Photo: Griffin Nagel/Bravo
This week on our favorite television program, Rich Women Freeze on the Beach, the rich women certainly froze on the beach. They laid in the sun hoping its warm rays would melt the icicles forming around their hearts and limbs. They wrapped themselves in blankets so they looked like the space witches from Dune or just Dorit at the last reunion. They sat in their high-waisted pajamas pulled up to the underwire of their bras, and the wind blew those blousy tops out so much that it looked like there were beached whales sitting behind them.
While the women froze on the beach, they mostly talked about Kyle and Dorit and how they continue to fight. It’s funny that Kyle and Dorit have clearly been the nexus of the season so far, but Kyle is getting more screen time alone to do damage control. We see Kyle sitting around her house, looking under plants in the gardens, peeking behind the back of the sofa, wondering when one of her daughters or her ill-trained dogs is going to pay any attention to her. When Portia calls after a sleepover at her father’s house, she mentions that she’s going to have lunch with her sisters, and Kyle starts grilling on her for the deets, hoping to score herself an invite. She tells us that she knows the girls are leaning on each other right now with everything that’s going on with the world’s slowest-moving divorce, but she still wants to be at a bottomless brunch with her four daughters, who all share the exact same voice. Um, no. They can’t talk about what is going on, and they can’t bitch about their parents and their messy-ass divorce while one of them is sipping alcohol-free mimosas (a.k.a. orange juice) next to them.
We see so much of Kyle alone, staring out of the window of her house, watching a bird tap, tap, tap, tap its way into the house. They say that a bird in the house means a death in the house and Kyle is trying to keep this spiritual rot from getting inside her Encino abode. While Kyle is alone getting all of this footage, when do we ever see Dorit at home alone? We don’t! We don’t see her kids, we don’t see her struggling, we don’t see her lying in a tub crying about her husband and wondering if her Hitachi Magic Wand is waterproof. Nothing.
The best we get is her having lunch with Boz. Dorit arrives first and Boz, as statuesque as all the halls of the Louvre, comes in second. Dorit says that she wants to talk about Boz and her health troubles first, and she can go last. Then Boz says, “I’m sensing some energy.” And then Dorit is like, “Well, okay. Fine. If you really want me to go,” and just goes right into her divorce and her issues with Kyle and we never get to hear about Boz’s fibroid that is the size of the Dolce & Gabbana toaster Jennifer Tilly brought as a housewarming gift.
Oh, that’s not all. When everyone arrives at Kyle’s to head up to Garcelle’s beach house, Dorit tells a heartbreaking story about how Jagger asked her if Dorit and her husband were divorced. She said they weren’t, and he asked if she posted something about it on Instagram. It broke her heart, and she was … oh, wait. Sutton has something to say. She wants them all to be on time to Garcelle’s for the freezing beach day? Okay. Well, I guess Dorit, her heartbreak, and her horrible decision to try to keep this divorce from her kids while also letting it play out in public are going to have to wait for some other time. Sorry, Dorit!
The craziest thing, however, was the dinner that Kyle called the day before the beach house visit to talk about when she stormed out of Boz’s last episode. Before the others arrive, Garcelle and Kyle are sitting alone and Garcelle finally says the quiet part out loud, telling Kyle that her text to PK, a pickleball court made of vomit, made her look more suspicious than a 50-year-old man alone at an Olivia Rodrigo concert. Kyle’s problem in all of this is that she doesn’t think she did anything wrong, that she thinks she has been a good friend to Dorit when she clearly hasn’t. That’s what Kyle doesn’t get. She’s somehow losing at this game when she is the one who invented the rules. She doesn’t see how her friends, like the public at large, can think the worst of her.
When she apologizes to Garcelle, Sutton, and Erika when they all arrive at dinner, Sutton starts interrogating Kyle’s apology asking exactly what she is sorry for. Kyle struggles with this assignment because Sutton built it to fail. What Sutton wants— which we know she wants because she told us in confessional — is for Kyle to apologize for there being a different set of rules for Kyle than for the rest of the cast. We even get a handy dandy montage of Kyle telling Denise Richards, Erika, and Sutton that they’re going to have to answer more questions than they’re comfortable with by being on the show. Meanwhile, Kyle thinks that after her marriage, her personal life, and her sexuality have been questioned by castmates, the show, and fans alike that she should get some kind of reprieve.
Sutton, of course, is absolutely right, but what drives me crazy about her is that she can’t come out and say it in the scene. She waits for the comfort of the confessional booth and then empties both barrels when no one can shoot back. In person, she’s asking Kyle all these passive-aggressive questions about what words, phrases, or actions she is specifically apologizing for. What I wish she had the courage to say is, “Kyle, thanks for apologizing for yelling at us, but what I am struggling with is that you think you are above the rules. You have told many of us before that we have to face scrutiny and when it’s your turn then you freak out. I wish you would apologize for the double standard.” But she can’t, and I hate it because, honestly, someone needs to tell Kyle this, and Garcelle can’t be the only person on the cast who is willing to say the hard things.
The trip to Garcelle’s beach house is a bit of a wash. As previously mentioned, it was freezing cold, they were all forced to wear PJs (which is just one letter away from one of the grossest men on the planet), and none of the games on the beach really seemed to work. There was some funny discussion about how much the women would have to get paid to sleep with someone other than their husband and Erika said she wouldn’t do it for $1 million only because that’s not that much money anymore. Preach sis! Inflation is getting the best of all of us.
The one good chat was between Kyle and Dorit when they finally had a talk about their friendship one-on-one. Dorit starts by asking Kyle if she wants to salvage their friendship, and she says she does. Dorit tells Kyle that if she is her friend, then her loyalty is to her, and she needs to stick with her, not talk to PK, a used diaper a raccoon is wearing like a hat, and if she does talk to him too, tell Dorit about it. Kyle says in confessional that she thought she could be friends with both of them which, at this juncture, is laughable. How can she be friends with this man when he couldn’t even ask Dorit for a separation and had his sponsor do it instead?
The convo ends with Kyle saying she will have Dorit’s back and that women should stick together, Dorit seemingly accepting Kyle’s apology, and the two of them hugging it out. Or were they just bracing each other so their body heat could give them a little bit of warmth? Unclear.
They join the rest of the group and Garcelle wants them to all write their wishes, intentions, hopes, fears, and other vague concepts on a paper lantern and they’re going to rise up in the sky like dragonflies caught in an updraft. But the wind is too busy winding. As they try to write on them, it whips the paper away from the women, taking the frame and wick of the lanterns with them. It takes their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and fears and shreds them all, atomizing them into the air like so many grains of sand picked up on the beach, hurling them back at the women, stinging their faces and legs as they get hit by the tiny particles. As Kyle is crawling through the sand, trying to put just a bit of fire on her intentions, she stumbles up a dead bird (dare I say a pigeon?) and screams for her life. Was this the same bird trying to get into Kyle’s, the same bird trying to spread death and famine? Did she get this bird first? Kyle can’t stop long enough to examine it because she’s skittering for dry land, trying to find some shelter, just a little bit of comfort, an iota of warmth while trapped on this freezing beach.
