DanThat'sCool!

Thanks For An Amazing 2012!

Stick Around….The Party’s Just Getting Started.  2013 Will Be A Hoot.

Mmmkay?

 

 

Yo. Check it out, ladies. Last year’s glitter eye shadow and I still look hotter than all of you.

 

 

 

One of these days, Alice. POW! Right in the Fabulish kisser!

 

 

 

The only things that can penetrate my Delusional Force Field are magazine royalty checks and body glitter. Bam!

 

 

 

It ain’t Britney, bitch.

 

 

 

 

I don’t ever like using the C-word or wearing poorly fitted 1970′s Brady Bunch spread collars.

 

 

Now that you all mention it, I’ve never seen Joe and Rosie in the same room at the same time. It’s like Clark Kent and Superman…

 

Ring the bell and grab some snacks, because it’s Jersey Fight Club: Round Two.

The Real Housewives of New Jersey Reunion just smeared our screens with more Glitter eyes and Twitter lies for the second of its three installments, and to say that the Borgata hotel, casino, spa and mud wrestling mat was explosive would be a bit of an understatement.

Even though the confrontations were already growing increasingly heated as Part Two began, the chill in the air still rivaled the best granita di caffè con panna from any 1/16th Italian Olive Garden drink special board.

(The above clearly being a pointless sentence, inserted purely to make me appear more worldly and bilingual than I really am.  I don’t even drink coffee, people.)

We picked right up where we left off last week with the rampaging Butchzilla Rosie Pierri thrashing her way around backstage, toppling tripod lights and threatening to cut out Teresa‘s tongue for talking smack about her deceased father.

Rosie’s sister Kathy and her new nose had just finished calling Teresa’s mother a F***ing liar (…nice talk, by the way.  You eat cannolis with that mouth?…) which in turn had catapulted OK Magazine’s go-to cover girl Tre into some dead dad bashing.  In her defense, it wasn’t so much the bashing as the fact that she was digging up a dead man.

Oh, that crazy Tre.

Somebody wasn’t liking it, and Rosie blew a backstage nutty that managed to drown out 5 fully mic’d Housewives sitting directly under those fuzzy overhead sound sticks.

Trust me.  You do not want to cut off Rosie’s float during Pride Week, people.  Just let her pass and then cross against the lights, or find another way to get where you’re going.  Because Rosie has a temper.  And Honey Badger Rosie don’t give a s***.

She’s the most loving, squishiest teddy bear of a girl you can imagine, but she’ll pop your head like a beer cap if you cross her or her family.  And she proved it as she slammed her way around the maze of electrical wires and lighting equipment.

Have you seen those mini GoPro cameras that kids duct tape to their helmets before they skateboard or jump out of airplanes?  It was like that.  But more spastic.

Rosie was off the GPS back there.

Luckily, newly skinny Lauren Manzo and her still a little snug leather dress managed to calm Rosie down and convince her to drop her weapons before sending her out to the couches to face off with Teresa.

Not that the other women would have noticed any artillery, because they were having a pretty major meltdown of their own.

As Yoda Caroline tried to explain to Teresa what 15 Minutes of Fame meant, one of the camera guys pulled a Split Screen.  And if we’ve learned anything from Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, it’s that the Split Screen means it’s Going Down Town Tonight.  Going fast.  And going hard.

Melissa and her (…alleged…) copy cat eye shadow blasted Teresa for trying to play the victim card, which Melissa claimed as her own.  Throw her a bone, for crying out loud.  If she can’t have the glitter look, she wanted the victim card.

“You don’t get to play victim! I’m the victim!”  Oh snap.  Girlfriend better stop screaming or she won’t be able to sing on Seacrest next week.

(And she don’t lip synch, bitch…stay tuned for that update.)

Rosie calmed down and made it out to chat with the Reality Maestro Andy Cohen, who only 10 minutes into the show was more than likely already sitting in wet pants.  He tried to lighten the mood a little by showing a batch of clips featuring Kathy and Rosie being supportive sisters and hugging it out, and then touched on Rosie’s coming out story.

After a few back and forths with Teresa, Rosie (…who may have the best WTF face in New Jersey…) was scooted off stage, but only after Andy clarified that she was indeed Single and Ready to Mingle again.

One of the stocky girls who carried in the Craft Services food table dropped something backstage right about then.  Just saying.

Then it was off to Napa and that whole winery vacation mess.

