs wore leopard.

Theresa dresses her children in horrible leopard. Danielle won't cop to insulting the way the kis are dressed. This is a mistake. She should say, yes, I am not fond of the leopard look, but if anyone could pull it off, your girls can.

Because Danielle has no answers, Caroline bitchily "interprets" Danielle's comment to mean that Theresa's kids look like dogs. Caroline knows that this is not what Danielle meant, because Caroline herself laughed like a hyena from The Lion King when Theresa and her girls made their grand entrance in their shiny satin and flannel leopard-print Bo-Peep/pantalette/hair bow ensembles.

I won't say that the kids are dogs. I don't think they are pretty or cute, though. Do you think that Theresa's forehead is lower because her mother made her wear bows, too? Because those are really heavy-looking bows.

There is some talk about a heinous Bravo poll about who viewers would want to be their mother. They choose Caroline, because at least she would totally pull out the stops for you if you wanted to be in law school. Theresa is horribly jealous and uses the excuse that of course viewers would want Caroline, because her kids are old.

Danielle gets the least votes. Danielle doesn't feel that she has to defend her parenting. Jacqueline says that Danielle's daughters go to the school nurse and cry every day. This is another mean thing to bring up. How much Danielle overshares with her kids. Danielle says that sometimes she regrets sharing too much with the girls, but added that another housewife with a teenager (everyone knows this is Jacqueline, including Jacqueline, whose oversharing resulted in her daughter being a hideous assaulting criminal as opposed to what she was before, which was a big, doughy, self-entitled little bitch).

Is there nobody else who thinks that outing little girls for their pain at their mother's reality show antics (which are without question revolting) is playing unfair? Taking your finger and digging into the painful sore that must be their lives? Revealing yet another aspect of their already far-too-public lives?
Period ragu, period wine. Women, don't get near the food at that time of the month or it will curdle. Theresa shills her cookbook, which has nothing that you couldn't get from any Italian food Web site - which is probably where she got the recipes.

Ring for the anniversary? Oh, it's just a yellow sapphire. Theresa said a diamond ring would be a half-million dollars. Of course, before she knew that her financial circus would be made public, she wanted everyone to think it was a real diamond. She's the kind of person who would buy fake Gucci shoes for her kid.

She only raises divas. Which may make life difficult when they are working regular jobs or delivering pizzas.

It's all just part of the $11 million debacle. The shopping trips show us what we know about Theresa - she's a spendy thief who wants the stuff but doesn't pay the bills.

The Other Ones act as if this is cute. Danielle's face is inscrutable.

Birthday parties, housewarming parties, she wants what she wants when she wants it, baptisms, etc.

The whole apartment above the pizzeria is too much for Theresa. For the first time, there is the look of regret on her face.

Of course, it's not regret at having bilked innocent people out of money. It's regret because the gravy train is over and no one is handing out credit to her anymore.

Theresa says her house is not in foreclosure, but she has her husband and her four kids, so she doesn't care if it happens (it will, they will live over the pizzeria and she will try to weave a fable about how their Italian trip brought them back to their roots and who needs all that stuff?). When pursued by Andy and his pesky questions, Theresa tries to skim over the bills, all the stuff that was written in the New York Post, it's all incorrect, some of it is, anyway, Joe didn't tell her, he was trying to protect her. Her stuff may be auctioned, but she's not paying attention. She's not in denial.

Jacqueline is almost in tears. Theresa insults the lying New York Post and said that it's not true - $100,000 at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales and Nordtrom? No way. Because you forgot Posche. A full $9K of that amount is from Posche!

Maybe. I am just making that up, because it sounds right.

Danielle is so happy.

Theresa won't clarify exactly what her financial situation is, and Jacqueline jumps to her defense and said that her husband just told her not to spend so much money. You know when your husband says not to spend so much money? Jacqueline says, as if $11 million in debt is just because someone thought that the white sandals would also be cute for summer, so she was getting the brown ones and the white ones, even though she only wears sandals for three months, but she really wants them, so damn the meat budget, but she's getting the white sandals, too.

Theresa was working, she was making her own money. She could spend what she wanted. She has adjusted her own lifestyle. The kids - they don't demand stuff. The whole thing has made them closer.

To stand up for her again. Jaccqueline said that the second Theresa found out (that there's not a magical fairy paying the bills) that they were $11 million in debt and this might cramp their lifestyle, she went to work immediately - appearances every night.

And Theresa becomes even, unbelievably, more detestable than before.

Theresa doesn't like negative, and she stays only in the positive (except where Danielle is concerned). If (when) they lose their house, they'll just build it back.

Joe's accident was when he yawned, not when he drank, and no way was it because he was drinking about money problems (I read that he was partying with another Bravo franchise right before the accident). Officer. I was just drinking because I was so "shooken" up about driving into a forest and hitting all those trees. Theresa starts to deny, but then has to admit when the other housewives say it, that the citation is still considered a DUI. But they got the ticket in the mail a week later (apparently, when people get arrested in New Jersey, the police don't act on the spot - they take a few days to think about it). Danielle says the obvious - why go have a few drinks after a car accident? Caroline corrects Theresa when she says he yawned. He fell asleep for a minute. This is the official excuse. Yes, that's actually what Theresa thinks now, too.

Danielle doesn't approve of DUIs. Of course, I still suspect that Danielle was a bit under the influence after the nail salon in the first episode. If I had to live with Theresa, the liquor would flow like non-sauce making time.

Is Danielle a victim or a villain? She wants to be both. The stripping moment made me ill. Butt crack and booty shorts. Engage and suggest. Horrible confession, and she's such a devout Catholic. (As a Catholic, I want to point out that no way can these people speak for my group.)

Danny says there is a kindred spirit thing going on. I know that Danny kicks Danielle to the curb at the end of the season. He wants to be on the show.

Now, Jacqueline brings up that Danny may have been married at one time. Ooh. This is her dirt? Big deal. Jacqueline's daughter was convicted on assault charges. Didja hear that?

When you hear Jacqueline speak, you know why her daughter was so obsessed with Danielle.

So Danny might have been married. So what? Is he a prize? No.

I have to say that Danny seemed to be in this more for the chance to be on TV than for the chance to have sexual relations with Danielle.

Jacqueline and Theresa want to make the Danny thing a big deal. Who cares? He's just a lonesome piece of provolone. No one cares. Danielle didn't hang out with him, she says - and so what if she did? This is not news. The idea was always communicated that maybe Danny thought Danielle was kind of hot.

Danielle says that she really can't afford to have her house renovated but that people needed to pay attention to the show - she didn't pay for the Sweet 16. It was all for charity. I don't know if this means that people paid to get in - I have no clue what this means. Do I care? No.

Andy tries to get Danielle to talk about whether or not she and Lori are in a relationship, and Danielle does not admit whether or not she is "swimming in the lady pond." Caroline sticks up for the not outing of people who may or may not be gay, but she says that editing is not to blame for how people are portrayed on the show.

Okay, Caroline, I stick by my earlier thoughts about you.

Caroline thinks it's fine for someone to strip or be a prostitute, but she has a husband who loves her, nanny nanny boo-boo.

Jacqueline has watched the sex tape. She has analyzed it in ways that Jacqueline is not able to analyze things, because Jacqueline doesn't have a brain; she has a skull full of Urkel-Os cereal. Then Theresa chimes in (okay, apparently Theresa has seen it, too) and she wants to do a timeline of the sex tape because it will prove whether this was an old mistake or a new one. Long hair or short? Danielle says it was long hair, because she had clip-in extensions.

Who cares? I am sure that Danielle is making money from the sex tape, and whatever. Grab those 15 minutes, sistah. I don't care. I was pretty horrified, and then I found out about Theresa and her $11 million and Ashley and her assault, and now I don't care. Where my outrage might have once been is a big callus of RHONJ incidents.

Theresa starts screaming bitch and more bad words.

Caroline is mad and yelling about the OK Corral because Caroline has been called on the "dead light in their eyes" comments, and Danielle is denying that her kids really know about the sex tape.

Of course, Danielle's kids know about the sex tape. They hear the whispers, poor littles. Danielle can lie to herself about that - mommy should have been more discreet, big mistake - and whatever. Does it help to have three bitches talking about it in a fake-compassionate way?

Caroline does some nonsense about how she wants Danielle's autograph because Danielle is so perfect. Sarcasm, but not funny sarcasm.

Next, we hear about the baby-with-cancer fundraiser, an event made unspeakable by Danielle's paranoia and the license that Danielle's paranoia gave her posse. I've already talked about that. It was ghastly, and there is no excuse. Caroline wants to focus on Danielle being mean to Christopher, which seems to me to be the least of the issues. Danger to her son in the form of Danny? Really. What is Danny going to do? Call him a punk. Big deal. Over.

If Caroline had talked about something without screaming fool!  and whatever other names she decided to call, she might have won. But she lowered herself, and now they all look bad.

But Danielle - oh, geez. She looks better than them.

More on Real Housewives of D.C. - An Amendment to the First

In my Friday post about the Real Housewives of D.C., I wrote about Stacie's search for her birth mom, and I was kind of annoyed, so I was a little scathing. I was thinking about it today when I was looking for information about the Salahis, and I thought I would do a quick expansion of what I was thinking.

This is what I wrote:

"She's selfish," say Stacie's friends, and Stacie says that it would "rock" her birth mother's world if people knew she had a black child. But Stacie has a right to know, dammit. Everyone cries about the selfishness of this woman who didn't get an abortion some time in the 1960s and just wants not to have her husband get mad at her.

That sounds really harsh.

I still mean that for whatever reason, Stacie's birth mom carried a baby she knew she couldn't keep to term and gave her to an obviously amazing family - Stacie received an expensive education and seems to have started life with all the possible gifts of family support, culture and strong priorities.

