Better Places To Be

The saying is ‘a day late a dollar short’ so I guess I owe you all 6 dollars by now but also better late than never, right? I will, however, keep this one a little shorter.

This episode opens with Victoria home from boarding school and a chance for them to catch up more than they’ve been able to do in the 2 months she’s been gone. LuAnn gets a refresher on grinding and dirty frog dancing but she seems truly shocked that Victoria has been shopping in goodwill stores.

The BBC World Service comes to interview Jill about the state of the world’s economy and I do have to say that Jill deftly managed to deflect some of their leading questions and overall came off pretty well. Their parting comment about interviewing REAL celebrities came across as pretty mean.

We see Kelly updating her comp card pictures as well as take an A-shaped picture for her upcoming Halloween party to which she’s (surprisingly) lent her name (although maybe this time she sold it). The answer from the photographer “we love a good booty shot” to her question “do you want to do some from behind because they’re like ‘spicy’” definitely should be juxtaposed against Kelly’s comment later in this episode as she arrives at her Halloween party! ;-)

LuAnn’s clearly decided that Victoria needs new clothes so she has no need to ever visit a ‘goodwill’ store again, and so takes her shopping at a place where the price tags contain at least an additional two numbers prior to the decimal point. But first LuAnn decides to do her own bit of goodwill and aid the local street vendors by paying over price for street jewelry – hey it’s all good for the local economy!

Once they get to the ‘real’ store Victoria seems a little bored and so picking up the slack LuAnn decides to have fun trying on clothes for herself! As she said she just ‘couldn’t help herself!’ For me the most interesting part of this scene is that the Bravo supplied usual total price spent subtitle didn’t get flashed up on screen. I wonder why?

Jill and Ginger are at Zarin Fabrics as she has a fitting for hers and Ginger’s Halloween costumes. The fact that they’re going as Elle Woods and Bruiser, either shows her own wonderful sense of irony or she likes being typecast, I am not sure which, though.

Jill’s second straight scene (or is this an interstitial?) sees her being interviewed on her sister Lisa’s radio show with her Aunt Cookie and Jill seems truly hurt that Lisa and Aunt Cookie seem to have a closer relationship than she does.

In late April 2008, I had attended a black tie gala that coincided with the Go Green Expo in NYC – around the same time as Earth Day. As it turned out Jill and Bobby were there as well and here’s a photo link of the three of us. A green fashion show was held and the models were all real scientists or people passionately involved in ‘green’ fields and afterwards many of the clothes they’d worn were auctioned off in a live auction with Nigel Barker as auctioneer. I have very few vices but I am a sucker for charity auctions and once I set my mind on being the winning bidder almost no one can stop me. The FEED bustier came up for auction and I instantly knew that I wanted to buy it for Alex. Maggie Norris the couturier had donated it for auction, and so after I bought every penny I spent went straight to the charity. As it turned out a woman sitting on the same table as me, also badly wanted it. The good news for Lauren Bush’s charity is that with two of us determined to win it the bidding got pretty intense and luckily, I eventually held the winning bid.

I thought at the time that it would look great with jeans but as the year progressed I wondered whether Alex would be game enough to wear it to a very dressy event.

Sure enough, when I took her in mid September for the fitting and she finally got to see it, I was delighted when she said she’d like to wear it to the Opening Night of the 2008/09 Metropolitan Opera Season. Certainly it wasn’t to everyone’s taste (fashion, rarely is) however it certainly made a statement both inside the Opera and out, and inside several people came up to her to express their love for it.

Ramona’s preparing a tape to show HSN on how well she can present and the fact that a film crew is around her is obviously less unnerving than her daughter standing next to Mario who’s holding a home video recorder. Avery obviously missed the memo that sometimes pauses say more than the words they intersect.

Then it’s off to Brooklyn with a couple of witches with their young boys as we are seen carving pumpkins on our stoop. It’s scenes like these that we can look back on in twenty years time and revel in the memories of having young children. Alex and I both love the boys participating in family activities like this, and find it very important to let them help and not just be props on the sidelines. Sharp knives and lit candles are a fact of Halloween and teaching them how to carefully use and respect them, when supervised, is a very important lesson to learn.

Elle and Bruiser arrive at the Doggy party and Brad seems to have raided the 20 year old curtain off cuts at Zarin’s to make his latest get up. Ramona and Bethenny arrive too with their dogs in tow. Alex was also invited to this event but as we’re cat people she passed as she rightly doubted that our cats would have liked all those dogs around.

Bethenny and Jill check out the Hudson Terrace as a possible venue for the upcoming Creaky Joints benefit and Jill manages to show her speedy displeasure with every food suggestion. Thankfully, Bethenny was there and successfully overruled her.

Bethenny joins Alex for brunch to discuss the progress of Bethenny’s new logo, and Bethenny continues to direct her client that the progression is exactly what she’s wanting. She specifically stated that she liked what Alex was doing. Now the finished version is yet to be seen but so far it would seem from B’s reaction that Alex is definitely on track.

Bethenny is seen arriving at Kelly’s Halloween party and is soon joined by LuAnn and then Jill, Bobby, Brad and Wayne. Palin and Moose arrive later than everybody else, but still way before Kelly.

I have to say that filming the 2nd season was surreal, in that the entire time we filmed was against the backdrop of one of the most amazing elections is recent US history. However, from the show you really wouldn’t know it. Obviously, for shows like ours it is important not to ‘date’ it too much to a specific year so that when it rolls out to countries around the world it doesn’t seem as coming from 2008. That being said Alex and I were so happy that we were able to surreptitiously sneak in a little reference to the politics. Remember that Halloween ’08 was just 5 days before the election.

Anyway when we arrived you see us hamming it up on the step and repeat and although initially Sarah had control of the Moose eventually the Moose struck back! Bethenny’s comment about not realizing who we’d come as is indicative of too many people who seem blithely unaware of current events.

As Kelly hadn’t even bothered to turn up ‘fashionably late’ to her own party, and as we all had other (and better) places to be we all split. Of course, we weren’t there to see that she and Max eventually did arrive. Kelly then describes her costume as fun and flirty and goes in to say that as a Mom she doesn’t want to be seen to be over the top. Hmmmm... Now is this where I drop the reference to what I wrote about in my fourth paragraph?

Until next week – when maybe, just maybe we’ll get a little update and see whether Jill was right and there’s no way we could finish our house in time.