Teresa denied purposely leaving Kathy out of her warm & fuzzy toast at the end of their road trip.  She swore that it was just an oversight.  Since her cousin was only sitting approximately 4 chairs away from her during that entire dinner, I think she’s gonna have a hard time finding a jury for that one, if you know what I mean.

I tried to count how many times poor Andy snapped his head back and forth during this exchange.  Dude’s eyeballs looked like an Atari Pong game. (Put down your Xbox 360 and Google it, kids.  I can’t do all the work for you.)

After a delightful exchange that began with Teresa calling BS on Kathy’s fake nose and lips and ended with Mrs. Wakile apologizing for dropping the F-bomb on Teresa’s mother, Tre moved back to her original couch position, which allowed for all of us to not only catch a widescreen glimpse of her butt before she plopped herself down, but also put her dead center back in front of camera #2.

Yeah.  I think she knows what she’s doing.

For someone who spent the entire season proclaiming that she was done with Teresa, Mama Manzo certainly ate up a lot of Reunion screen time trying to pound some sense into her head.  As everyone relived the last night in Napa when Jacqueline faked narcolepsy and the Boys all pretended to be so far away on the other side of the room that they couldn’t hear what was going on, the Manzo Matriarch definitely got more than 1/16th Italian on Teresa’s a**.

The C-word even came back up again.  Not Caroline.  The other one.  The nasty one.

Andy nervously asked Tre if she felt that Caroline had bullied her all season, as some Twitter Twatters had suggested.  She quickly said yes, but then couldn’t come up with one example to support her accusations, no matter how many times Caroline bullied her to answer.  Not playground bullying.  Just Brownstone bullying.  The usual.

Then someone said the D-words.  Plural.  And that always gets an even bigger rise out of a Jersey Housewife than the C-word does.

Danielle (Staub) and Dina (Manzo.)

I know, right?  It is kind of amazing that after (…how many?…) seasons being MIA these two women still have a grip around everyone’s neck.  I mean, really.

Is Danielle even alive?  I guess she must be, since everyone keeps talking about her tweet.  (…I said tweet.  Get your mind out of the gutter…)  And if you don’t need someone to go to iParty or your cable company doesn’t broadcast HGTV would you even recognize Dina on the street?

But you just say either one of the D-words and it’s a guaranteed volcanic eruption.

When it was obvious that this one was going nowhere after about 20 minutes of soft core bullying, even Caroline gave up on the topic and it was back to Melissa.

Who can sing, thank you very much.  And she proved it, just to shut up her sister-in-law.

Over the last two seasons, Teresa had made it blatantly clear in pretty much any media outlet she could get her claws into that she didn’t feel that Melissa could sing without the aid of auto tune and an MP3 iPod lip synch track, so La Gorga finally called her out on the accusations.

It was almost like watching an episode of Glee the way Melissa just broke into song in the middle of a sentence.  But the girls on Glee don’t have so much boob showing, and nobody danced, so I knew it was still RHONJ.  But it was almost like Glee.  Really.

Since everything somehow needs to be centered around Teresa, as soon as Melissa finished her 16 measures of Top 40 acapella it was time for Mrs. Giudice to lay down a few beats to prove that anyone can be a singer.

Or a cookbook author, apparently.

When Melissa accused Teresa of tweeting photos of food that her mother had actually phantom cooked, the whole thing spiraled into more D-words, which spiraled into Melissa’s secret Twitter convo with Danielle a hundred years ago.  Which then spiraled into a blurry flashback to that classic RHONJ Reunion where Teresa totally lost her marbles on Danielle and tossed poor Raggedy Andy aside like…well…like Raggedy Andy.

Is Bitch Bettah?  Just asking.

Then Teresa suddenly proclaimed that she had ‘let go of all the crazy’ and was now free of Caroline and Jacqueline.  Halleloo!  To complete the exorcism, she dropped to her knees and waved her hands in the air like those women on the National Geographic channel do when a Coke bottle from America washes up on shore.

Let’s just say it got cray cray and move on.

The only way to possibly top that one and finish off Round Two was for Juicy Joe Giudice to waddle out to the couches and put an end to all the rumors and gossip and cheating accusations.

Or maybe just waddle out to the couches and sit in a sweaty, foggy haze.  That’s probably more like it.  Let’s all just lower our expectations so we’re not disappointed.

Even after slamming down a full Red Bull in under 5 seconds, Jabba Joe still appeared to be unsure of where he was as Andy quizzed him on The Call.

You know.  The cellphone call heard round the World.  That one.

The one where he got busted on camera in Napa for talking to who knows who and calling Teresa a Bitch Wife and the C-word.  What did he think that microphone pack on his belt was for anyway?  And the cameras?  Tool.