And I do understand Stacie's desire to meet both her birth mother and birth father.

However, I have to say that my respect for Stacie's feelings does not equate to agreement with her stance. It no doubt feels to Stacie that her mother is being selfish in not telling her family about Stacie and not revealing Stacie's father's name.

That said, Stacie's mother already has made clear what she was willing to do for her daughter. What she was willing to do was carry her to term and give her to another family.

There were issues that caused this woman to give up the child: perhaps issues with race, with her relationship with the father, with the times, and with her own future. They are perhaps issues that might not matter if the pregnancy happened today - people had different value systems back thirty or forty years ago.

However, the issues might matter; who is to say whether this was a case of forbidden love or something different altogether? We aren't standing in that woman's shoes.

Stacie found her and the woman was willing to talk to her. I don't really know whether Stacie likes this woman at all; it sounds as if she is only reluctantly keeping her secret. Obviously, the woman was curious about the daughter she gave up.

However, she has repeatedly told Stacie that she doesn't want to reveal the name of Stacie's birth father. Perhaps she is concerned that he will step in and wreak havoc in her own life. Perhaps she is worried that her husband will find out. Perhaps she is worried about the life of the birth father? Perhaps there is another story that no one knows about?

I just think to label someone as "selfish" for keeping her part of a bargain made all those years ago and expecting other people to also keep that bargain is a bit unfair. She made a deal that worked for the conditions of her life and for Stacie's life many years ago, and to expect her now, in her old age, to uncover this to other people whose lives would also be damaged seems unfeeling in itself.

Stacie "wants," but she has no right to "expect." It would be a wonderful thing if her birth mother felt comfortable opening her life to Stacie and giving Stacie her full history. She's not required to do so, though - and berating her (albeit as an unknown entity) on television seems mean and unfeeling - despite the fact that Stacie herself said that it would be a "scandal" for her mother.

Real Housewives of D.C. - Store Grapes

This episode of the Real Housewives of D.C. was all about facades. Which is what they are all about. This time, it was more of Michaele and Tareq's facade, and how annoyed other people are that they get away with it.

The episode starts with the dessicated Lynda feeding her large pet model, Ebong, large slabs of bacon. She is wearing a little apron and standing next to her Joy of Cooking cookbook. Her children, aged 16 and 19, slither into breakfast wearing giant feety pajamas, and some other random grown son comes in wearing a giant white shirt. I will think of him as Fonzie because at the moment he walked in wearing the white T-shirt, Ebong said, "Ayyyyyyy."

So, henceforth, he will be known as Fonzie.

All the kids have that slack look of mommy-doing-too-much-for-them: that smug, self-satisfied demeanor that comes from having your parents give you jobs and it really not mattering much whether you have a job or not because they're always your trust fund.

They sit at a table heavily weighed down with bacon and sausage and is it my mistake or is the Pellegrino tinted orange? They are talking about the new house Lynda hopes to buy, and they all hope that when they get there, the Suddenly Domestic Lynda will make her Signature 16 Quarts o' Chili and that the house will have a pool and that after eating chili, they can dive right in and get horrible cramps (I am assuming from not waiting the requisite 30 minutes after eating, but I guess it could also be that Lynda just makes some spicy, gas-making chili).

Lynda has enjoyed living in a hotel for the last five years, but now she oddly feels the need to give her nearly grown and actually grown children a yard. To which I must ask, "Why?" So they can toddle around in delightful little running steps? So they can practice for Little League? So they can get married in a gazebo draped in ivory bunting, against which the giant model Ebong will be even more imposing and beautiful?

Cut over to Stacie. She is having A Different World moment with her sorority sisters and they are practicing songs that they sang in their sorority years back so that they can do them again at their Howard University reunion. One of them jumps right into the conversation with, "So, how's your search for your birth father going?" which is not at all what she was supposed to do, as that was meant to be the crown on the conversation. Stacie blithely steers her back to the Real Beginning of the Discussion, which is, "I found my birth mother and she's white." The women are horrified. The mother's relationship was "secret" and no one in her family of New White Husband and New White Child knows that she had a secret baby with a Nigerian while she was in the Peace Corps.

And I start wondering: was Hillary Clinton in the Peace Corps? just because I try to entertain myself with stories like this from time to time, and then Stacie says something along the lines of "it's a big problem," meaning that news about her birth is going to create a scandal. And I Google Hillary Clinton Peace Corps but all I can really get is stuff about her swearing people into the Peace Corps and honoring the oldest-living Peace Corps volunteer. I could pull up a bio, but by then i am bored with my theory, so I hit Play again on the DVR.

Stacie's friends are being surprised in that way that people are when they are on TV but they have already been fully briefed on the conversation. Stacie's White Birth Mother got pregnant and the Peace Corps sent her back to the United States and she never told Stacie's Black Birth Father that Stacie existed. It was a love that couldn't happen, them being from two different countries and in the Peace Corps.

"She's selfish," say Stacie's friends, and Stacie says that it would "rock" her birth mother's world if people knew she had a black child. But Stacie has a right to know, dammit. Everyone cries about the selfishness of this woman who didn't get an abortion some time in the 1960s and just wants not to have her husband get mad at her.

Mary is so happy that she is helping Ted open his salon and his Hella Spa (Hela Spa), Washington, D.C. has the reputation of being Hollywood for ugly people, and she is delighted to be part of the move to change that. But then Michaele comes in wearing yet another of her backless pillowcases and a lot of bleached hair, and she screams hello to Ted and throws herself on him like she's hoping to impale his lungs with her nipples. She grinds on him for a while, and then Mary comes in. Mary looks sad, in a dress that shows badly that she is not wearing a bra when she very much should be wearing a bra, no makeup, sad frizzy hair.

Ted does not notice her. She stands there some more and he still does not notice her. She stands there even more, and Ted doesn't notice her, and even though she is pretending to not feel like a loser by play-acting nicey-nice with the help and pawing through the swag bags for the Big Party. Finally she clears her throat, "a-hem," and Ted looks over and goggles. He is surprised perhaps to see that Mary is the unkempt braless woman is apparently Mary, the woman who says that her contacts are simply going to make him in Washington. Mary is so jealous that she is oozing green slime, and then she and Michaele engage in this sick little hang-on-the-hairdresser girlfight, kissing him, hugging him, and generally trying to prove to the other one that she is the most important person in this hairdresser's life.

Mary gets her talking head moment and says that while Michaele may be donating some of her crappy-ass wine, she feels that she, Mary, is the one who is really sponsoring the event.

She is getting her hair done and it's all fine until Ted walks up and says, "What's going on, gorgeous?" as if he hadn't seen her 15 minutes earlier. Mary asks Ted to do the hair for some fashion charity thingy she is doing, and he says he will, and then she says that she noticed that he didn't notice her quickly enough for her liking when she came in the door. "Am I your favorite?" and he says there is plenty of him to go around.

"Who's number one here?" she asks.

He tells the stylist to "hook a bitch up," which really isn't funny and is kind of crass.

The salon opening is full of Housewives telling each other how lovely they look and Cat is over all us Americans who have three-month holidays in the sun. Lynda comes in with her pet model and says hi to Michaele. In a small town like Washington, you run into people, she says, adding that she doesn't hold a grudge because life is too short.

Tareq and Michaele are clinking plastic champagne saucers of some ambery-colored liquid (Lipton Iced Tea and white wine? peach-flavored - and colored - wine? Rotten, spoiled wine that has been sitting in the un-airconditioned double-wide that sits on the edge of their grape farm?) and once again, Mary is seething.

She believes that Tareq and Michaele use their wine as a bartering system to get into things and get to know important people in Washington, D.C. Mary says this in a way that makes me sad that she doesn't have anything to use as a bartering system - other than her sense of entitlement.

To Cat, she declares them as social climbers, and Cat says that she despises social climbers.

Mary says that in D.C., you have to have a certain integrity, or you aren't going to make it. I am glad to know that there is so much integrity being swung around in D.C. If she hadn't told me, I would never have known. Also, good to know that integrity seems to be - according to Mary - indigenous to Our Nation's Capital.

Back at Mary's big traditional stucco house with odd contemporary windows, Mary's Lolly daughter has quit her waitressing job and now is an assistant who has, like, her own desk. But she can take her dog. And I have to wonder - look at Mary's eyes! What is she on???

Cat is throwing a ball in the yard of her rented house in which she no longer lives. Michaele calls to invite her for grape-stomping, and Cat asks to invite her friend, Jason. Michaele says yes. Cat gets in a dig about whether this time there will be wine served at Michaele's winery.

Then Michaele calls Lynda, and they talk about the perfect weather before Michaele informs Lynda that she is inviting all the Housewives and their significant others or husbands (Lynda is the only one without a husband) for grape-stomping. Lynda declines because her kid has football that day.

She says in her talking head that of course if Michaele had been a true friend to her, she would be only too happy to be at Michaele's party. So I am guessing that whole forgive and forget because life is too short thing isn't working out for her.

Michaele is secretly crushed, though she pretends to be pensive on the camera.

Cat and Jason and Mary go to Mary's high-end contemporary furniture store in Georgetown and Mary informs them that she is going to further insult the integrity of her traditional house by painting the dining room high-gloss black and adding contemporary furniture. Cat looks horrified, and basically tells Mary that she is horrified. Then Cat says she wouldn't sit in any of the chairs in that store for more than five minutes (something about her knobbly bottom) and Mary tells her to just. Shut. The. Hell. Up. To which Cat replies, "Should I just say I love everything then?"

Because it's Mary's friend's store. Jason (a hairdresser) and Cat say the furniture looks like something the guy from American Psycho would have, and they laugh and laugh. Mary sits there sucking the skewer stuck up her butt. Then the storekeeper gives them some wine and Jason - wearing a knit cap from Wal-Mart and the arm protector from his grandmother's sofa - makes fun of the plastic cups.

