I knew it! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. There is no way that Lisa Vanderpump, the woman with the foresight to start a Bravo-themed EPCOT center in the middle of Los Angeles for Housewives fans, was going to let Schwartz & Sandy’s have so much real estate in the opening credits, so much screen time on the show, and so much prominence with the cast if she wasn’t getting a little bit of a kickback. Last week, when talking to a friend, I said, “I bet Lisa swoops in at the last minute to save the place, puts a bunch of money in, and makes herself look like the hero.” Of course, that looks exactly like what is happening now.
We learned a lot about S&S’s (or should it be S.O.S.’s?) this week thanks to the friends-and-family opening that featured most of the extended Sandoval clan and my favorite SURver, a woman named Daisye. Can you image what it must be like for her to order Starbucks? “The name is Daisye. No, with an E. No, not D-A-I-S-E-Y. With an E. No, not D-A-E-S-Y. At the end, an E at the end. No. I already told you it’s not E-Y. It’s D-A-I-S-Y-E. Duh.” The six people behind her are now all late to work and will look like assholes run-walking into their 9 a.m. meetings with their little iced coffees, all because one woman’s parents don’t have a firm grasp on the English language.
The best part about the friends-and-family opening is that we found out that Sandoval’s mom is a five-foot-one firefighter from St. Louis. Where is the documentary about this woman? I need to know everything immediately. Can we get a true-crime podcast about her; Lisa Rinna’s mother, Lois, who survived a serial killer; and whatever monster cut Ramona Singer out of her loins so we can find out how all of these people ended up on Bravo? Schwartz’s mom — who Sandoval sang a whole song about wanting to bone — is also invited, but only if she admits the triplets are disappointing.
After the opening, S&S still isn’t open, and the guys meet with Greg, their business partner, who is fed up with them and wants to open rather than pay the $25,000 a month in rent. But wait, he’s not paying the rent. The Toms are! When they tell Lisa this during a trip to TomTom, where Madonna’s “This Used to Be My Playground” played in the background, she tells them it was an awful deal, and she wishes they had shown it to her so she could have told them not to sign it.
And with that, all of the stars have aligned, Mercury has come out of retrograde, all Cancer men are allowed back on Summer House, and Lisa Vanderpump has secured her savior storyline. Just look at the promo for next week. She even gets her husband, Ken Todd, the world’s last remaining Cockney-certified chimney sweep, to the table to tell them they’ll buy out their business partner. Do they also want to fund There Is Something About Her Sandwiches and Scheana’s follow-up single to “Good as Gold”?
Since Lala is sick at home watching RHOBH with a bag of chips like literally every single person who is reading this recap, the bulk of the episode was once again about Tom and Katie’s divorce. More specifically about Tom and Katie and Raquel, a love triangle that is so stupid it is just a line. At Sandoval’s concert at the Canyon, Where Music Meets the SOUL, Raquel gets herself nice and drunk to deal with, you know, her lifestyle choices. She says to Scheana and Brock, “Should I go ask Schwartz to make out?” Scheana tells her this is a good idea because she is a troll that hates Katie, and I am here for every single second of this feud.
Anyway, Schwartz isn’t a total idiot and says no. Well, is he not a total idiot? Why was he in the front row of the concert but then also sitting in a chair? If I were among the crowd of Pump Rules fans in that mosh pit, I would have picked up that chair, which was taking up way too much room, and then cracked it on Schwartz’s head. And then why is he sitting in the back of the room with Raquel when the band is still on? Wait, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about Schwartz having one moment of clarity in his whole life and telling Raquel that it would upset Katie if he Frenched her in public.
For the record, I am very sympathetic to Katie and her boundary that Tom does not date any of their friends. (Sandoval says it’s unreasonable. Really? There are literally 16 katrillion women between 18 and 39 in L.A. County for Schwartz to choose from. He has to pick one of ten that Katie said is off limits?) However, Katie does make it eternally difficult to be on her side. It’s like calling Scheana a troll. She’s been so mean to Scheana for their ten seasons on this show; of course she is team Schwartz. Katie says she’s worried that their friends are going to have to pick sides and they’re all gonna pick Schwartz. Well, duh. Pick the guy who is a good time, always out partying, and constantly has a smile, or the sourpuss skylight faller-through-er who has been terrorizing them, calling them mean names, and backstabbing them with her coven-mates for as long as they’ve known her?
Katie has dinner with Raquel and Adriana at a wine bar, and Raquel is either so stupid, so innocent, so messed up on THC Rice Krispies Treats, or a combination of the above that she tells Katie she asked Schwartz to make out. Katie isn’t even mad at Raquel; she’s mad at Scheana for giving her the idea to make out with Tom. “Raquel is not smart enough to come up with something so diabolical on her own,” Katie says. “She’s literally the human equivalent of cotton candy.”