But Andy wanted to know the deets, and it is his show.

Granted, I would have been more concerned about why Joe was wearing that Greg Brady leisure suit shirt with one sleeve longer than the other, but I don’t work for Bravo.

Yet.

What I could decipher between slurs was that Joe had been talking to a friend who was taking care of things back home while they were jet setting around on Bravo’s Amex.  He also explained that he doesn’t like the C-word, but had learned it from Teresa.

(Maybe she should focus on the other C-word: Cooking.)

When asked why he seemed to have been speaking in a number of different languages when he was busted, Jabba slurred something about a Spanish Pizza Guy even though most everyone believed that he was speaking some version of s*** faced Italian.

Something ain’t right.

To stick a fork in it and make sure it was done, Andy asked Jacqueline to elaborate on why she had previously stated that Teresa and Joe put up a front for the cameras, to which she politely declined comment.

Well that’s boring, I thought.

And then Joe slurred that she could say whatever she wanted…he don’t care.

Wait for it…

…and then she did!

Second week.  Second stick of Dy-no-mite.

Jacqueline revealed that Teresa had walked in on Joe while he was getting busy with some woman on his desk.  Eeww.

Teresa claimed that Chris had cheated on Jacqueline.

Jacqueline blurted out that Teresa had told her that Joe cheated with baby sitters, secretaries and anyone else stupid enough to want a piece of that jelly.  I’m not ready for any of that quite yet.  Double eeww.

OMG.

And then she was all like Oh You Wanna Play?  And then she was all like Bring It.  And then Andy was all like google eyes and nervous blinking.

In the middle of it all, Joe actually asked why he was even there.  No lie.

(For those of you who missed it the first time:  Tool.)

And then it was over.

But the fuse was lit, and next week it’s the B-word.

Boom.

 

Pardon me while I block that blinding spotlight with my sweaty Napalm.

 

 

 

I said I lost all the weight after getting the Lap-Band. Not a Lap Dance, you pageant moron.

 

 

 

Whoa. I don’t even have enough charge in my phone for all the texting I need to do after this is over.

 

 

Yo! Andy! Am I even in the shot? I didn’t get a new nose just to sit way over here on the end of some Borgata couch.

 

 

No. Seriously. Somebody needs to find my Blackberry right now. This is some cray cray good s*** going down right now.

 

 

Teresa. Stop it. You’re bad attitude is On Display. Which is still available on iTunes, by the way.

 

 

Napalm.

(nā päm) n. An aluminum soap of various fatty acids that when mixed with gasoline makes a firm jelly used in some bombs and in flamethrowers.

So there.

The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

(#RHONJ) n. An equally, if not more so, lethal combination of botox, fillers, glitter, stilettos and body oil that when mixed with Andy Cohen‘s boyish inquisitiveness can also blow your face off.

The More You Know.

And so The Real Housewives of New Jersey Reunion began.  With an oily bang.

After the first ever back-to-back filming of two consecutive seasons of Joisey drama, it was finally time for everyone to reunite and to reignite all the explosive animosity that had been percolating while the rest of us got caught up with everything that went down in Season Four.

While TV Time made it seem pretty seamless, in Real Life Time it has been one full year since all the Wives gathered together under one roof.  That would probably explain not only the sweat on Andy’s upper lip as everyone settled in for the first of three…count ‘em THREE…reunion episodes, but also why there were a few new hairdo’s and noses on the set.  I guess Time tries to make everything prettier.

With Atlantic City hotel security on high alert and a S.W.A.T. team command center set up in the lobby, Andy welcomed everyone to the Borgata hotel, casino, spa and wrestling ring in beautiful Sin City and then got right down to bidnezz.

Like any good host, he attempted some smiley foreplay during the introductions by calling out everyone’s successes over the last year that they had been MIA.

Which is a great move, unless you are introducing people who haven’t really accomplished a lot since you last saw them.  Then it just gets awkward.

Teresa Giudice, who had traded in last year’s Star Trek reunion gown (…with the disco ball breast plate…) was now pretty much popping out of a highly saturated, and equally oiled up, green gown.  Knowing that as soon as she opened her mouth total chaos would ensue, I gave Tre the benefit of the doubt for starters and assumed that she must have been feeling under the weather, which could be the only explanation for why she had coated her fabuliciously boobilicious décolletage with so much Vicks VapoRub.

I know, right?  Nobody would grease up their junk like that on purpose, right?  You couldn’t even look directly at her breastesezz without squinting like Mama Manzo.