He is finished being disdainful of the store. He tells Cat and Mary about going to the Congressional Black Caucus Dinner. Mary says it's the biggest weekend for the African-American community. Apparently, Michaele invited them and her ticket only admitted one, but they snuck right through. They sit in the empty chairs because sometimes people don't show up to these things.

Mary is mad because she has invited Ted and Jason to meet All the Important People and it just Doesn't Look right for them to be sneaking everywhere.

Anyway, Secret Service spots Michaele and Tareq and they get escorted out by Secret Service.

"Brazen!" says Cat, and Mary is amazed by this word.

Somehow, after they are finished getting thrown out, Tareq and Michaele end up sneaking back into the VIP room.

They all go to the grape stomp, which is the first time they've stomped since Tareq's mom tried to have him removed from the property. Tareq's mom is a local reporter, and she's sent the press, and Michaele is concerned that the press-media is there. Tareq calls Stacie to let her know that there may be problems getting in.

Mary wants to see what the grape farm is all about. The vineyards.

There does seem to be some double-wides, and Mary says she has never seen Michaele without Tareq since Michaele was behind the counter at Nordstrom's selling makeup.

More on the Black Caucus dinner: Stacie is horrified that they would insult the black community like this. Obama was there! Stacie's very own delightful president!

She calls Tareq back. She has two young kids and she can't be walking into all this crazy shit. She wants the scoop. Cat asks, "Are we safe to come to your place?" and the phone goes dead.

Tareq and Michaele have dressed their security guards like Secret Service guys. Michaele hangs on 40 seconds too long in each air kiss. Tareq tells everyone to stomp three gallons and he'll give them a bottle of wine of their choice. Cat can't get over the security. She grills Michaele, who pretends not to know what they are talking about.

Stacie is just drinking.

Cat won't stomp. She must have funky feet. She is flat-out rude to this big imbecile whose mother wants him off her damned property.

"I know you're American, but let's just have some manners," said Cat.

Michaele's assistant says love is better than being bitchy to everybody. Stacie's husband says that generally you don't expect your service provider to call you a bitch, but, keeping it real, Cat was being a bitch.

He may be the show's only redemption.

They start to stomp, and both Cat and Mary notice that the grapes in bins on the platform are Thompson seedless, from the supermarket.

Michaele stomps as if she is a go-go dancer in the 1960s. Mary says not one ounce of liquid came from those grapes. Cat keeps saying "Bollocks!" She grabs Jason's early car back to D.C. Michaele is mad that Cat was insulting. Mary tries to defend Cat because she had the exact same thoughts that Cat did. They all smack around their glasses of vin rose.

Mary brings up the Black Caucus dinner and Stacie says that Jason and Ted were upset about not having tickets. Michaele says that they did have tickets; they just weren't seated together. Mary tells Michaele that she builds people up and she doesn't like to talk about people. Then she talks about Lynda with Michaele and Mary smacks Michaele for picking fights with Lynda. Mary tells Michaele that Lynda adores her. They are agreeing to disagree. Stacie is gonna take Michaele's side.

Now Mary is going to bring up some incident where Michaele said, "Ask Mary - she likes to talk about people." Michaele plays dumb and then says that she heard that Mary, Lynda and Cat took great enjoyment in making fun of Michaele. Stacie said that Mary wasn't part of it and that it was Lynda who said the bad things. Then she says that Mary was close to it.

Tareq brings up something about Mary's daughter and next week we're going to see Mary crying. Somebody goes to the hospital. It annoys me that I had to sit through this lackluster episode to get to something that may or may not be interesting.

Just When You Thought RHONJ Couldn't Get Any Worse...It So DOES!

My mantra throughout this season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey has been, after each and every episode, "that's as bad as it gets." I wait a week for the next episode and I continually have to admit that I was wrong the week earlier - because it just gets stupider and stupider.

This week, the entire families of Manzos, Lauritas and Giudices meet for dinner at the Limestone Waffle House that is Teresa Giudice's home. They sit around the sumptuous chairs (which can be yours in an upcoming auction that is now indefinitely postponed while the authorities comb through more Giudice assets that have been uncovered and decide whether it really is okay to sell children's toys and beds and hair bows to the general population) and the women all seem to be drinking fruity strawberry daiquiris. This seems to be an odd choice, because each of those suckers packs more calories than a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but that's what they're doing,

The drinks may actually be Bellinis, because Teresa offers one to Jacqueline. They are very red Bellinis. I am sure that you can get the recipe from either Teresa's book or, more likely, where she may have gotten them herself - off the Internet. But I kid.

And what it the conversation? Uh - duh. It's about Danielle Staub, everybody's favorite punching bag. Not that she doesn't bring some of this on herself, but I always find that the best way to eliminate a problem from your life is to not keep talking and talking and talking about it.

Before the family starts in on Danielle, everybody clinks glasses and compliments Teresa on the food, and Teresa - bizarrely clad in some shredded black lace cocktail dress/negligee/mantilla - says, as if she's not desperately trying to push her book about Italian food, "some people think Italian food is so fattening, but it's so not." Albert, Caroline's husband, chimes in that when the group was in Italy, they ate their faces off but never gained weight. He delicately avoids the fact that the reason they did not gain weight is because of the enforced death march up Mount Vesuvius they were forced to endure as a condition of being held captive at Teresa's leopard-and-lace family reunion.

Jacqueline seems unable to use a fork; she is trying to do the European upside-down fork thing and I keep worrying that she will stab herself in the chin. Caroline asks, stagily, how Ashley is doing with her trial for assaulting Danielle at the country club, and Jacqueline says that Ashley seems to be doing fine. Caroline points out obviously that this may be on Ashley's record for the rest of her life, for the millionth time that someone in this extended family has pointed that out, to which I have to say: yes, it will be on her record for the rest of her life. Even if the charges are dismissed, the fact that Ashley was arrested will be on her record for the rest of her life.

Unable to lie about what Ashley did (there were 72 cameras on her at the time), Jacqueline defends the repugnant Ashley by saying that even if Ashley did wrong by pulling Danielle's hair, the hair-pulling was not accompanied by Ashely's screaming that she was going to kill Danielle, as Danielle claimed in the police report. Therefore, Ashley is somehow vindicated.

Caroline does a talking head (it is obvious that this episode is going to be the Caroline Show) and asks rhetorically, "If you are in a better place, why are you so hell-bent on hurting this child?" To which I say, nobody thought that Ashley was such a child when she moved out of her parents' home to go live with her 23-year-old boyfriend, and actually, it was the so-called child who hurt Danielle, not the other way round. OK, so Danielle said that Ashley has flabby arms and failed school and whatever else. Probably, a lot of it is true, though why an adult would be saying such things about a young person makes no sense at all. Why Ashley would respond makes no sense. Why Ashley is allowed to have a cell phone and Internet action also makes no sense - it's not as if she's working for it.

What Caroline really asking is: why are you making my niece pay for her very terrible behavior?

Because - let's face it. Ashley has not shown one iota of remorse over this whole thing. This is the thing that got her on the contract to be paid $3,300 per episode, which is a lot of money for doing the thing she is really talented at - sitting around in knit hats and ass-widening PJ bottoms and being a pouty snot. This is the only time she will realize any kind of success in her life, because the rest of her life is going to be waiting for her stepfather to fork over some money so that she can have a pedicure and buy dog sweaters.

Jacqueline chimes in with the most ridiculous argument ever: if Danielle says she was such a good friend of mine, why is she doing this to my daughter?

Again, I reiterate. Again. You told Danielle you no longer wanted to be her friend. You turned your back on her. This means that whatever warm and fuzzy feelings she once housed for you are most likely gone. By rights, those feelings should have evaporated. Also, your daughter has a weird and violent fascination with Danielle that no doubt was spurred into existence by your constant barrage of insults against her. This obsession of Ashley's with Danielle was whipped into a frenzy by you and then stirred into a luscious soup of rage with assault. The police came. Ashley was arrested. Charges of assault and harassment were filed.

However, this does not constitute Danielle doing anything to Ashley. Ashley is a menace who has not once apologized for her actions. She is the kind of person who would do this again to Danielle or anyone who ticks her off. What Ashley needs is some good residential psychiatric treatment and a real job. Ashley did something to Danielle; what is now happening to Ashley is called a consequence, not some random thing that Danielle is doing to Ashley.

Caroline is tired of everyone in her family having to battle this lunatic. The rumors she spread about Teresa being up to her eyeballs in debt and having her house foreclosed on makes Caroline mad (Teresa just sat there tight-lipped and livid that Caroline would mention this at the table or anywhere - make it go away! - only God knows whether Teresa let her family in on the bankruptcy/possible criminal charges/IRS issues). She was mean to Caroline's son Christopher (by saying that he was rude to her in a valet line, which seems so minor that the fact that Caroline even brought it up makes me snort in disgust). And she was mean to Dina, which made Dina leave the show (something about Danielle calling Dina's ex and trying to get him to stop paying child support or something).

She is "so driven to hurt every single one of us." Then, Caroline lets loose her inner martyr: "And I have done nothing but try to stay out of this woman's life."

Caroline is determined to lay it all on the line and go have drinks with Danielle in order to put all this fighting to rest. And get Danielle to drop her charges against Ashley. And right away, you know it's going to be a failure - and not because of Danielle.

The problem with this scenario is that Caroline wants Danielle to not only leave her family alone (which Danielle actually seems to be doing), but also drop the charges against Ashley. Caroline is operating on the premise that Danielle will believe that Caroline's decision not to mess in her life means anything. It doesn't, because Caroline has made it clear from the outset that she won't have anything to do with Danielle. Caroline also is under the mistaken impression that Danielle will somehow read from Caroline's attempt to talk with her that Caroline is offering any kind of approbation - or that Danielle actually wants Caroline's approbation.

