Maybe it’s because I still prefer Lisa Vanderpump over any of the other Beverly Hills Housewives, but this season has been pretty awful to watch.  We’ve seen take-downs before, and gangs of harridans swoop in on the one who appears to be the fan favorite or  the Queen Bee.  You only have to look back at what happened to Teresa Giudice to know what I’m talking about, and that bit of nastiness was handed to her by her own family.  The ladies of Beverly Hills aren’t family but they claim to be friends – good friends, in fact.  I didn’t see friends anywhere.  I saw gossip and insecurity and jealousy and petty arguments that would be laughed off by anyone in the real world.  “Esmerelda said that friend said that her cousin said that your husband is cheating on you.”  “Really? Well, he isn’t.”  “Okay.”  Done and done.

Friends don’t do the things these women do which is why I question how they define such a relationship.   We viewers know what friendships are and who gets to earn the title.  A friend has your back, really has your back.  We don’t just say the words.  We listen and counsel and cry and laugh and keep each others’ confidences to our death beds.   If we hear some murmurings from somewhere else, we call each other and iron it out right then and there.  We also believe each other, because we’ve vowed to tell each other the truth, even when it might hurt us to hear it.  Somehow, it’s better to hear it from a friend than from someone who doesn’t really have our best interests at heart.  This doesn’t seem to exist among this group of women.

This season, it seemed as if all roads led to Lisa Vanderpump  The were rumors about a cheating husband, a suitcase full of tabloids, a confused woman who is so needy that she can’t stand having a friend who has more than one friend, and another woman who can’t stand that her ex-husband likes Lisa more than he does her.  Lisa is at the bottom of all of it if you want to believe the group.  I guess if you all get together and tell your stories loud and long enough, you start to believe them.

They gathered together to celebrate the 100th birthday of Beverly Hills at the Beverly Hilton and couldn’t make it through the evening without bringing up the same arguments they’ve spent 19 episodes beating to death.   When Lisa and Ken arrived, the rest of the ladies, with maybe the exception of Carlton who hates everybody but Lisa,  were waiting and each one of them wanted to confront her again.   Brandi thinks that if she downs a few drinks, she’ll have enough courage to get through her talk.   Okay,  Brandi, we’ve all seen how well you communicate when you’re falling down drunk.  Kyle says that Lisa is probably nervous about seeing them all.  According to Kyle, things didn’t have to get ugly in Puerto Rico, that was all in Lisa’s hands.  Yolanda wants to talk to Lisa, but she’s going to get a restraining order so that Ken can’t come within 100 yards of her.   Kim wants to apologize to Ken for calling him names in Puerto Rico, but thinks he should kiss her ass afterwards.

Ken didn’t want to go to this party and he didn’t want his wife to go, either.  He’s done. Done. Done.  On the way to the event, he makes a joke about being hungry, most likely to cut the tension.  We all know how that works.  Our spouses and life partners step up when we’re down.  He stayed by his wife’s side long enough to pour some wine in her glass and offer a couple of uncomfortable greetings to the other women.   Both Lisa and Ken apologized to Joyce for getting out of the hotel and moving to another during the Puerto Rico trip.  Kim apologized to him but didn’t like the way he received it.  Maybe if Ken had missed most of the past two decades, she’d be a little more understanding.  In his talking head, Ken says that Kim is unpredictable, that she says strange things, without rhyme or reason.  Hey, Ken, you should see her tweets.  Vavoom Shabang; I love turtles and lizards.

Brandi had a lot to say in her talking heads, calling Lisa a puppet master who collects people and that Lisa’s been in her ear, making her do stuff she doesn’t want to do.  Wow, really?  That’s the woman you claim to love?  I think most of us have seen a few incidents where she would have been better of if Lisa had been whispering some instructions to her. Oh dear, now she’s  giving me a migraine.  When she sat down with Lisa, she went on and on about Scheana, the SUR server.   She wants Scheana drawn and quartered for sleeping with Eddie Cibrian right after Lisa fires her.  If that’s the punishment for sleeping with Eddie, most of the women from Calabasas to West Hollywood would be unemployed before they were executed.  But that’s the one girl Brandi knows, so Lisa is supposed to make it all right.  If Brandi wants to avoid Scheana and still get her drink on, maybe she should go to Mastro’s.  Carlton gave it 5 stars after the ambulance took her away.

Brandi isn’t done, though.  She wants Lisa to love her and only her – not Kyle, not Carlton, just her.  She thought Lisa and Ken were her family and that they’d adopted her.  This is making less and less sense by the minute – something I just realized as I was writing this.  Brandi still insists that she loves Lisa but Lisa is also done.  The girl is emotionally exhausting and contradictory.  Rather than explain herself as a reasonable 41-year-old woman would, she rambles on as if even she isn’t sure what she’s upset about.  You can’t say you’re hurt when Lisa mothers you while, at the same time, you say you’re hurt when she doesn’t call you for a week.  Pick one.

Ken and Mauricio went off to resolve their issues, just the two of them.   It was going pretty well, until the crows began to gather.  They’d done their “I love you man” thing and hugged before Yolanda moved in.  She really hates Ken, doesn’t she?  She couldn’t get into her attack, not yet anyway, because Ken and Mauricio moved away from her.  The rest of the women start to circle a table, ready to continue whatever the hell it is they started.   There;s some more talk about those ridiculous tabloids – who bought them, who saw them, who used them to paper train their dog.   Brandi says that the tabloids were at her house, Lisa looked at them and said “Let’s take it.”  The tabloids, according to Brandi, never made it to Palm Springs.

Ken heard some of the conversation and walked to the table.  Yolanda told him to leave.  Ken and Yolanda reenacted the final scene of “High Noon”, staring each other down and pawing the ground.  Okay, I know, Gary Cooper didn’t call anyone stupid, Ken did.  Yolanda was being stupid, but I don’t think Ken needed to point it out.  Ken started to say something about what would happened if Yolanda’s husband was there, but Yolanda said mthat her husband would never talk to Ken because Ken isn’t nice to women.  We’ll never know, because David Foster only appears on camera when it suits him and he can talk about himself.  Anyway, Ken moved his hand in Yolanda’s direction and she started screaming, “Don’t touch me!” and swatted his hand away.  He didn’t really touch her but Yolanda felt his negative aura and panicked. That’s when he said “You’re stupid.”  Ken should’ve gotten a Fat Burger before the party.

Lisa left, with a quote from  George Bernard Shaw, “Never wrestle with a pig because you get dirty and what’s more, the pig likes it.”

See, nothing was resolved, nobody’s friends and that’s just the way Bravo likes things.  Kim wasn’t really in the middle of this argument.  She was feeling up someone’s boobs and drooling over Brandi’s date, Drew Carter.  I may have to go back to Brandi’s book.  I’m pretty sure that Drew is in there somewhere.  Then again, there were so many professional athletes in so many cars, beds and floors that I may not be able to pick him out of the crowd.

Brandi had a bad day on Twitter, so much so that I began to wonder if she has multiple personalities.

Here we have angry Brandi:

Brandi GlanvilleVerified account ‏@BrandiGlanville