The Real Housewives of Miami Recap: The Past Is Prelude
The thing about Miami the city is that — compared to New York or L.A. — it’s small. The thing about Miami the franchise is that it’s big. The cast is essentially nine people, including three rather prominent friends-of. Some of that cast have been doing this for years, though most of those years were on hiatus. Because the town is small and the show is big, that means that anyone from the past could come back at a moment’s notice and fit it not only with the old crowd but the new one as well. I’m half-expecting Elaine Lancaster to walk through the door and start throwing high heels around.
That’s why the presence of RHOM seasons two and three star Ana Quincoces caused so much disarray on this episode. Adriana brought her up, invited her to Nicole’s Don’t Call It a Mother’s Day Party and Jean Jacket Give Away, and that caused Alexia to go off the rails and think that Dr. Nicole was planning against her the whole time. To get to the party scene, though, we have to make like the episode and rewind three days to figure out just how the hell we got here.
It all starts on Julia’s farm with her 17 goats, 257 chickens, two donkeys, five cows, 10 dogs, and 11 turtles. I didn’t even make those numbers up, that’s how many animals she is currently not making money off of. Adriana comes to waft her Birkin around the goat shit and drops one hell of a bomb while riding in the car with Julia. She says that Alexia’s husband Todd is having money troubles because his business relies on borrowing money and interest rates are high right now. She says she learned this from Ana.
This dovetails nicely with what we see of Alexia. She takes Frankie and her other son Peter furniture shopping because Peter is moving near to her. She says he has grown up a lot and then he shows up late looking like a dirtball in a Fendi-print ball cap and a hangover squatting on his face. None of us believe he matured for even a second. She tells the boys that she, Todd, and Frankie all have to move in two weeks because the person who owns the apartment they’ve been living in decided to sell it.
I’m not super tuned into the real estate world, but I have been kicked out of enough apartments to know that something seems a little fishy here. In Florida you only need 15 days’ notice to vacate an apartment, but if the owner was going to sell it didn’t they have showings and such before it sold? Wouldn’t they have had more than 15 days’ notice? Alexia says Todd, who works in commercial real estate, doesn’t believe in buying homes, only renting them. I don’t know, he probably knows more about how these things work and I probably know more about being mean to rich ladies on the internet, but this seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
Later in the episode, Alexia goes by Todd’s office to try the business woman’s special and Todd is in his office with about a dozen athletic bros all wearing some variation of chinos and a golf shirt in a synthetic fabric. This is to show us how robust Todd’s business is. All the white boys are doing well and smiling! After they have lunch and a little shag in the executive washroom, he’s going to be diving into his money bin like Scrooge McDuck. He tells Alexia that he knew about being kicked out of the apartment sooner and he didn’t tell her because she was gone on the girls’ trip and blah blah blah. This whole scene may not be an act, but it definitely feels like spin. There’s nothing more romantic than stopping by your husband’s office for a little old-fashioned damage control.
It always gives me red flags when a Househusband is an “entrepreneur” or you can’t quite describe what his job is. Joe Gorga has been on television for more than a decade and I have no idea what he does other than possibly steroids. This is true of Housewives, too — remember when we had no clue how Jen Shah had as much money as she did and it turns out she was robbing old ladies of their pensions? Yeah, I don’t feel like that is going on with Todd, who seems to have a legitimate career in commercial real estate. However, I can see where Ana might be on to something. I can also see how the moving houses thing could be totally legit or it could also be a total scam. I could go either way with this one.
Before we get to the party, there are a few unrealted scenes we should go over. Guerdy takes her kids bowling and assures them that everything is going to be okay after her cancer surgery. Dr. Nicole talks to her mom about her dad’s kids neither of them knew about. And Lisa has a dinner date with Jody, who was voted World’s Sexiest Entrepreneur by Secretly Canadian magazine three years running, which she compares it to the awful dinner she had with Lenny the year before. That’s Lisa’s problem. As great as Jody is, he’s not just great. He’s not just Jody. Everything he says and does is measured against Lenny, who is lingering around this relationship like an egg-salad-sandwich fart.