Caroline is also going to insult the life out of Danielle by saying that what Ashley is guilty of, Danielle has been, too. She is going to ask Danielle to "save" Ashley. And yet Caroline is offering her nothing in return.

This entire scenario is called a negotiation. In order to be successful in a negotiation, you have to have a bargaining chip. Caroline believes her munificent presence is a bargaining chip - but she is offering Danielle nothing that she wants or needs. If Caroline invited her to a party, or suggested they meet for lunch sometimes to show people how civilized they could be for an hour or two at distant intervals, Danielle might have snapped the possibilities right up. But if there is nothing to snap up, Danielle will swim away, stewing in her own juices.

Teresa says that she tried to talk to Danielle at the country club, and Danielle just ran away. 

I despise Teresa. She is despicable. She is a liar. She is a thief. Also, she laid in wait at that country club for Danielle, who was behaving pretty well by Danielle standards (considering she found out that her so-called friend was not her friend during the self-same fashion show) and, when Danielle did not engage her, Teresa dropped a bomb of classlessness. I am no fan of Danielle Staub, but Teresa is at least an equally horrible person.

Teresa - I'm not buying your act, I'm not buying your book, and I'm not buying any of that tacky tat you spent $11 million on to fill up your Big Neighborhood Funeral Home of a House.

Caroline says, well, she may run away from me, but I won't run away from her. She is going to try to make a deal with Danielle, but Ashley better behave going forward. Jacqueline whines that she will talk with Ashley, but she can't control her, which means she doesn't want to control her.

Right there and then, Caroline texts Danielle.

Cut to Danielle. She is eating what appears to be huge tubes of pasta and asparagus, and she seems to have learned her table manners at the same school from which Jacqueline matriculated. She is sitting with her two daughters, and she is surprised. Her older daughter asks Danielle to read the text, and Danielle does - and then she starts that weird thing that she does where she scrutinizes every word for the most ominous meanings possible. "Nonsense" (Caroline would like to put a stop to this nonsense). "I'll tell her when I think it's nonsense!"

The younger daughter starts crying and moaning. She doesn't want Mom to go to this scary-sounding meeting from which no good can come. "What normal person would do that?" Well, there's her mistake. Danielle is not a normal person. She believes that it actually matters that Caroline walk away from this meeting thinking, "Wow, I really misjudged her." Danielle loves, loves, loves that scene in Pretty Woman  in which the Julia Roberts gets to go back into the Rodeo Drive shop and say, "You work on commission, right? Big mistake. Huge!'

The older daughter gets that tense mouth-face that she does when she realizes that her mother is spewing crazy-talk.

"What do we have to talk about?" Danielle muses. "I'm not in fear no more. I was, but now I'm not. The thing is, I don't want anything to do with them...so, I'm going to go."

And here is the part that where I realize that Danielle talks in Saturday morning action cartoon show speak, where there's always a watery line before the commercial that's supposed to be strong. Because she says:

She may be the matriarch of her family, but not of mine. So, here we go - matriarch to matriarch.

The older daughter's eyes slit to the side, and she realizes that this is going to be embarrassing as all get-out, especially when her mother says, "I am going to get the dignity and the respect that I deserve."

Respect is earned, dignity is self-contained. It's not something you can demand as if you're ordering a hamburger at a drive-in speaker.

Cut to Jacqueline and her husband trying to talk some sense into the puffed-out drywall that is Ashley. Ashley gets really excited when she hears that Caroline is going to speak to Danielle, and you can tell that throughout this conversation, she is fantasizing about the blog post or Facebook post or whatever she's going to run do as soon as she can leave the room. Jacqueline tells her that she can't do anything more to Danielle, and Ashley says she hasn't done anything - which is actually not a response to what Jacqueline just said.

Why is the baby sitting there? Who brings babies to conversations like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. You always dress him in red and black biker togs. Whatever.

"She's like herpes; she never goes away," the hatted one says of Danielle, laughing at what she thinks of as her own wit, and no doubt remembering what her doctor told her about herpes.

The stepfather says that Ashley is annoying with her Danielle talk and adds that Caroline may not get off the hook. It's costing him money, with all these legal fees, and Ashley needs to can the crap. But Ashley doesn't think she will get convicted, because she thinks that her fiction about only pulling Danielle's hair because she thought Danielle was hurting her mother will fly. She also has this idea that somehow the court will ignore the obvious evidence of Ashley pulling Danielle's hair because the tape doesn't show her telling Danielle that Ashley was going to kill her.

Ashley wants to know what Aunt Caroline is going to say - because, of course, the more details, the more people will like her Internet post. This will all be so funny, goes Ashley's brain.

Jacqueline says that Danielle will probably want a public apology, and Ashley says, "Well, that;'s not gonna happen." Because it makes so much more sense to hope the judge will ignore the evidence - on camera - of Ashley's assault on Danielle. Because Ashley paying a fine and being found guilty is so much better than saying, it was a confusing situation and I don't know why I did it. I am so sorry.

Ashley rolls her eyes and shows her parents enormous disrespect - which makes sense, since Jacqueline does nothing but talk about Danielle. Jacqueline can't stand that her daughter owes Danielle.

Back at Danielle's, Danielle's pet felon Danny comes in without a coat (he probably pawned it to pay his probation fees). Danielle tells Danny that Caroline texted her. Danielle comes up with an elaborate scheme in which Caroline has planned every incidence of Danielle's discomfort in the last two years. Danny says that yeah, sure, Caroline is the boss, but it's not likely that Caroline planned the country club thing, and Danielle says, "Oh, come on," and Danny caves and does a 180-degree and just starts agreeing with Danielle that Caroline is, in fact, the Godfather.

Danielle really, really likes mafia movies.

"Caroline, you're not Carmelo," Danielle says, puzzling me before she added, "You're not a Soprano."

Oh, Carmela Soprano. The wife.

She tells Caroline to get a life.

And then she brings up a very good point - if you didn't like me, would you ring my doorbell to tell me you didn't want to be around me? Or would you just not hang around me any more? 

And this is a very good point. And the "woman' that Danielle knows, they just don't do that.

But, she's still going for the drink.
  
She embraces her moments of insanity, but Danny gets the idea that it's not a good idea for Danielle to be in a place in which she is vulnerable. Danny, who can't be a bodyguard - no doubt because his parole officer tells him to steer clear - is nonetheless excited about the possibility of drafting an assemblage of goons to accompany Danielle to this restaurant.

Danielle is ranting by now. Caroline, you come and meet me face-to-face and tell me what your problem is with me. Which is kind of the point of the meeting, right?

Caroline's new cop son who got kicked out of law school and her makeup artist daughter who has no makeup on and looks like a big mess meet with Caroline in the kitchen to talk up the meeting. Caroline is going to go get dressed, and we see her getting dressed, checking accessories, and says she is not going to stir the pot.It;s the Big Lead-Up.

Danielle has a quick phone meeting with her energist. She is going to lead with love and drive her message home, which sound like two conflicting goals. She has hired a short, dumpy, white driver and a big, black bodyguard. "Danielle's mafia is in place," she announced, oddly.

We see them driving - Danielle in a rented town car and Caroline in a Range Rover, which must supply Range Rovers to everyone on the show. Danielle for some reason is very concerned about Caroline's red hair, and adds that her "mafia" hurts with guns.

At the Brownstone, the family is meeting in preparation for Caroline's return. They are having bellinis and half red wine-half Coke drinks. Ashley is cleaning her teeth with her tongue. Albert says that Caroline is only going to save Ashley, because, he says, Ashley "lost it," but Danielle premeditated her rudeness by lying to the court about Ashley threatening to kill her (I have to add that if someone was chasing me and pulling my hair, I would completely have it in my head that this person was trying to kill me - I don't believe that Danielle's perception is an unreasonable one). Jacqueline says, yes, her daughter was wrong, but Danielle is - and here she gives a list of stuff that Danielle did more than 20 years ago as an example of why Danielle has no right to judge her daughter. It's so rude, and so tasteless. There are children at the table. It's not in keeping with the correct level of parental horror over what Ashley did. Danielle's past, to Jacqueline, is Ashley's excuse.

Ashley gets mad. She hears it every day. Jacqueline says, no, you don't hear it every day, since most of the time you are living in sin with your boyfriend. Ashley - rightly, I think - gets up and goes to the bathroom. Her mother is surprised that Ashley is upset. She follows her and tries to get her to see that Jacqueline is all perfect and Ashley needs to always be polite to her no matter what word vomit spills out of her mouth.

Ashley's boyfriend, a total suckup to the Italians, agrees that Ashley needs to know her place and be respectful.

Caroline's cannelloni of a daughter goes and makes Ashley come to dinner. 

So far as Caroline's meeting - Danielle has brought her army, but Caroline doesn't give a fiddler's fart. She is nervous - you can tell because she's doing this fast-anxious smiling thing.

Caroline opens with a lot of platitudes about how she wishes life was. Danielle agrees. The Caroline makes her misstep. She says she is "puzzled" about why Danielle feels the need to pursue "this" (meaning the criminal charges) with Ashley. She brings up Danielle's past and says that Danielle could be the person that help Ashley turn her life around. She keeps bringing up Danielle's past, which is really rude and irrelevant to Ashley's current situation, as Danielle's past did not beget Ashely's atrocious behavior.

Danielle is shocked. She can't believe that Caroline would preface a request for her to drop the charges with puzzlement and throwing Danielle's own past back in her face. Danielle says that she is not perfect, and because she was held accountable for her own mistakes, she can embrace them as positive experiences. (This is lost on Caroline). Caroline admits that Ashley was wrong and that her actions were illegal.

"This is not about me or my mistakes," Danielle says. "This is about Ashley."

And she is right! She is so right! I can't even believe how right Danielle is! Who would have known???

