Who left the fat on this sausage?
Joe and Melissa make-ah me so mad sometime.
Drizzled with extra grease and oil.
Hold on a second while I wipe the sweat and grease off my plasma.
…elevator Muzak…
Ok, I’m back. Sorry about that.
If you look closely, I swear you can still see a stain on the screen from the overly moist hour of The Real Housewives of New Jersey that just smeared across my TV.
Tonight’s Pizzeria Special was Dysfunction de la Familia served up steamy hot and topped with cheese, salty sweat & a spritz of a child’s tears. The whole thing was coated with so much PAM cooking oil that it literally slid off the screen onto your lap. And trust me, hot Jersey pizza in your lap was not even the most uncomfortable thing about this episode. