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Jersey Shore Family Vacation is a work of art. The MTV series, which returned with new episodes last week, continues to be funny yet unexpectedly authentic with each new episode, which technically makes this cast of guidos artists in their own right. That proved to be exceptionally true when Decider joined the cast for an afternoon paint and wine class at Painting Lounge in New York City.
“I wanted to paint Vinny’s shower scene from Chippendales!” Pauly D exclaimed as we tied on our aprons and sat down in front of our paints, brushes, and a blank canvas. Instead of using that show-inspired moment for our masterpieces, we instead learned how to paint a palm tree image, which was borrowed the show’s press photos from the previous season. While Jenni “JWoww”, Nicole “Snooki”, and Deena were unable to attend, Pauly, Vinny, Ronnie, and Angelina approached their blank canvases, ready to paint a picture of palm trees with their brushes, and a picture of the season ahead with the words.
While this season kicked off with the emotional hearing for Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, who learned he would be spending eight months of his life away at “college” as Pauly D called it, the rest of the season follows the crew from a dude ranch to the altar. When I asked what the most “Mike” thing about his wedding to Lauren was, Vinny quickly replied, “It was very Italian.”
“And the food was good,” Angelina added.
“There were so many desserts,” Pauly confirmed. “Well, me and Vinny, we were lit at the wedding and we ended up eating our dessert on the floor. Don’t ask why but we did. But the owner was like, we have this warm cookie.”
“We made him go down in the basement and bake us fresh cookies,” Vinny, the notorious keto dieter of the group said.
Pauly interrupted to let the group know, “Just want to throw this out there, I’m going for a little darker painting,” laughing at the mixture of his colors. “I did that on purpose,” he said, as the entire group focused on painting the picture’s sky a light pink shade.
“I couldn’t believe the spread he had, it was like every single kind of food in the world,” Pauly said, as we returned to the topic of the wedding. He counted off the stations at the celebration: “There was a Mexican station, an Italian station, a seafood station, tacos, it was literally everything,” he recalled, clearly impressed. And even though Mike has earned the reputation for most enthusiastic snacker on the show since it returned to MTV last spring, Ronnie confirmed that it was his now-wife Lauren who did much of the planning for the big day.
“That place just opened up too,” Vinny said of their venue. “It was one of the first weddings [they had at the location] so they laid out the red carpet. They wanted to show that they were the big wedding hall,” he said, describing it as a “castle.” As far as the gifts Mike’s pals gave him for the big day, Pauly revealed, “The boys gifted really good gestures,” that Ronnie added “came from the heart.” And those Jersey Shore viewers that were worried after this season’s first episode when Ronnie had yet to provide Mike with a wedding shower gift can rest easy knowing one was delivered before the big day. What was it? Well… “I can’t even tell you,” Ronnie admitted. “I know my girlfriend did it. I paid for it, She ordered it. That’s how it goes, right?” He’s referring to his on-off girlfriend Jen Harley, the same woman he shares his adorable one-year-old daughter with, and yes, the same woman we’ve watched him have a tumultuous relationship with on the show, on social media, and on plenty of websites on the internet. It is likely the same person he was tensely texting with as he stood in the hallway before our class began, staring at his phone with the same face we saw on the show last year as the couple bickered back and forth electronically.
It was Pauly and Vinny that proved to be the most talkative, or perhaps the best multitaskers as we chatted and painted at the same time, describing what it was like when they went to visit Mike recently, in addition to the frequent emails they send to stay in touch. “I thought it was gonna be this big formal [thing] where we get strip-searched and they take our phones and all that but it wasn’t like that,” Pauly revealed. “It was very relaxed. And he’s very positive in there with the circumstances.”
It was Jenni and Vinny who sat in the courtroom as those circumstances were decided, and Vinny said of the experience, “It was tense, it was something I never did before. I never watched someone get sentenced. You think it’s always gonna be ok, you think at the end she’s gonna be like, alright have a good day, but she’s giving out jail time right in front of your eyes.” I asked if the judge was mean about it, and he shared, “She was pretty stern but they listed the positive and understood that he did go through a transformation and applauded him for that. I still don’t agree with the eventual ruling,” he said.
When I asked what Mike’s currently eating while there, Pauly said, “He has this vending machine that’s pretty lit, it has all these things, there’s macaroni and cheese, PopTarts. When somebody visits they go on dates by going to the vending machine and then going out by the picnic table.” The guys instead let Mike’s wife Lauren enjoy all that the vending machine had to offer during the visit, and instead used their time to ask burning questions. What Pauly specifically wanted to know was about the daily routine which includes haircuts twice a week and two workouts per day.
What they were surprised to learn was that “He actually knows everything before us,” Vinny said when it comes to the latest pop culture news. “I wanted to give him updates but he knew everything. I wanted to tell him about our show and give updates of what we’re going through and pop culture updates, he knew it all. TMZ stuff, he watches it,” Pauly said, proudly adding that when it came to their dating spinoff show Double Shot at Love, “He was so happy to watch us every week. There was this room they made sure to put it on, they were all fans of the show so they watched it every Thursday.”
And even though the guys realized that now that Mike will be watching Jersey Shore on Thursdays, including the moment he and his friends learned of his sentencing, Vinny said, “It’s good that he’s watching it now at the end of the sentence,” confirming they expect him to be out soon and reporting that he’s staying positive.
Though unlike Mike’s current outlook, Pauly declared of his painting “Mine’s a little dark!” At this moment, Angelina realized she was paining her pink sky on the bottom half of the canvas instead of the top, and simply flipped it upside down to correct the error, and politely requested champagne to, you know, complete the wine portion of the activity. I joined her, but the rest of the group declined a beverage, Vinny with one reason in mind: he’s headed back to the Chippendales stage in Las Vegas at the end of the month. With one residency already under his belt, he enjoys that he gets to “live in Vegas for a month and perform in front of a bunch of drunk girls.”
“Dream come true,” Angelina added sarcastically.
“It motivates me to stay in shape too,” Vinny continued. When I asked if it’s changed any of his own strip club behaviors, some of which we’ve witnessed on the show over the seasons, Ronnie piped up with a chuckle, “He tips a lot better nowadays.”
“When I go to strip clubs now I’m like, these are my coworkers,” Vinny said. And though he doesn’t dance so much, Vinny said, “I do take a shower on stage to ‘Purple Rain’. But yeah, we don’t really dance.” Well, except at the top of the show. “I break out through a door because I do my famous door dance on the stage. They [wanted me] to fist pump at first, but I was like, ‘Guys, fist-pumping is dead.’ Gotta break down the door.”
“It’s not dead,” Pauly said quietly to big laughs in the room. “I still do it!”
I took this opportunity to ask Angelina for the latest updates on her life and how she’s doing, and as she replied, “Good. I’m painting right now,” the guys, especially Vinny and Pauly, slipped right into the same bullying dynamic they share with her on the show, joking about her being a stripper, taking showers, reminding the room of her previous engagements. It was both exciting to feel as though an episode of the series was playing out right in front of us and also a little bit of a bummer to learn, oh, that’s not just a thing that exists on the show, but follows her in real life as well.
As far as her own wedding planning goes, she explained. “I’m just on hold. It’s going but it’s trucking along slowly.” She’s toying with the idea of having her bachelorette party in a place such as New Orleans or Mykonos, Greece. And if this wine and painting class is any indication of the events that could follow, it might be a bit of a mess. It was at this point that she knocked over her small plastic cup of champagne, which flooded her paper plate of paints and spilled onto my pants. Angelina apologized but I could only laugh and shrug it off. What else would I expect when hanging with the cast of Jersey Shore, really?
As we moved on to painting the sun portion of the image, our instructor Chris noted that he’s heard if you’re able to draw a perfect circle, it’s a sign you might be a sociopath. “Yo, Vinny’s is about to be on point!” Pauly exclaimed to laughter throughout the group. Instead, Vinny mused that he needed to mix more white paint to get the yellow color he hoped to achieve, as the group continued to take their painting seriously. Maybe too seriously?
When I asked Ronnie how life was going for him, he replied, “Good, just trying to do this sun right now, it’s the hardest part of my whole day,” which can’t possibly be the truth considering he’s got a small daughter at home. Pauly took the opportunity to continue joking, “You already have a daughter, now he’s trying to have a sun!”
Ronnie confirmed that Ariana is, “Good, she’s getting big,” and that his favorite aspect of #thatdadlife is “going through all the moments of her evolving, from her crawling to now she doesn’t stop moving, now she started to talk. She’s so observant, now she’s catching on.” She’s now in daycare, and when I suggested she could be meeting her future roommates there, he replied, “Hope not!” She could be meeting her fellow Spiral Squad members, just as Ronnie has Snooki, his partner in very drunken shenanigans during the group’s dude ranch getaway.
In fact, when I ask what each person’s superpower is, in reference to Vinny calling the group the Avengers as they show up when it matters for Mike’s sentencing, he names Snooki’s power as such: “She can drink.”
“She can outdrink everybody in the house,” Pauly confirmed, with Ronnie adding, “She can funnel anything.” Vinny suggests that Ronnie’s special power is that he “can clog any toilet,” and that Pauly’s is “He doesn’t sleep,” with the busy DJ confirming, “I’m lucky if I can get four” hours per night — and that’s on a plane. He confessed he’s only been to his Las Vegas home once this month, quickly adding, “But I love it, I like what I do, so that’s why I’m able to handle the travel.”
As for Vinny, “He can see desserts on the table and not eat them,” Pauly says. Vinny also tells me towards the end of the activity that he does have an artistic side and has been known to draw with pencil and charcoal, recently completing a unique piece for his grandmother’s birthday and both proudly and shyly showing me the photo of his accomplishment.
As the rest of the group surveys their own work in front of them, comments from “So cool!” to “Mine’s abstract, bro” are used to explain what they’ve created. We round out the superpower discussion as it’s decided that Jenni’s power is “Supermom” and when it comes to Angelina, she’s unable to come up with one for herself so Ron offers her “potty mouth,” which she shoots back, “Oh stop Ron, you do too.”
But it’s precisely those potty mouths that are watched (and enjoyed) by viewers all across the country, including such fans as Miley Cyrus who Vinny tells me binge-watched the latest season of the show. The cast’s own viewing habits include The Handmaid’s Tale, Euphoria, 90 Day Fiance, Big Little Lies, Stranger Things, and When They See Us (“I was affected after that show,” Pauly said), all popular shows, but none that are likely to last as long as Jersey Shore has proven to.
“When it first came back after the six-year break, I didn’t know if anyone would watch,” Pauly admitted. “But they ended up watching so our ratings were good and that’s what’s up. I didn’t know if it would still work.” At this point, Ronnie quickly wiped at his face when he realized light blue paint has splashed onto his nose, sending the room into giggles and proving that this show is sure to last for some time.
Jersey Shore Family Vacation airs Thursday at 8pm ET/PT on MTV.