Caroline is getting huffy. She can't salvage this, so she is going to turn it into an attack. She tries to sell Danielle the fiction that Ashley thought she was defending her mother, a lie which is made clear by the camera footage - Jacqueline is not even near Danielle.

Caroline says that Danielle needs to tell the truth (read, stand by Ashley), and then Caroline will respect Danielle. Which is such a reckless hand to play, as it is based on the assumption that anyone in the world cares a lick about whether Caroline Manzo respects them.

I actually liked Caroline a little before this episode. But she went from what I thought was a considerably changed version of her formerly bullying little self to a seemingly wiser and more thoughtful person - right back to a little bully. She's getting louder now, because she's mad that for some strange reason, this person is not hearkening to her demands like a waiter at her husband's business.

Danielle says that while it may be a surprise to Caroline, Danielle doesn't need Caroline to validate her. She feels that she has been attacked and insulted and gossiped about (all true).

Caroline says that she wants one example in which she has hurt Danielle. The way Caroline hurt Danielle, of course, was by egging the others on, but the only proof Danielle has of this was Jacqueline's earlier disloyalty to Caroline. Danielle considers playing this card -you can see she's toying with this idea while at the same time trying to come up with some example of Caroline directly bothering her. She can't. But Caroline's family has hurt her. Caroline's friend have. And really, since it was Caroline herself who called this meeting, since it is Caroline herself who is asking for all the favors - it really isn't required of Danielle to come up with anything. Caroline is getting louder and louder. She knows that she lost her persuasive argument, but she is not smart enough to know why, and it makes her mad, like when the dog can't catch his tail. So she turns to her old standard, bullying. She is going to try to browbeat Danielle to do Caroline's bidding, and then she is going to swan back to the Brownstone and tell everyone how that "garbage" kowtowed to her, dammit.

And when Danielle turns it around and says, "What have I ever done to you, Caroline," Caroline spews some nonsense about how Teresa is her, Ashley is her, Dina is her. I have to say here that Caroline can't have it all ways. She can't be the one who never did anything to Danielle but is taking on the hurts of the whole world. She is not neutral. She is not the rescuer. She's just a housewife getting a few things off her chest.

Caroline is right that Danielle attacked the children. But the Manzo/Laurita/Giudice bullied Danielle, and Danielle is a nutjob.

We are no longer talking about Ashley - Caroline is just mad. She's mad about the entourage at the Brownstone. She's going to say some f-words. She's mad about a lot. She's about to break down, but she's working hard to keep it all in.

And Danielle drops her bomb. It's a good one. Caroline has brought up Danielle's unsavory past. Caroline passed judgment on Danielle based on her past, which was more than 20 years ago. And she lassoed everyone she could into her coterie of People Who Judge Danielle.

So Danielle says, "What about all your friends who are under indictment now?"

It's a good one. It's something that Caroline never thought Danielle would have the guts to bring up. She has no response. She gulps. This is true, this is mean, this hurts. If she thought about it, she would apologize to Danielle, say, you know, you just taught me something, and maybe Danielle would give Caroline what she wants. But Caroline has no subtlety, no finesse. Danielle hasn't either, but Danielle has been coached brilliantly for this meeting. Brilliantly. She has been rehearsed and put through questions - nothing catches her off-guard, nothing takes her off her game. Caroline hurts, so she is going to attack.

She tells Danielle that she is a clown, and Danielle says that she can't believe that red-headed Caroline is calling her a clown. Caroline says that Danielle will. not. hurt. her. It's just pathetic. It's stupid. Caroline looks foolish and Danielle looks calm and cool. Caroline is a pushy Fred Flintstone of a woman, yelling for her brontosaurus burger, and the sad thing is that she spent all of her earned currency as the Wise Woman on petulant, bratty Ashley.

Caorline pulls the garbage card - the insult she hurled at Danielle in Season One, and Danielle leaves. Caroline is so proud that Danielle is leaving first, which she looks at as some kind of accomplishment.

Caroline is wrong, of course. Lobbing insults at people and expecting them to sit there and take them is silly. Any normal person would walk away from such a conversation - what did Caroline expect? Did she think that Danielle would burst into tears? Did she think she'd leap across the table and attack her? Did she expect her to sit there a minute longer and listen to Caroline's brain diarrhea flowing out of that hole under her nose?

I am, if you can't tell, completely disgusted by Caroline.

Caroline continues to shoot off her mouth with such bon mots as "enjoy your life," to which Danielle says, "yes, I am," and Caroline seems to think she's hit some kind of target. She is happy that Danielle is walking away from her. Now, I wouldn't be walking; I'd be sprinting. Get this meatball sandwich out of my way, I'm outta here.

In her talking head, Caroline proclaims Danielle to be soulless, heartless, and not worth her time. I have to disagree, and I don't like sticking up for Danielle. Danielle was polite considering the circumstances, she was calm, and she made logical arguments. All in all, she did better than Caroline in this little Manzo-created Showdown. She won, just the way she won against Dina. Because it makes NO SENSE to try to hurt people with meetings in which you tell them that you don't want them in your life. That meeting is about you and you saying what you want to say. It doesn't resolve anything, because you don't care to hear what they have to say - and more to the point, the person you're spewing your rants against doesn't care what you have to say.

Danielle was hoping that Caroline would say something that would ease the sting of the United Attack. If Caroline had said, wow, this kid, what did she do? Tell me how to get through it, or something, she would have won Danielle over. And Caroline could have done it without getting involved in Danielle's life. But, no - Caroline wanted to dictate terms to Danielle, and she just didn't have anything to offer in return.

Which is why this episode was stupid.

The end of the show, and Danielle goes home to her little family and Caroline goes to a restaurant with her big family. Everybody loves everyone in their spearate little hamlets.

Real Housewives of New Jersey: The Birth of Vesuvius

Hot on the heels of rumors that Danielle Stab has been fired from the Real Housewives of New Jersey (neither Bravo nor Danielle will actually cop to this, although Danielle did some sidestepping - "I'm not even thinking about Season 3 in light of all the incredible opportunities coming my way" - that leads me to believe the rumor mill may have accidentally stepped into the truth on this one), comes Part II of The Real Housewives of New Jersey visit the Mamaland.

Opening scene is on the cruise ship, which has finally landed at Naples. The Giudices are trying to get off the boat. Rather than leaving all of their luggage in the room for the porters, they take everything with them. Because they have more bags than have ever been manufactured in the country of China, this makes chaos ensue. Garbage cans and kids get knocked all over the place. The garbage cans, being more pleasant in general, do not set up caterwauling whines when they get knocked over. At some point, Joe even suggests throwing one of the kids overboard.

I don't think he was kidding.

Funniest scene ever when Joe decides to walk a stroller down the steps instead of just manning up and carrying it. It was an umbrella stroller, for Pete's sake! It weighs exactly nothing! Even loaded down with all the kid crap the Giudices carry (an entire suitcase for hairbows), it still weighed less than the burden of their incredible debt.

Teresa says that Joe hates to be away from his business for a whole week. I think that Joe is hearing from America what the repercussions of the Giudices bad acts are, and he's anxious that he doesn't know the full extent and crabby about the fact that it hangs there over his head.

So Joe goes hunched and bow-legged down the stairs with his stroller bouncing this way and that, in his big green sweater and his too-tight boy-man jeans with the pockets ending around mid-thigh. And it makes me laugh.

Jacqueline makes fun of Teresa's inability to allow her children to go outside without a bow on their heads. This is true. It is the reason her children look vulgar. By looking vulgar, I mean they look like trash. The bows are not the reason they have vulgar behavior. The parents are the reason they have vulgar behavior, even as kids go.

They get into the bus and Teresa's kids are whining. One of them is sitting, in her puffy, pink fur jacket, on Albert's lap. This ticks off Caroline, who is really up-to-here with kids. This was going to be her alone time, and, to put it frankly, they aren't her kids.

So the girls cry and whine, and Teresa says later that Caroline seems to be in a crappy mood, but she should feel better now that she's not on a cruise ship. She said that she doesn't feel at all responsible for Caroline's mood - it's it's her problem and she needs to suck it up.

Teresa is just mad that Caroline appears to be criticizing her children. She likes it when people say how cute they are - no doubt because they don't know what else to say when confronted by all that leopard print and poly-satin. She definitely doesn't like it when people purse their lips and glare at her little Giudiettes.

Cut to the new hotel in Naples and one of the little Giudettes is amazed over the bidet. She says, "oh, a little sink!" and Teresa, ever the informing mother, says it's an au bideh. She pretends she can't speak English, as if she's suddenly some Persian princess who is trying to communicate in a Whole New Language. For confirmation of her suspicions that this thing is an au bideh, she turns to her husband, her promptly dismisses it as something that they don't even use in America anymore. However, he tries to educate his daughters by explaining that au bidehs are "like douches."

In Albert and Caroline's room, sadness reigns. They don't speak Italian because their parents didn't teach them, trying to assimilate as they were. They can't go to Pompeii because there are too many people, and quite frankly, though they didn't say it, they are aware that Pompeii, not having a Chanel store, is not of interest to Teresa.

Caroline and Albert are tired and they won't say anything bad about the little girls, but they do believe that Teresa and Joe need to parent with "more iron hand." Caroline realizes that perhaps she looked a but bitchy on the bus, so she points out that they are finished raising kids, but adds that they will be great grandparents.

You can just tell that they are done babysitting.

Now, we go to Danielle, who had an awesome day and needs the kids to listen to her without looking at their cell phones. She needs their full attention because she's sensitive about her "birth mom" search. She never wanted the kids to know about the fact that she was looking for her birth mother, but rather than making the whole issue seem unimportant (seeing as how she didn't want them to know), she decides to make it really important.

