The Road: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, S2E2

Giggy: There wasn't a ton to report on Giggy--just that Lisa picked him up, licked her lips, then whispered "Come on, put out," before devouring his entire face.

Beaver Creek: The ladies went to Beaver Creek, a skiing town where Camille owns a house that she designed and now has to sell in the wake of her divorce. Hold up--who cares? It's the journey, not the destination, that counts.

So, Adrienne over-packs a little? She packed three suitcases (not including bags) for two days of vacation. According to math, the suitcase to vacation day ratio is 1.5/1. Would it be fun or just tedious to be so rich that you spend an afternoon packing bags full with all your many possessions and then making people cart them around? Probably.

Kim was in rare form this episode. She was fidgeting and chatting and rearranging herself frenetically like a six-year-old girl who ate one too many Pixy Stix or, more realistically, a binging meth addict. Kyle was upset with her for being louder, and poked her with a sharp stick the producers had given her. "Don't push me. Don't push me! I'm not ready yet!" wailed Kim, while Kyle just smiled with her lips closed, drawing the corners of her mouth unbelievably high and wide (to the joy of her plastic surgeon).

At the airport, Lisa asked Kim where her "little paper" was. " I don't have a little paper. I don't have a lih-ul' papah!" Kim taunted in a British accent. Lisa then grimaced politely and said nothing, but thought of what she would have said to Giggy, who, for some reason, was not allowed on the trip.

On the plane, Kim made every male passenger present himself to her, and then she proceeded to test each one of their asses. I refuse to explain because there was no explanation other than Kim does what Kim wants when Kim does meth.

The Road: Upon arriving at the airport in Colorado, the women were shoved into a limo, which was then soldered shut with a blow-torch from the outside. Through the screams and cawing of the passenger car, the driver turned around and informed them that the Rocky Mountains had collapsed onto the Beaver Creek highway and that they would be taking the Road of Eternity to get to Camille's house that she no longer owns.

Hours earlier, a Bravo production assistant perched atop a high cliff overlooking the road to Beaver Creek. She'd graduated in December from Bard with a triple major in photography, critical film theory, and Romantic literature, but had, of late, filed away her aspirations of moving to Paris and working as an editorial assistant for Cahiers du Cinema, where she had once interned during her study abroad junior year. Through eyes watering from the cold, she stared intensely into her Blackberry, waiting for the signal from her commander.

***

She'd been working at Bravo for only a few weeks when she unceremoniously found a plane ticket to Colorado with her name on it at the desk she shared with three other people twice her age, all of whom were PAs. She would be helping with a special episode of a new reality TV show about a luxurious ski lodge frequented by L.A. socialites, she was told via email. Excitement! A chance to travel for work! She didn't know many people her age who were being flown around the country. Had she shown so brightly already that they were entrusting her with higher profile assignments than pilfering stray cats off the streets of Brooklyn to feed the Countess LuAnn?

After landing in the Colorado airport, she was taken aside by the flight crew and ushered onto the runway, clutching awkwardly at her fine combed hair, which was blowing wildly from the spinning propellers of the Chinook helicopter she was being led to. The blonde flight attendant who guided her gently by the arm seemed to be holding back tears as she passed the PA off to two men in full military gear. One of the men stripped her of her carry-on, leaving it to blow down the runway, and outfitted her with a backpack that seemed to be full of heavy stones.

"Where are we going?" the PA asked.

"That is not for us to say," one of the guards replied, handing her a Blackberry and shutting the door to the helicopter as it simultaneously lifted off the ground and into the brisk wintry dusk.

***

The instructions were simple. Watch over the bag, without opening it, and abandon it on the mountainside when the signal was given. There would be another helicopter to pick her up and fly her back home once she'd done that. Perhaps, she thought in her deliriously optimistic rationalizations, that she was part of a checkpoint, a la The Amazing Race, and needed to make sure the marker wasn't intercepted before the first contestants got there. Six hours had passed and, in the earliest hours of morning, the only light she could make out was from lone cars on the highway to Beaver Creek, passing every half hour or so.

Suddenly, her Blackberry lit up. "Jackpot," it read. She put the bag down slowly and began walking away from the cliff, away from the road, and into the night. Only about three minutes had passed when she heard the faint cyclical beating of a helicopter in the distance. A spotlight and rope ladder fell upon her simlutaneously. She climbed carefully, and though the distance was not too far from the ground, she had been sitting for hours in the cold and knew her joints were a bit stiff. Once inside the helicopter, the PA recognized the two guards from earlier that evening--they neither acknowleged nor spoke to her, but rather, handed her an eye mask to put on. Having gotten this far, she knew it would be of no use to protest, and she slipped it on easily, inviting sleep to visit her in the pitch black.

Something shook the carriage of the helicopter violently and she was jolted awake. "Don't worry, ma'am, it's only turbulance," said one of the guards. She went to scratch the mask covering her face, slyly repositioning it so that a sliver of her eye was uncovered. Now able to peer out the corner of her eye, she glanced through the window at the vast darkness below. She could feel herself falling asleep again after a few minutes.

And just as she had given up struggling to lift her persistent eyelids, a blaze of light and a thunderous noise erupted from the mountains below followed by the echoing sounds of boulders and giant fragments of rock tumbling beneath them. She had not screamed, was not fazed by what she had seen. It had happened in a split second. Was it real? The image and noises were being distorted in her mind as she struggled to reimagine what had happened--perhaps she was hallucinating under a deep haze of hunger and sleep? Would she tell anyone about this moment, even after she no longer worked at Bravo? Most likely, she would not. Who would believe her?

***

Back in the limo, the housewives protested. "What do you mean the highway is blocked?" asked Lisa.

"I'm sorry ladies, but we're going to have to take another road. It's going to be about four and a half hours, so you better get comfortable."

The car sped off and Kim turned to the window of the car and began talking at it. She talked and talked and talked about herself, about her childhood, about Disney World, about Paris!, about love!, about the troubles of growing up a child star and the eternal rift it caused between herself and Kyle, about the life regrets she would never forgive herself for and what she really would've made of herself had she a fresh start away from the spotlight, away from the insecurities her mother bore into her from a young age. She talked until hers was the only voice left in the world.

Barnacles: Oh! Also, Camille totally made fun of Kelsey Grammer the ENTIRE show. "I used to have to scrape those barnacles off his back," she cackled! And Kyle cracked back, "Old whatshername can have fun scraping the barnacles now!" Next, Camille started talking about manscaping and made a crass metaphor about hedge-trimmers. And then I involuntarily threw up into my hands and switched off the television.

PREVIOUSLY > Women on the Verge: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, S2E1