The women gaze down on a majestic sea turtle and argue about which one of them had it the hardest when they first moved to New York. After dinner, Ubah accidentally leaves her phone in the car and Erin grabs it, telling Sai that she is going to pull a prank.
Confusingly, the prank is to push Ubah into the pool and then not give her phone back until Sai gives up the game hours later. In retaliation, Ubah snatches Erin’s sunglasses right off her face and holds them for a while. This kicks off a series of squabbles that end with all of the ladies, seated in a hot tub eating popcorn, deciding unanimously that Erin is the cause of every fight that season.
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Everyone knows that Ramona Singer loves to celebrate her birthday. Before she started hosting parties for 50 of her closest girlfriends, Sonja treated her to a birthday celebration in Atlantic City, knowing that her first birthday since her divorce from Mario would be tough.
Sonja Morgan, mistress of a crumbling townhouse and self-proclaimed bottom, is a drunken menace this trip. The first evening starts out all right, as the ladies dress for a leather and latex dinner that would have gotten them drummed out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This is one of the least aspirational trips a group of Housewives has ever taken. Not because Ramona’s mansion, decked out in an HGTV palette of white and light gray, is not comfortable, or because Ramona’s hospitality manager Michelle is not gracious enough, but because the women fight from the time they arrive to the time they leave, and it’s mostly about their pecking order on a TV show called The Real Housewives of New York City.
Dorinda belligerently argued with every cast member this trip. She was so unpleasant that when she couldn’t make it to dinner one night on account of Montezuma’s Revenge, Luann quipped that “sometimes diarrhea shows up when you need it most.”
When Edith Wharton wrote so rapturously about Newport, its lacy cottages and manicured lawns overlooking the sea, she never dreamed that one day it would be the place where an athleisure-wear designer with a mommy complex would chuck a saucy ravioli at an Upper East Side divorcée in a crowded restaurant.
Seasons earlier, Sonja Morgan of THE Morgan’s witnessed Kelly Bensimon having a nervous breakdown on Scary Island and compassionately rallied the women around her. Now, Sonja is drunkenly out of control. She offers to give the house manager a…prayerful sexual favor, while simultaneously proclaiming that she had no intention of following through.
Once again it’s a holiday in the Berserkshires, but this time it’s Halloween. Dorinda goes all out: hiring a masseuse and a yoga instructor, booking a private tour of the nearby Morgan mansion, and heating her gorgeous pool so that Ramona can enjoy a swim despite the brisk New England air.
Tinsley Mortimer books a trip to Cartagena, a hip and trendy destination whose charms are lost on the pampered New Yorkers. Poor Tinsley, her thanks is complaining all weekend, but her karma is that everyone else has a terrible time. Carole and Bethenny fight so bitterly their friendship ends.
It’s never quite explained why Skinnygirl pre-mixed margaritas was sending Bethenny to Tequila Mexico to taste premium tequilas for a product that had come to market years earlier, but The Skinnygirl was very clear: this was a work trip and Ramona could not be trusted to act with decorum, so she was excluded on work events.
Luann is getting married - can you believe it? Nobody could, actually, because her betrothed had dated both Ramona and Sonja. Recently. Never have two people looked so ill at ease about their own impending marriage as Tom and Luann did at their engagement party aboard a borrowed yacht.