Kim G has told people that Danielle was looking for her birth mother, and there are allegations that Teresa found out and gossiped about it, and Danielle tells us all, via talking head, that Kim G has "stabbed her in the proverbial back." I need to know: is this different than stabbing her in her actual back?

Danielle says that Teresa should not have talked about something so sensitive, and her daughter says that everyone deserves respect, even if you don't like them.

Actually, this is not true. Everybody deserves to be treated respectfully, but that it different from actually having to give everyone respect. Respect is an earned honor, and it is different to have respect for people than it is to treat them respectfully.

This is not a concept that Danielle could grasp, becuase it is the appearance of respect she wants. She doesn't have the discernment to understand the nuances between mere good manners and actual admiration.

Anyway, Danielle decides that she was a baby left without a mother and she turned out to be a great mother; therefore, the girls are lucky to have her as a mother. She thinks that the fact that everyone around town knows about her birth mom search is an omen that means she is supposed to share this quest with her daughters. And then, despite the fact that her mother was the one who left her as a baby without a mother, she says that she wants to find the woman who risked everything to have her at the age of 15.

The daughter says that if Danielle doesn't end up finding her birth mom, that's okay, because as least she didn't sit on her ass and do nothing about it. Danielle decides to be shocked and tell her daughter not to use that kind of language, which is a little disingenuous because Danielle likes to wave her middle finger and drop nasty language all the time. The kid backtracks and says "butt" in the way that kids do when they thought they were being cool and grown-up and realize that they have been called out for behaving badly.

Danielle was right to correct her daughter, but really - lead by example, babe!

The older girl felt really smacked and could barely look at her mother after that.

Back in Italy, Caroline and Chris get to look around the storefronts of Naples, which is where their parents are from. Their parents are with them, and they are teary-eyed and emotional; after their big moment, Caroline says, "Let's get the f*** out of here."

They eat in a pizza place that supposedly has the best pizza in the world. Everyone eats a lot, and Teresa lectures about how they did this and that, but the next part of the adventure will be the best because it's about family, by which she means her family.

Joe, who has been surly for the entire trip, gets a little sentimental. Teresa tells them how difficult it will be because of the hill they will have to climb to get to her family home, and is somewhat surprised and a little ticked off that Jacqueline agrees that it will be difficult to get there because of the climb that will be even harder because of strollers and old people (meaning parents). Teresa puts an end to this conversation by saying that there are old people and babies in Italy, too. Which is what she should have said in the first place. Forewarned is forearmed or whatever - but to create a sense of dread is just not hospitable.

Back in New Jersey, Danielle's ex-con hangeraround Danny is at the house, looking as if he has just crawled in from a road trip with Rick Springfield. Danielle is eating snacks, and Danny chastises her. Danielle is doing some kind of act about how she is super-thin naturally and eats all the time. But Danny was taking her to eat.

Where is he taking her? Why, to the supermarket in Franklin Lakes.

Danielle says she won't go there because that's where Mean Caroline, Back-stabbing Kim G, Phone Neglecting Kim D, Mean Jacqueline and Mean Teresa live. Danny says, "they're not there," and Danielle gets excited, thinking that perhaps they have been killed or fallen into a giant crack in the Earth's crust. No, Danny says. They're in Italy.

Now, one would wonder how Danny knows this. Danielle, however, is not interested in how Danny knows this, because she assumes he's some kind of Italian muscle who knows everything. No, Danielle is more interested in why they would be in Italy when she herself was not asked to go. Is this a Bravo trip? Is this Caroline and Jacqueline's share of the Bravo goodies, since they didn't have Sweet 16/Housewarming/Christening parties? Will there be cameras there?

She pretends very hard not to care about the fact that the other Housewives are maybe being granted audiences with the Pope (trumping her vile priest meeting) and having their effigies carved into quivering hunks of ricotta cheese.

Meanwhile, Danny has that weird look of strange success in his eyes that Kim G had before Kim G decimated Danielle at their local Applebee's. You know that he has turned on Danielle, or would at least consider turning on Danielle, if a better opportunity arose.

Danielle is driving (is Danny not allowed to drive?) and gleefully crying "panini" at intervals. It seems odd to be so gleeful about a pressed sandwich that one can get in any number of mediocre sandwich shops that are way better than supermarkets, anyway. I have to wonder if Danny or Danielle bounced a check at the Franklin Lakes supermarket or had them cater the porn video shoot and offered to help them realize their ROI by showing that this supermarket has panini that people will drive literal minutes for.

Market Basket is so great that she has fond memories of it from way before she ever met Jacqueline. Trying to prove how deprived she has been by her feud with the Other Team, she points out that she and her girls used to get ice cream there. Ice cream! The All-American Treat! Plus, the world's best paninis, which she should totally put on a T-shirt - pressed meat all around, folks.

Danielle has new lip plumping. Her lips look like twin hot dogs in her talking head moment.

She is afraid, afraid, and she doesn't care what they're doing in Italy. Though she hopes that Italy is not another Titanic. By this, of course she means that she's very jealous that they are on a cruise ship right now and that she is not, and the only thing that would make this OK is if the boat sank and everyone on it was killed.

Then Danny drops a bomb: he has met one of Ashley's friends. Danielle leaps to say that Ashley has no friends, she assaults people,  and pulled Danielle's very own hair at a country club. She has terroristic tendencies. Danny says that this little girl who is a friend of Ashley's asked Danny what she could do for Danny and Danielle (us, as he says), and so he is going to use her as an avenue to keep tabs on Ashley.

Translation: he is going to get as far with this child as he can, having given up most of his own youth in prison. This is his chance to be young again, and by golly, he's not givin' it up. This will be prom night, long nights drinking beer out of bottles on the step of the 7-11, movies with groping, etc.

Danielle throws in that she used to drive Ashley to school in the hopes that Ashley would not get thrown out of yet another school.

I have to say that I despise Ashley, but Danielle has lost Ashley-despise points by continuing to make these digs. Ashley is revolting on her own.

But she hopes that Ashley is in Italy - because if Ashley would attack her in a country club, she would certainly do it in a supermarket. We are supposed to think that Ashley will leap out of the banks of shopping carts brandishing eggs and spray cheese. It doesn't happen.

Danny just humors her, and suddenly, the thought creeps into my head: was it Danny who told this friend of Ashley's about Danielle's birth mom quest, and the friend told Ashley, who told Jacqueline, who told Teresa? Is Danny the Manzo's source for All Things Danielle?

But then the idea of a panini becomes overwhelming, and she keeps crying it out over and over again, like the Delta in 1984 who keeps yelling, "Roof! Roof!"

"Panini! Panini!"

Back in Italy, the Giudices are transferring their luggage again. In the bus, Joe is demented over the cost of everything. He hoped that when he went to Italy, he would leave his world-heavy financial woes behind. Instead, he is finding that despite the cameras, everything in Italy costs money. Perhaps he thought that the rustic Italians would believe they were all Big American Stars and fall over themselves serving them the Very Best for Freeeeee. But no, the Italians served them and then handed them bills, and Joe is getting madder and madder. He curses and throws out amounts, and scorns the breakfast, which was just coffee and ham sandwiches, and loathes the brandy and the whiskey on their bills at dinner, and he didn't touch the damned minibar and he derides that cost of the hotel. Not being used to actually paying for anything, he is demented with fury.

I wondered at this point if perhaps Teresa had told him that this trip would be paid for by Bravo and that he wouldn't have to worry about anything.

Teresa tells him to shut up. It sort of looks as if she's telling him to stop sucking everyone else's joy and not to curse in front of her children (it doesn't seem that she's giving Jacqueline's sons any thought, and nor do you see anything much at all of them). But really, I thought she was just telling him to stop embarrassing her by talking about money, in that way that people do when they want people to think they have lots of money and shouldn't be worried at all about it.

Finally, as they get close to Joe's hometown, he realizes that he has been on a rant, but in that way that truly disturbed and anxious people get - as if it happened to him rather than being caused by him. So he tells everyone that they're gonna "eat and they're gonna be civilized - no more bullshitting around."

Caroline thinks this is hysterical, and laughs her head off.

Joe then becomes happy in that way that people are when they are showing something off that nobody else knows anything about. He tells everyone all about the scenery.
Jacqueline tells the old people to remain behind, and they do. The Giudettes are dressed so horribly I can't quite voice it: fake Burberry plaid plush and rubber boots and black plush with appliques, and it's simply dreadful. Heinous hairbows the size of peonies that look like bad carnations plopped on the end of each eyebrow. Giant man-sized Converse sneakers.

Teresa points out her Italian house, which she hopes to be able to renovate and refurbish when she has the money. I certainly hope that before she is allowed to do this, she has to repay her debt.

Everybody is walking and then crawling up the steps leading to the top of the hill, and Joe starts tour-guiding and pointing out houses and the former use of donkeys to get stuff up the hill. He doesn't know why they got rid of then.

They get up  to the top of the hill and everybody's kissing and hugging and speaking Italian and Caroline has nobody to speak to except for Teresa's Giudettes, who are hanging around bored and annoyed. Jacqueline makes an ass of herself by grabbing one of the relatives and hanging on them because she is so tired from walking, and then she sits right there in the public street like a bag lady.

In New Jersey, night has fallen, which makes it the perfect time for Danielle to go meet a private investigator to whom Danny has introduced her for the pursuit of her birth mom quest. She only has these two facts to help her look for her birth mom: date of birth, place of birth and her ethniticity. She describes her ethniticy as Catholic and Italian, though of course she has no clue. She would like to be Catholic and Italian, and therefore, poof! She says she is. She could be Native American or Lizard or Icelandic. She has no clue.

The private investigator tells her that he doesn't know that it will be easy or fast to find this now-62-year-old woman. Danielle says that her life is just her two kids, and she would like to have another adult in her life. She just wants to be part of a family.