Despite the glare from her calzones, Andy managed to congratulate Teresa on 3 NYTimes best seller cookbooks before acknowledging sister-in-law Melissa Gorga‘s iTunes dance remixes.

As he moved on to Caroline “Yoda” Manzo, Andy already appeared to be running out of host steam because the best he could come up with was that he approved of her longer haircut.  Nice save, AC.

By the time he got to the very end of the couch and cousin Kathy Wakile (…ouch…that location can’t bode well for next season’s casting announcements…) Andy was really grasping for straws.  Instead of faking some success story though, he chose to simply just call Kathy out on a newly designed nose and overly injected lips before staging an impromptu one man intervention to try and put a stop to all the claymation before Girlfriend was totally unrecognizable on her DIY canoli box covers.

Andy had skimmed over Jacqueline Laurita because he wanted to come back to her for all the deets on why she skipped out on last year’s Reunion Show.  You don’t diss the King of Reality TV without a really good note from the principal, if you know what I mean.

Jacqueline began explaining “The Incident” at the Posche Fashion Show where Melissa had been confronted by that skeevy bald guy claiming that she used to dance for him at a strip club.  Being a self confessed texting tweetaholic, you’ll remember that Jacqueline’s cell was literally on fire that evening as everyone in Jersey was letting her know (…via text and/or 140 characters or less…) that Teresa was in on Strippergate the whole time.

I say she “began” explaining, because as soon as Jacqueline opened her mouth Caroline grabbed the wheel and steered the conversation right into Teresa’s shiny face, accusing Tre of setting up the whole thing to humiliate Melissa.  Jacqueline couldn’t have agreed more, and swore she had a Blackberry full of proof while Mama Manzo’s patented ManzoHand flapped around like she was bringing in aircraft at JFK.

To which Teresa replied “Prove it, Bitch.”

And then it was on.  Like Donkey Kong.

Jacqueline and Teresa went a few more rounds over the Posche Show and surprisingly got nowhere.  But it did give me time to wonder out loud why these women keep going to this stupid fashion show if it always ends up in a throw down.  I mean, really.

How many times do you have to get burned before you stop putting your face on the stove?  Stay home and watch Project: Runway for chrissake.

Melissa and her newly lightened hair got into the fray for a few seconds as she tried to explain why she never RSVP’s to anything at Teresa’s house, and that she doesn’t just drop off presents at Gia‘s school and then run away like she’s the UPS man.

It all made sense when you watched it even though for the life of me I can’t remember how Strippergate turned into Gia’s birthday party.  But trust me, it did.

Then it was back to Jacqueline again, and her hot mess daughter Ashley.  Or Ashlee.  Or whatever it is on Twitter now.

Having survived 3 days of gas leaking from a stove and never feeling any more stoned than she felt when she lived at home, Ashlee seemed to be maturing and growing into her new role as an adult.  At least that’s how it seemed on Skype.  And we know that the internet never lies, right?

The show then shifted into a bit of a downer for a few moments as Jacqueline and Caroline melted down over video of Jacqueline’s autistic son and had a good cry.

Melissa teared up as well and did that soap opera tissue dab thing that I guess you’re supposed to always do if you’re wearing too much eye liner.

It was hard to tell what was going on with Kathy’s new face, but she seemed a little moved, too.  But I can’t swear to it.

Teresa on the other hand, with that unexplainable gift that she has, somehow managed to turn a young boy’s battle with Autism back onto herself again and Caroline blew a nutty.

An industrial, Manzo-sized nutty.

Caroline called out Teresa for her F***ing Christmas Pageant dress.  Teresa called out Mama Manzo as an Old Hag.  I called my cable company to find out why even though I set my DVR to record Bravo TV I was somehow watching a TLC Show about bratty kids who scream and yell and throw things until one of those overseas Nannies comes to America and spanks them.

These are grown women, right?

And speaking of TLC.  And Honey Boo Boo Child.  Love.  Her.

Did anyone notice that Bravo TV stole a few Redneck Reality tips from the Boo and started subtitling conversations that are already in simple English?

I mean, yeah.  The Wives were whispering.  But I could still hear them talking smack about Teresa.  But subtitling what you can already understand is cool now, thanks to the Boo.  There’s no escaping the power of the Dolla Holla.

Redneckognize it, bitches.

Then Andy got it all back on track and gave us a Jacqueline and Teresa’s Friendship: The Early Years montage.

