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Fashion Week to Fight Week

Simon talks controversial photos, fights, and recent 'real life' drama.

By Simon van Kempen

So we start at the Badgley Mischka show where despite Kelly saying that she’d been invited to almost all the shows, Ramona decided to ‘invite’ her to this one as Kelly likes architecture and Ramona likes fashion. Guess Ramona forgot to do her research on Kelly then. While waiting for the show to start, Kelly fills Ramona in on the charity meeting that Ramona had missed and clearly she’s not happy with Bethenny. After the show they retire to the back room and Ramona asks Kelly how to deal with me. Kelly asks her some pertinent questions, all of which Ramona can only answer ‘no’ but then throws in that I once tried to speak to her ‘for an hour’ and she couldn’t get away. I missed that talk. The interesting thing about this scene is that it’s a great set up for what happens later in this episode. Perhaps Kelly should have taken her own advice on dealing with people one doesn’t like when it came to dealing with Bethenny.

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Jill’s apartment is coming along. The walls are almost done, the kitchen cabinets had been wallpapered and it seemed Jill was happy with everything and thankfully Bobby was too – even when Jill told him the budget had been breached.

Back over to Brooklyn (no strings?) you see us meeting with a couple of vendors, Nissim Holland as we were choosing tiles for the master bath, and then Jack Kennedy to give us some tips on lighting – particularly for the artwork we were planning on hanging. Alex is seen talking about how we wanted to do ‘this’ ourselves and in this case she was referring to the design & project management. You also learn that as a kid I was more into encyclopedias than Dickens! Oops – thankfully she still married me!

Then we’re into Fight 1 – where we learn from Kelly that apparently a ‘time out’ means being kept waiting 30 minutes when someone’s summoned to a meeting. Kelly holds nothing back and goes at it straight away. Kelly’s getting pretty good at monologues but sometimes she seems to forget to engage her brain beforehand as in this scene she makes no sense. When Kelly says how disgusted she was at Bethenny’s behavior and Bethenny asks what it was, Kelly retorts "you tell me what it was." Had she forgotten? Kelly then walks out, we cut to Bethenny’s interview and her Kellamity line but then we find there’s a part 2 as Kelly is waiting for her downstairs for one final riposte. Weird!

Kelly then has a ‘cute’ (that’s her favorite word, right?) scene with a man friend who clearly by the way she’s flirting, she likes and would like to know better. She recaps her altercation with Bethenny but somehow I don’t get that she felt she needed to ‘Mommy’ Bethenny. Who does that?

Bethenny & Ramona go watch Mario play tennis and Bethenny gets to tell her side of the charity meeting debacle. And then goes on to tell her about (and act out) her ‘time out’ which was followed by the “I’m up here and you’re down there” comment. To Ramona’s credit, having listened to both sides she seemed a bit confused but leaning towards Bethenny’s viewpoint.

It’s move back in day at the Zarins (although they did stay there throughout all the work) and the only hiccup seems to be that their television was not right for their cabinet. If that was the only ‘little’ drama she’s lucky. Wait until you find out what ‘little’ dramas we had on our renovation!

The Singers get together for drinks to trash Jill and increase the build up for their upcoming tennis match, which now seems to have been first planned way back when the 1st George Bush was President. My favorite line in this scene was Mario saying to Ramona that he knows she went to FIT. Did he forget that the cameras were there and she was talking to them and not him?! Ramona gets the chance to show she’s a little pissed at Kelly’s Page Six Magazine column which backhandedly took a little swipe at her other cast mates and it’s beginning to look like Ramona’s NBFF (new) is now a FBFF (former).

LuAnn is picked up in a limo by Kelly to go to the first anniversary (and last) Page Six Magazine party, which was weird considering the party was in midtown, Kelly lives downtown and LuAnn uptown. But it gives Kelly a chance to debrief LuAnn on her meeting with Bethenny. First they briefly discuss the charity meeting and it seems LuAnn saw it a little differently than Kelly. LuAnn practices her etiquette on Kelly and generally listens well, telling her that her lateness wasn’t right and when dealing with Bethenny, aggression is not the way to go.

The party starts and fight 2 soon starts after we all seen walking in. That night Alex & I were dog tired, we’d both been working long hours at our regular jobs in addition to dealing with the renovation and I remember walking in that I didn't expect a follow up with Ramona. How wrong I was! Ramona had a go at Kelly who surprisingly was very disarming and quickly put Ramona at ease.

Mario was unhinged is all I can say. I admit that I was a little sympathetic to his argument, however if I was off base challenging Ramona last week when she blanked me (again!), then that was nothing compared to this! It almost seems like someone had put the wrong voltage batteries in Mario that night as he seemed overdosed on electricity. Was his voice coming out of his hand, his mouth or his a$$? Jill was just a tad peeved at Bobby for not intervening and him not doing so was odd considering he was about to tell Alex to come to my aid.

Mario was standing by himself, and while Ramona had been being weird with me, I’d never felt the same vibes from Mario, and so I walked over to chat. You see us talking a little about their argument with Jill before Ramona joins us (standing on a ledge). The conversation is going pretty well and then Alex (with Bobby) join us too. And for perhaps 30 seconds you see four people talking, having fun but then the mood quickly changed. The back story here is that back on April 8th, the four of us had taped a scene for Extra! and then afterwards went for a quick drink, before Ramona asked us to accompany them to a party at Espace on the west side. That night we had all gotten on pretty well, but this was before Alex’s photos appeared in InTouch (which despite what Ramona says was NOT planted by us,) followed by my appearance on the Season 1 Reunion Show: both of which p’d her off. We allowed her to say her piece, she kept on interrupting when we tried to say ours, but eventually I had had enough so it was finally about time to call them on their hypocrisy. I’ll let the rest of that scene speak for itself except to note that they didn’t deny what I said!

Next week looks like we’ll finally see this tennis match which I think has now been 6 weeks in the making. I hope the suspense will have been worth it!

Slightly off topic, but Alex & I were interviewed fairly recently about the show and at the end the reporter asked us what to expect in the Reunion Special. We answered that we had no idea, as it was well over month until it would be filmed and that ‘real life’ might intervene between now & then. Since that interview Alex was laid off, Kelly got her picture taken for all the wrong reasons and not by a society photographer and then just this week LuAnn’s sad news broke. Hopefully there’ll be no more real life intervening in the next few weeks. That’s quite enough for all of us.

‘til next week…

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