This makes me think that Danielle is realizing that it might be time to check in with Birth Mom in case there's a chance if wiggling in on the inheritance.

Danielle then adds that if her mother is homeless or addicted to drugs or alcohol, she doesn't want that in her life. The guy says any choice to see the birth mother is up to the birth mother. Danielle says is not finding her to make the mother better; she's finding her to make Danielle better.
If the woman doesn't want Danielle, the investigator has to tell her, not the mother, because Danielle can't take that kind of rejection.

Cut back to Italy, and Teresa is throwing out minor Italian words like somebody whose family spoke it at home. She says in her talking head moment that the reason she sometimes doesn't speak English so good is that she didn't speak English until kindergarten.

Caroline is isolated and bored, and Albert is keeping her company. Since her parents and grandparents wanted to seem as American as possible, they stopped speaking Italian.

Jacqueline can only thunk that she wishes Danielle would move to another country or another planet.

There is tons of food, and the little Giudettes eat like monkeys right over the serving platters, foods dangling out of their crumb-laden mouths and landing back on other foods. Then the rest of the crowd go out and wave across town at some uncle of Teresa, and Caroline and Jacqueline eat pasta out of some stranger's beat-up cooking pot.

Jacqueline adds that before she entered the Manzo-Laurita family, she didn't eat like this. I got the impression that she never intends to stop and she intends to make up for lost time. Caroline and Jacqueline obviously feel out of place, so they are glad to be sitting in the fire-warmed kitchen and eating pasta.

They wander down the steps through the town and Teresa might fall because of her bad shoes. She demands that Joe apologize for treating her badly. Joe's Italian accent is getting really strong, though he left Italy at the age of one. She again demands an apology; he tells her she better learn a little respect. She is really mad, and she tries to kick him. This is not a joke: look at her eyes. Then she tries to turn it into a joke and she pretends to kick him again. Her doesn't apologize to her; he tells her that with one kick, he could send her flying over the hill and into the valley. He says it in a kind of funny way, so she takes it as her apology, and then she makes him apologize to one of the kids he yelled at for running all over the place like an on-the-loose chimpanzee. Then they both yell at the kids some more in the waning light of the sun, over near where Joe was born.

Back to Danielle. Danielle is playing with the dog, and when the phone rings, she says it's her private detective. Hers. He updates her and tells her that it will take a little while to find the information about her birth mom because her birth mom was a minor, which she already knew.

Danielle said that she had waited 47 years to find her birth mom (Danielle's speech impediment made me think she was saying four to seven years, which made me think of a prison sentence), and she believes she's out there, so another 10 years won't matter. And then she breaks into strange, hysterical-bordering tears.

The Italians are having a big party with a big table in a restaurant with white cloths and a minimal number of wine bottles in shelves against the wall. They have erected a curtain that Teresa and her family can emerge from behind, and when they do, it's horrendous. Teresa is in a slip that maybe fit her 10 years ago. Not a slip dress, mind you, a slip. One of the kind your grandmother wore, but with some rhinestones and fake pearls added. It was Bedazzled. And Bewildering. He breasts are popping over the top in a strangely unsettling manner and her hips and thighs make the dress do strange things at the sides.  Joe is wearing a sweater and a mailman's kind of jacket.

The Giudettes. Oh, the Giudettes. This is the kind of thing that makes kids stop talking to their mothers.

They are wearing the ugliest f-ing dresses (I don't like the f-word, but I am trying to explain how bad these dresses are, and I am using the terminology of the Queen Bee from Mean Girls) ever created, anywhere in the world, for anyone. Uglier than a prison dress from the 1930s, uglier than the 1980s, uglier than toddler pageant dresses. These dresses are just vomit-inducing.

Pink poly-satin ruffled shepherdess dresses with leopard overskirts. Ruffles, lacing, bows. Pantalettes. Giant ugly headpieces. Hoopskirts.

The Giudices have one pretty child, the middle one. This dress made her look ugly.

It was as if all the strippers in New Jersey got together and donated their outfits so that Teresa could compile this mess. Which she paid for and called beautiful custom-made dresses.

Caroline is giggling at them behind her napkin, There is over-the-top and then there is tacky. This was just tacky, laughably so. When you consider how much money they spent on gaudy things that aren't even enviable, it just makes me cringe. Those dresses are worth at least four years in prison.

Joe is speaking with such an Italian accent that he sounds as if he is trying to be a waiter at a restaurant in Iowa.

Salut, yadda, yadda.

Back home they all go, and Caroline's house is in one piece and Teresa wants the kids to go to bed. Milania, who can only scream, yells that she doesn't want to go home. Teresa and Joe are back home and it takes Joe three prompts to say he loves Teresa, too.

Ashley is guilty of pulling Danielle's hair, Jacqueline admits.

Next week, Caroline is going to meet one-on-one with Danielle.

Trip from Hell: Gondolas all over the River Styx

This week's episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey is about hell. Specifically, it is about the hell in which people put themselves when they continue to do stupid things.

The first scene brings us to Teresa's palatial Macaroni Grill of a house. The whole gang - Jacqueline and her husband Chris and the Giudices themselves - are all together to get their stories straight on Joe Giudice's car accident. (Caroline couldn't come because her husband's business has a liquor license and why would they want DUI eyes on them?). Apparently, Joe ran off the road, took out four trees, totalled his car and then sat down and consumed several whiskeys while he waited for the police. Heck, he needed to calm his nerves!

You see, Joe's blood-alcohol level was in the DUI arena - right in the middle, being roped by urban cowboys with rodeo clowns all around. And now DUI court is just around the corner, so in the same way that the Giudices got a coat of good white PR paint over their financial woes, they tried to get the whitewash out to cover Joe and his drunk-driving woes. He doesn't need this. He's $11 million in debt, bankrupt and facing criminal charges concerning some penmanship on a mortgage loan. He's been miserable; who knew that the one Giudice who could get a real modeling job would be Joe? Sadly, however, his modeling stint is going to be for some pharmaceutical company touting the miracles of antidepressants. I can't condone what he's done, but I feel sorry for him on a human level. I also thank God it was only trees and not people he killed.

So, over copious Big Gulp-sized goblets of wine, Jacqueline and Teresa reiterate that they'd been at dinner with Joe, and he wasn't drunk! He wasn't even drinking! Then, oddly, Chris and Jacqueline drove Teresa home and Joe drove home several hours later.

Again, they note: they didn't see him drinking!

Joe is embarrassed and sheepish and adamant that those trees shouldn't have been where they were. Teresa is astonished that anyone would make a big deal out of this, kind of the way she's astonished that people are telling her to quit spending so much money. She's basically astonished that people don't think that her bad behavior is cute.

So - cut to some diner from which apparently Danny Provolone, Danielle's pet felon, offices. He's there, and Danielle comes in, wearing her catfight-ripped cardigan and her weird over-the-hands sweater. She's all sweetness and light; Kim G lost her mind and screamed at Danielle in public last week, and now Danielle gets to be the schoolgirl victim of Grandma Potty Mouth. Danielle orders blueberries for the anti-oxidants and Danny seems oddly over-interested in this. Perhaps he's just gotten a job as a blueberry picker in Maine. But he's also ostentatiously playing with his phone, and he tells Danielle the Big News: Joe Giudice got arrested for DUI.

Danielle already knows this. However, she's delighted to hear this again, because it gives her a chance to talk about it on camera. She presses her long, wiry hands together with glee and gives her schoolgirl smile, the one that worked so well when she was a stripper and dressed as a schoolgirl.

"Why was he out drunk driving around at 2 a.m. instead of being home with his wife and children?" she asked the camera incredulously, which in incredible, because she hates Teresa and doesn't have much use for her children. She's not incredulous, of course; she's thrilled. Here is the proof she needed to have people understand that the Giudices and the Manzos and the Jacquelines are truly awful people, and that Kim G is an awful person, and she, Danielle, is light and love. Certainly, she's had her problems, but she's in a happy place now where light and love and blueberries surround her and darkness rains down onto her enemies like hellfire.

It's berry nice for her.

She hates DUIs at 2 a.m. because of course she only drives under the influence after she gets her nails done. And when she does, she has the kids with her so that she can check in on Caroline Manzo's party to which she wasn't invited. But that's different, because the kids weren't at home alone and it wasn't 2 a.m.

Back to Teresa's, where Joe is now in the throes of explaining exactly how the accident happened: he was tired. Jacqueline, who has had so much wine that she's forgotten that the purpose of the wine-drinking-at-the-Giudices invitation was to discuss how Joe wasn't drinking, says, "What I wanna know is what were you drinking that night?"

Teresa huffily says Thanks, thanks a lot, and Joe goes back to his party line: I yawned, and when I yawned my eyes shut, and when I opened them, there were those pesky trees. An angel was looking over him, he adds.

Jacqueline looks as if she wants to add more, but she can't add more, because Teresa has no doubt hidden ugly truths on Jacqueline's behalf before and Jacqueline owes her this one.

Back at the diner, Danielle is still furious about the possibility that Teresa might have been left a widow with four little children on her hands. How can you not have the responsibility to call a cab when you can buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of furniture? And what are you doing out as a grown man at 2 a.m.? She offers the fact that at 2 a.m., strip clubs are still open, thereby making Joe into a pervert and a cheater and a slug all at once. She doesn't remind us that the reason she knows that the strip clubs are still open at 2 a.m. is that she used to work in one.

So let's just call it like it is, she says, which means nothing but sounds threatening.

Meanwhile, Joe is still yacketing on about how he wasn't really drunk that day. He happened to have the accident in front of the house of one of his father's friends, and when that fine old man saw the car, he almost had a heart attack because he was sure whoever was in the car was dead. But Joe walked with him to the house, where he had about four shots of whiskey, which is, he claims, how his blood-alcohol level got so high. Post-accident drinking, not pre-accident drinking. Teresa nods and her face looks like she's just begging them to believe this story, please, puh-leeze, pwetty pweeze, holding her glass and nodding and blinking about 72 times a second.