After a few snickers over nuts in a chocolate ball and a sex tape that will hopefully never see the light of day, it was clear that these two women don’t stand a chance of ever getting back to where they were before everything fell apart.  Not a chance.  You heard it here first, folks.

Jacqueline finger pointed her accusations that all Teresa cared about was exposing Melissa and Kathy even before they joined the show.  Forget the fact that Melissa was, or was not, or maybe still is or will be a stripper.  Teresa seemed more horrified that it took Kathy 40 years to get her first designer handbag.

I know, right?  You can get a pretty decent one at Marshall’s.  No excuses, honey.

Teresa made it clear for the bazillionth time that everyone on Earth is jealous of her and that everyone wants to be her.  Or at least that was the implication after a few more screaming matches and another In Touch magazine cover story.

Gah.  We get it.

Next up, Andy decided to bully the bully for a few minutes and cornered Caroline on her behavior this season.  He schooled her.  And she owned it.

And then she made room on the couch for the new and improved Lauren Manzo 2012 model.  But she didn’t have to make as much room as she used to, because daughter Lauren had lost over 35 pounds with a simple Lap-Band procedure and was now a sleeker, slimmed down version of the mopey girl we suffered through all season.

Baby Manzo looked pretty good in her leather dress.  I’ll give her that one.  And now that she doesn’t use her mouth for eating, it apparently allows her more time for yelling and swearing as she unleashed on Teresa.  Granted, Tre asked for it by tossing Lauren a low blow about the Manzo boys never working before the discovery of the Blk Waterfall, but screeching “Dick Head” tends to make you a little less of a lady.   Just saying.

Que the next Manzo nutty.  A split screen nutty, so you knew it was gonna be good.

Teresa went off on Caroline’s previous tummy tuck and how she couldn’t help but notice that Caroline had brought 3 new, pretty hefty fat rolls to the Borgata for the Reunion Show.

Caroline proudly owned those fat rolls.  Just like she owned her filler-free face, which probably unintentionally caught Jacqueline in the crossfire, considering that she had just pointed out her new Laurita cheekbones to Andy a few minutes earlier.

Lauren almost burst the seam on her new skinny dress as she compared Teresa’s manic behavior to high school bullies who raise the nation’s suicide rate, and then made a pretty smooth segue into Teresa not writing her own blogs.

By the time Lauren tried forcing Teresa into giving the definition, correct spelling and proper use in a sentence of the word Napalm, Andy had to finally step in and send Lauren back out to the craft service table for some solid food.

Then it all just fell apart.

Melissa told Teresa to turn around and look at her, because she was tired of talking to her weave.  Oh, snap.  I’m totally gonna use that at the office.

Which in turn caused Teresa to call out Melissa, on national television no less, for wearing last year’s glitter eye shadow.  Last year’s!  The glitter eye shadow that Teresa had already worn to the Season 3 Reunion Show.

Yeah.  She went there.  Bitch Stole My Look.  A year later.

Then it careened into Teresa whoring out her kid Gia in a celebrity gossip magazine article.  Seriously.  Is it any wonder I spend so much time at CVS with all this good cash register reading out there?  Inquiring minds, and all.

Moving on to stealing recipes that have been around since Italians discovered Italy, Teresa slammed Kathy a few more times.  She even let everyone know that she had created a book report outline listing all the times that Kathy’s husband Richie had made fun of her, mouthed off and/or laid his hands on Teresa.

An outline?  Like on paper?

Right.  Spell Napalm and then we’ll talk.

Finally, I guess the two things that you’re not supposed to drag into any Housewife fight are kids or dead parents.  You might want to write that one down in your own private outline for future reference.

Because after Kathy called Teresa’s Mother a F***ing liar, Teresa bit back with a slam against Kathy’s now deceased Dad, and then all the wheels on the Crazy Bus fell off.

Let’s just say that Part One ended with loads of Honey Boo Boo subtitling as Kathy’s sister Rosie Pierri went certifiably whackadoodle backstage after Teresa spoke ill of the Dead.  (Damn those Green Room monitors!)

Whackadoodle to the point where she threatened to (bleep) the (bleepin’) tongue out of her (bleepin’) mouth and began trashing the back of the Borgata like Butchzilla terrorizing a Japanese Pride Parade.

I’ll say it.  We loooove Rosie.  But she’s scary when she’s mad.  Really scary.

As the hotel went on lockdown and Andy tried to uncork one of the gigantic keggers behind the couch, Rosie toppled a lighting tripod, stepped on two tourists and headed towards the couches.

To be continued…