No, no, no, no, no, Katie. That is not how you do it. [Clears throat] Raquel is the mascot for a boba tea chain that only sells to high-school dropouts. Raquel is the feud between Selena Gomez and Hailey Beiber if those two people were her only brain cells and they were fighting over lip-gloss application. Raquel is a TikTok trend where you slap yourself in the face exactly 137 times so that when you cry, your forehead doesn’t move like you just had Botox. See, Katie. That is how we play this game!
But it’s not like Katie is even getting along with Schwartz now. She thinks that they’ll have to be able to talk about their boundaries and issues if they want their relationship to continue, but it shouldn’t. They’re divorced, and they’re divorced for a reason. How about that reason being Tom pulling Katie aside at the friends-and-family party, then as soon as he’s done talking, he’s just greeting his guests and ignoring Katie while she’s trying to talk about her feelings. When she gets upset about it, he asks her to leave. (“Fine,” she says. “I’m never coming here again,” which is not what he told her and also why everyone hates her because she pulls shit like this.) When Katie walks out, Schwartz calls her his “archnemesis.” He’s not wrong, but this is the ex you’re trying to be friends with? Good luck, broseph.
But it wouldn’t be an episode without our little White Kanye, DJ James Kennedy. At his gig, Raquel and Ally step outside so that Raquel can remind Ally that James is a jerk who drinks too much and is awful to women. Oh, and also he cheated on her the whole time they were together. She doesn’t tell Ally not to date her, but “warns” her about James. When Ally tells James this, he says, “Well, I’m just going to warn her new boyfriends that she doesn’t suck dick much. Well, at all.”
This, right here, is the problem with James. He says he’s going to warn dudes that she might not be as spicy in bed as he’d like, which, whatever. Compare that to her warning Ally that James cheated on her, would get drunk and yell at her, and did something akin to emotional abuse for the five years they were together. And he thinks that is the same as not giving enough blowies? My dude! Also, maybe Raquel loves to S the D, maybe she just doesn’t love to S James’s D. Maybe it’s too small. (Maybe it’s too big, but hardly.) Maybe he doesn’t clean his foreskin. Maybe he has eczema on his balls. Maybe he pushes her head down on his cock too much while she’s trying to work. (They don’t call it a job for nothin’.) Maybe her nose job made it so she can only breathe out of her mouth, which makes sucking hard. There are a million reasonable excuses why she didn’t fellate to James’s liking, but there is no excuse why he treats women like shit.
As if to highlight this, we hear from multiple people that, after his gig opening for Tom Sandoval, James had to be removed from the very club where he was just working because he got in a big old fight. But this is the Canyon. This is where the music meets the SOUL! If James can’t even behave himself there, what hope does the Hotel Ziggy even have? But, once again, this is why James should not be drinking. This is the same behavior that ruined See You Next Thursday, a gig at SUR that he is contractually obligated to perform. Where is Lala on James’s sobriety journey, and why is she not helping him more? Can you imagine if Lala was your sponsor? Your first slip-up, when she picks you up off your bathroom floor and stabs you in the neck with her pinkie fingernail that is sharpened to a stiletto, you won’t be falling off that wagon again.
But everything on this show comes back to the Toms, right? Lisa wasn’t at the friends-and-family opening, but before Sandoval’s mom and the firefighters of St. Louis’s 132nd Hook and Ladder arrived, the two men were in the storeroom getting dressed into not matching but complementary outfits.
“Come here. I need a minute,” Schwartz said, turning to Sandoval.
“Why now? My pants are down, and your shirt is open,” Sandoval asked.
“Exactly,” Schwartz said. He came toward Sandoval for a kiss, but he put his arms up, catching Schwartz’s and stopping him in a clinch. They were like two wrestlers, arm against arm, each man feeling the steel cables of their muscles moving under their hot flesh. Then Schwartz stopped. He grabbed Sandoval’s hands and rubbed them along the ripples of his torso. “See, my shirt is open,” he said.
Sandoval seemed to guess what the correct next move was. He grabbed Schwartz’s hand and placed it on the thin knit of his boxer briefs. “And my pants are do —” He couldn’t finish; he just leaned against the wall, feeling Schwartz’s energy come radiating through his body, through his pants, through his fire hose, which, just at that minute, roared to stiff life as if there was enough liquid in it to douse, if not the whole restaurant, at least the man who was kneeling in front of him.
