"You ate the bow?"

I come and go on the Real Housewives shows.  Sometimes they fill me with glee, and sometimes I feel like I've sold my soul to the devil for what, at the moment, is three hours (minus commercials) per week of being what might be the only thing worse than a vapid, self-interested famewhore: Someone who watches the vapid, self-interested famewhores.  I mean, without me (and the rest of all y'all out there watching), there's nothing for them to whore themselves out for.  For some reason I feel like I'm taking the high road by sticking with Tyra and her ever more bizarre journey far from the Land of Sanity.

But I've got nothing going on right now.  No real job, no classes until August, and who can say "no" to three nights a week of these women plus the bonus of Kathy Griffin on Thursdays? Not me, that's for sure.  And at the end of last week's episode and the first half of this week, something happened that brought to me what I can only describe as true happiness: Sarah "ate the bow" off Heather's ridiculous cake.

I am not a religious person, and I would be entirely despicable if I claimed reality TV as my god, but there is something deeply satisfying to me about schadenfreude.  I get a feeling of deep completeness when I see people behaving in spectacularly unbecoming ways.  When Tyra pronounces the word "photos" as "phow-tows," I revel in it.  When Teresa Giudice attempts to turn a table over in a fit of rage, I laugh until I cry.  When Heather flips her switch with her back-up army of Mean Girls because a drunken moron with a misplaced sense of social justice steals a pinch of fondant due to a vague diabeetus-like ailment, I feel like the classiest person ever to grace the surface of the earth.  I may not be able to find a job in my chosen field.  I may not have a boyfriend.  I may be selling peaches to the old and crabby, but by god, I have never, not even once, done any of this shit, let alone in front of a gaggle of camera guys.  Not even once.  

Let's parse this, guys.  Sarah had dinner with Alexis, who seems to have an overdeveloped hyperbole muscle (ironic, that, considering the only parts of Alexis that are overdeveloped have become so surgically, and she probably doesn't know the word "hyperbole").  Alexis speaks in such a way that may lead someone who hadn't seen the "intervention" in Costa Rica (that's "Costa Rica, Mexico," geography majors) to think that she had actually been beaten to a pulp.  Nope, she just got pointlessly nailed by people she thought were her friends, all over the fact that she's phony.  Which she is.  She's a braggart of the worst sort, but so what?  If you don't like it, quit hanging around her so much.  I think most of us have learned that strategy by the time we get to our early twenties.  That's not good for the cameras, though, and Alexis poured the whole tale to Sarah, who promised to start shit at Heather's party.  Alexis vaguely talked her down, but brought her to the party anyway.  This was probably half wanting an ally (since Big Jim wasn't going to go), and half producer-prompted.

So then Sarah "eats the bow."  Which she totally didn't.  She took the teeniest, tiniest pinch off the end of the fondant bow (which was perched atop a cake that totally matches a sweatshirt I had in eighth grade, let the record show) and ate it.  I'm not defending this action, especially in light of the fact that she did it to antagonize and not, as she stated, because she has "a sugar problem."  It was a stupid thing to do, and as ugly as that cake was, it's just not good manners to gank bits and pieces off someone's ... "renaming" cake (this is already way too long, so I'm not getting into that whole issue).  Heather's choices at this point are as follows:  1) Ask Drinking-Problem Sarah to leave (which, as she had not been invited to the party and Heather had apparently hired security, should be relatively easy), or 2) Ignore it.  Just let it go. Rise above.  That's what Rory's grandmother Emily on Gilmore Girls would have done, and I defer to her in all issues of etiquette.

Of course, Heather chose 3) Lose her shit in a very condescending manner and call over Tamra, Gretchen, and Vicki to join her in a rousing chorus of "Did you eat the bow?" and "Who does that?!"  (I am soooo sick of hearing those three words together in that order.)  Drinking-Problem Sarah's response is as delightful as it is insipid: She has "a sugar problem."  Everyone knows if you have the sugar diabeetus, you're supposed to grab hold of the nearest piece of fondant sculpture!  I mean, that's basic shit they teach you at the YMCA CPR class you take before you start babysitting.  

Finally, after a sneering offer of an Oreo (brilliant!) to cure Sarah's diabetes, Slade Smiley (supposed Tour de France cyclist and avid turtleneck-wearer) escorted Sarah out.  On the way to her waiting car, she sobbed, "Is this the world we live in?"  A world where one is asked, on-camera, to leave a party for eating part of a showpiece cake?  I'm afraid so, Sarah.  I'm afraid so.