Mere Duchess

LVP = MVP

With Real Housewives of Beverly Hills my urge is to strip off all the soundtrack hijinks and teasers, tint it in 70s film stock colors and watch it with subtitles.

Their Beverly Hills is a balloon going flaccid. There’s a sense that some deadly combination of environmental toxins and demagogues could render moot all these delicate toile scenes of late capitalism at any moment.

Their faces have a spectral quality like mannequins papier mached in moth wings.  Children are born from rented wombs and women get facials in hyperbaric chambers.  More lives than you can count are a replay of Darryl Hannah, and it’s still the age of Spago and Glenn Close as sex symbol.

Sometimes it’s enough to just imagine yourself floating alone in a housewife pool, the horizon emblazoned with paste-colored big box Taj Mahals.

It would be enough—just that—but then the Lord gave us Lisa Vanderpump, holographic amalgam of a thousand Charlie ads. Lisa is a posh Brit whose house is where Diana Ross goes in champagne/benzodiazepine daydreams when she clicks her Wiz heels together and says “There’s no place like home.” 

A very special brand of 1986 - 89 is embedded in everything Lisa touches.  Reading her blog I discovered that she appeared on Silk Stalkings, which has long been an obsession of King Helene and I.  Silk Stalkings was broadcast on the USA Network from 1991  - 1999.  Not a show you could linger on with parents lurking about, but when you’d catch a glimpse of it, it piqued your filthy curiosity: you had no idea what a silk stalking was, but you knew from the sultry saxophone and red lipstick script it was some trouble you wanted to get into.  When you got old enough, you realized it was mostly a lot of Vanna White-looking women pulling clothes back on over high waisted thongs.  But Lisa manages to evoke, in her 50s, fully dressed, what was supposed to be the thrill of SS.  She’s perpetually in the driver’s seat of a red Ferrari, a black silk chiffon dress fluttering in the breeze, cutting out of another Careless Whisper evening.

Lisa’s also exactly what my girlhood would have spit out of its Weird Science computer as its Mom/big sister/life size Barbie (also because she kind of is/sounds exactly like Kelly LeBrock??)  So many colors of pink and purple, and her outfits are what you designed with a Tyco Fashion Plates set and rub-on colored pencils. 

Lisa being from the UK, with her normal family (except that her daughter is named Pandora!?!) and a husband who loves her, sort of anesthetizes the Beverly Hills scene, makes it a wholesome place to love again.  She’s like going back to a time before the Kardashian Kard, shrunken heads on Celebrity Rehab, and poison-paralyzed faces of junked women were canaries in the coal mine for universal spiritual death.  To when the words “Beverly Hills” evoked only a beach day in a Barbie Camper under a mantle of Christmas palm trees.