Real Housewives of West Linn

Party anyone? On the left, a chocolate sour cream cake with espresso caramel buttercream and espresso salt. On the right, Jules’ Lemon Cake. lemony white cake soaked in lemon syrup, lemon cream filling, and lemon curd buttercream.

OK, I’ll admit it. With much shame and tail tucking, I’ve sort of started watching the Real Housewives franchise. It started with Beverly Hills.  And even then, it was only because it was LA and while I am so, so pleased to have left LA 8+ years ago, I do sort of enjoy seeing places I somewhat recognize and there is a familiarity surrounding that “LA type”. It was just going to be LA.

Then I tried New York on a random Saturday but they were all awful and wholly unlikable. Then I tried New Jersey and I liked Caroline. So I watched all that Hulu has to offer of them because, well, Caroline. Now I find myself part way through Atlanta. I know, I’m not proud. In my defence, I am educated enough and cultured enough to be able to read Chaucer out loud in a proper Middle English accent . . . no? Yeah, I know. No.

As I watch these crazy women scream at each other, flip tables, pull weaves, melt down in night clubs, I always laugh to myself and imagine my friends and I being the cast of Real Housewives of West Linn. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Bravo will not be contacting us anytime soon.

We’re not wealthy enough, shallow enough, brand conscious enough; we don’t shop enough, we don’t scream enough . . . ok, maybe we do drink enough; we don’t exclude enough, we don’t gossip enough, and none of us talk to each other on our cellphones on speaker with the phone 2 inches from our face. As much fun as it is when the gang gets together, I think we’d fail miserably at being “entertaining” and Bravo would be so justifiably bored.

We’re not into setting each other up for falls and in fact, when we see someone careening, we jump in–“hey–can I help? what can I do? who can I pick up from what school? what ingredient are you missing?”  So when I got a text yesterday morning from Kathy, still recovering from her cold, foggy and looking for her skirt even after she already set it aside, a bit frantically stating that she needed two cakes, a chocolate and a lemon, by tomorrow morning because she was on birthdays this month at work, my answer could only be: Absolutely. Because that’s just how we roll. Because Kathy seems to cosmically sense when I’m frustrated and sends me texts that make me cackle like a fool. Because Kathy brings us cookies when we didn’t ask for them but totally needed them. Because Kathy keeps her eagle eye on our kids whenever she’s at the school and makes it clear that they belong to her too–that we all belong to each other. Because Kathy, more than any of the rest of us, always pulls it off–no matter how many plates are spinning in the air, no matter how many places she’s supposed to be, she always has our backs.

So I hopped in my car, zipped off to the store for lemons and butter and cream and the like, had a cranky not-really-a-near-miss with someone who turned out to be Heather which immediately made it clear that I was a jackass for having honked, so then she called me only seconds before I could call her and we laughed and apologized and laughed some more at our crazy lives . . .and just like that, something cranky turned into something happy.

See? This is what it’s like around here. It’s all so wholly unbecoming of proper “Real Housewives” and you know, that’s ok. Send Bravo elsewhere because here, we’re not real housewives, we’re just real friends.