Jacqueline, disbelievingly, says, why did you drink before the police got there? to which Joe answers that he didn't give a shit. Teresa thanks God that he didn't hurt himself or anyone else, and then she gets a Talking Head moment in which she says she was so scared, and it's tough, and squeezes out a couple of crocodile tears.

Danielle says that drinking and driving to her is disgusting (though she expected everyone to understand her toting cocaine and kidnapping), and she expresses outrage that Danielle's past came into question with Caroline Manzo but yet look at Joe - he's a criminal, too, because drinking and driving is the worst thing you can do.

Danny thinks this is funny, and says that Joe probably didn't get investigated because he had more money than Danielle, and Danielle says she had more money than any of them when she was married to her husband.

Then she Talking Heads that anyone who puts out negativity is going to get it back because of karma, but she says this while she's being negative. So if there's a next season, this is when Danielle will get hers back.

Lunchtime the next day, Caroline and Jacqueline are waiting for Teresa, who comes in late wearing a brand new jacket. The bankruptcy has been filed and now she can use her income for herself, and so she bought a jacket. Now she says they should get up and go away from the drama. Jacqueline and Caroline don't want to wear a bathing suit, so they decide to go to Italy. They can see their families back in the Old Country.

Caroline worries that her husband will have work.

Jacqueline dresses her kids up like some Italian bumper stickers from the 1970s and her husband guesses that she wants to go to Italy. Caroline rushes to her husband's office and he says Italy would be fun, but not with kids. He just wants all the couples to go. He wants to have alone time with Caroline. She nods.

Because of course the Giudices are going to bring their kids. They tell them at first as a joke that they aren't coming, but they all throw temper tantrums, which right there would have made me continue to tell them that they aren't going. These are the most spoiled brats in the country. They have no manners, no boundaries, bad clothes. But they are going, because Bravo is paying for them to go, because Teresa can't get her kids to the car without a scene; Italy will be brilliant.

Teresa says the accident has made life at home stressful. The bankruptcy and the other stuff are just little headaches; the accident has made things "so tough."

The decision is made that the Jacquelines and the Teresas will bring all of their kids, except Ashley, because she's on bail for assaulting Danielle. Then they decide to bring all the old parents. So there are about 74 people going on this trip, which Caroline has sold to her husband as a romantic getaway.

Ashley sits on the floor of her mother's closet while Jacqueline packs and tells her not to use the house as a love shack or have parties. Ashley has a job to pay her legal fees. She has to take care of what she has to take care of.

They all meet at Teresa's and Teresa serves wine and offers cake and the girls climb into the big, empty furniture. Teresa has a whole duffel bag for hair accessories for the girls, because Teresa can't do the girls' hair - she just waits until they wake up and then she sticks a giant bow on each of their heads.

Suddenly, a tremendous crash happens, and the little girls scream, "Mommy, it broke!" A huge tacky vase lays in dinner-plate size chunks on the ground. Theresa is going, "oh, no, oh, no, oh no!" because she's not worried about anybody being maimed, but that something she bought is broken. Jacqueline's mother did it, because she fell off the step-down into the sunken living room. Teresa is mad because it's a vase, but she also wants to get going to a new place where there are other things to buy.

They get into a giant bus and arrive at the airport, and then they're in Venice. Teresa has so much luggage! The girls look heinous in their little fake fur coats. Their mother looks heinous in her fake fur coat. They all look just like the Myth of the Ugly American, except this is not a myth. You can rub your eyes over and over, and it's still there right before your unbelieving corneas.

Caroline knows it's going to terrible and she's rethinking the trip from the first moment of landing.

They are going to be on a big Luxury Cruise Liner, and they move their luggage to this behemoth and then go look at Venice. Venice is, as Teresa says, a city that's "made on water." They get about 40 gondolas and go on a ride. The little girls are dressed in different fake fur coats from the ones they landed at the airport in. Jacqueline decides to be angry that no one is singing "O Sole Mio" to her. They sing in the real kind of gondolas that they have in Las Vegas. Joe is happy that the Italians have boats instead of cars. Then he's seasick.

They get off the gondolas and Teresa runs to go find Chanel. There are Chanel stores everywhere on the planet. Chanel stores are not only not unique to Italy, they're not natives of Italy. Was there not an Italian designer that Teresa could chase down in Venice? Every place in the universe has Chanels, as Joe calls them. Joe doesn't want to go buy stuff, because he's a bankrupt with legal bills and a DUI in his face. He wants a quiet lunch with some wine. Chanel is closed, but Teresa has to be something, anything. She buys a big green Murano glass ring, which Joe says looks like a growth.

They get in speedboats and head to the cruise ship, and Teresa tells Joe, "Spank me! Spank me!" She's giddy. Freakish. So inappropriate. The girls were there. The parents were there. She's like a kid on a potty yelling for someone, anyone to please notice her. Even Jacqueline was annoyed.

They say good-bye to Venice from the top of the boat. It's kind of nice, though probably when the old people left the Old Country for the New Country, there was not as much fake fur.

Seriously, there is a lot of fake fur. Leopard, tiger, other stuff.

Joe and Chris have a little whiskey moment in the bar and Joe's glad that he got to get away from his own drama (self-made). The accident (self-made) made him have sore muscles, and Chris says, in an admonishing tone that if Teresa had been there, she could have been hurt, by which Chris means she could have been killed. Chris is telling Joe to shape up, quit being a bozo, get your life together, and everyone is kind of embarrassed by Joe.

I actually have the idea come creeping into my head: was poor Joe so sad and depressed that he tried to get in an accident? It actually crept there when I first saw the car. That was a lot of speed to make the car that basjed up. Like he was stepping on the gas as hard as he could and aiming for trees.

Then Joe abruptly changes the subject and Chris decides to let him off the hook and says Danielle is out of control. Really, Danielle is not the one out of control. She's skanky, but actually, Kim G and Teresa and Ashley are out of control. Danielle is controlling everything like a puppet master.

Chris is angry, of course, that Ashley assaulted Danielle. However, he's also kind of surprised that Danielle didn't allow Ashley to get away with it. However, how could Danielle? First, it's something that she has over Jacqueline - your daughter committed a crime against my person. Also, though, Ashley committed a crime against Danielle's person, and it has to be said that if Ashley hadn't had consequences that would stop her from committing further crimes against Danielle's person, Ashley would continue to commit crimes against Danielle's person.

And what's even worse is that she would commit those crimes against her person and the brag about in on Facebook.

Chris says that he sees that Danielle has no family and friends around, so everything that has happened - Joe's bankruptcy, Ashley's arrest, etc. - must be because of Danielle. And yet, I think: Danielle is getting everything she wants.Yes, it rankles a little bit that Caroline won't let her come for wine, that Jacqueline turned her back on her and Teresa called her honey and bitch. However, she's getting everything she wants, other than that. It's everyone elses' lives that are falling to bits like crumbly corks.

The next morning, Teresa and Joe decide to go have some "free time to themselves..in the bedroom." Rather than just resigning themselves to the fact that they were the ones who brought their brats and the grandparents have had enough, Teresa decides to strong-arm Caroline into babysitting. Because it's her vacation, dammit! Joe needs sex! They do it at least once a day! At least! And Teresa wants to spend! And in order to spend, Joe needs to be in a promising mood...

Albert was sold a bill of goods that included couples only, no kids. Caroline wants time alone with her husband. She doesn't want to babysit. She's aghast at the prospect. And she should be. The girls are, as usual, whining joy-sucks, as created and continued by their parents. They want to be fed, and then they're bored. They want to swim, but it's cold. They want to hot tub, but they're too young. They want to play, but it's too much effort. They want to draw, then they want to stab Caroline with their crayons.

On the boat, Jacqueline and her husband take a cooking class. Jacqueline demands the chef's hat like she's a charming old teenager. An overgrown pageant girl. She gets pesto on her teeth and it's revolting to behold, and yet they keep making us behold it.

Albert who doesn't want kids steps up to the plate. He's a good guy, and no matter what else he has done in his life (which may be many good things, I don't know), he has earned his place in heaven by dealing with those four lunch meat trolls all day.

Later that evening, Jacqueline and Teresa drink a lot of mojitos. Mojitos are not an Italian drink. They don't care. They drink mojitos and each chocolate. They go to the piano bar and they play the piano marginally and dance marginally and the crowd goes wild. They blinked and everything. All both of them. Jacqueline, unable to stop being a housewife, cleans the glass elevator wall with her snakeskin-clad butt.

It's Milania's birthday the next day, and Daddy's asleep but it's her birthday so poor sad Joe doesn't get to sleep in. She's four. So she's going to have a big private dinner. Then it's suddenly time for dinner. The girls are dressed abominably. Abominably. Fake leopard and tulle and hairbows. Jacqueline is so hung over from rhe previous evening that she can't get up. She was not seasick until she drank too many mojitos, but then she drank too many mojitos. So now she's seasick.

Milania realizes that her big party is a dinner party. She is devastated, because she doesn't want an "eat" party. But Teresa wants an "eat" party, because the kids are not kids: they are extensions of Teresa. What she wants, they want. What they want, they can't have unless Teresa wants it, too.

They have a big, grown-up dinner party and all the children fret and then fall asleep. The captain comes out, they bring a cake, but the kids are asleep. Teresa keeps saying she's mortified. And I keep thinking, this mortifies her? Kids fall asleep, $11 million of debt. Hmmm...

Jacqueline is still down for the count.

The one thing that kept going through my mind is how terrible that trip would be. Teresa is a child, and she has four children who scream and change their outfits, and Joe is right. This is not a *&! vacation.

Hell. Hell on a gondola.