As they’re talking, Jody says that he is going through a lot right now. We know he’s divorced and apparently he’s launching a new business for the first time in 12 years. He wants Lisa to check in on him a little bit more. See! This is what all the women were trying to warn her about. She is so salty about them trying to give her advice in Palm Springs that she’s driving her housekeeper’s Hyundai to the Mamacita Party, but they were exactly right. They told her to pay more attention to Jody, to ease up on the Lenny talk, now here he is asking for exactly that. There is no drug on the planet more intoxicating than hearing, “You were right,” but still, why can’t people just listen every now and again?
When Lisa goes out to dinner with Larsa, she apologizes for being a bad friend and not paying attention to other people’s problems while she’s dealing with the Lenny drama. Just after she says she should be more interested in Larsa, her alarm goes off telling her to check in on Jody. She then calls him, right there at the table, to ask about his feelings. She also lets him know that she’s calling because of the reminder on her phone. For the first time possibly in her existence, Larsa is right: You don’t tell the person your phone told you to do it, you act like they were on your mind. I’m not saying don’t set a reminder, I’m just saying to keep it quiet. Also, it’s the day after their talk. Wait at least three days. The day after he’s expecting a call because the conversation just happened. The second day he’s starting to forget it a little. The third day it’s like a surprise and he thinks that you actually took what he said to heart and are going to be better.
Lisa, just like her bestie Larsa, can’t see anyone’s life outside of her experience. Her call to Jody wasn’t really about him, it was about her performing the duties she needs to in order to keep a man. It’s just what she did with Lenny, but since Jody is not a reanimated pile of foreskins he’s not forcing her to host lingerie parties in her own home, he just wants her to say, “How are you doing” every once in a while. She could be our very own Joey Tribbiani. Anyway, when she asks if Jody has anything he needs to discuss he says no. Of course he does. Does he want to talk about his feelings to his girlfriend when she’s in a loud bar with Miami’s Least Compassionate Person seated just a few feet away from her? That is a pass harder than all the Hard Rock Cafes in the whole world.
Okay, now we’re on to the party, and Dr. Nicole is there overseeing the swag bags and the poet she hired to say nice things about everyone. Alexia and Marysol are among the first to arrive and they’re inspecting the place cards. “Who’s Ana?” Alexia asks. Nicole says that it’s Ana Quincoces, and Alexia flips like she’s in a trampoline competition. She says that Ana is after not only her but especially Marysol. Then Marysol says that Ana wishes her dead. We then cut to a clip from a podcast where Ana and her daughter Beba are talking to David Yontef (now he’s officially in the Bravo canon and Andy Cohen can ignore him no longer) and Beba says she calls Marysol a corpse because she’s “Rotten to the core.”
Okay, calling someone a rotten corpse is not a nice thing, but it is not wishing someone dead. She doesn’t want Marysol to die, she thinks she’s already dead. JK, JK. She’s just saying she doesn’t think Marysol is a nice person. It’s nasty, just not in the way Marysol thinks.
Anyway, Alexia starts accusing Nicole of setting them up, of knowing that Ana had beef with the two of them and vice versa, and Nicole invited her to start drama. Nicole explains that Adriana invited her as her plus-one and she had no clue what was going on. “But Adriana and Ana were never friends,” Alexia says, adding that Nicole should have asked Adriana’s motives for bringing Ana. Well, I don’t think Nicole should have needed to even ask. We should all know that Adriana’s motives for doing just about anything are nefarious, including in this instance.
But it’s wild that Alexia is telling Nicole that she should have known about this bad blood without even asking. Nicole wasn’t around in the old days. She says she hung out with Ana a few times and enjoyed her, and neither she nor the other woman spoke about not liking each other. This is what drives me crazy about Alexia. She is such a schemer, such an ungenerous person, that she would have invited Ana to stir shit, so she can’t imagine that Nicole wouldn’t have the same motives. Julia, however, is the only one who knows what Adriana is up to and isn’t saying anything so far, even though she’s working on her relationship with Alexia.
But the end of this scene is wonderful comedy. Marysol is barging out of the room saying she won’t hang out with Ana, and Alexia grabs her free coat and also heads for the door. “Thanks for the jacket, but I don’t appreciate this,” she says on her way out. As she seizes across the room, we can all see the poet in the background typing away. Either he’s getting a full transcript of this fight, because he can’t believe what he’s seeing, or he’s creating a new poem from all of this. Each clack of the keys is a new sound, a new word, a new line, a new stanza. He’s putting it all down, preserving it for posterity, and searching the vast recesses of his gray matter for just the right adjectives to describe the sublime.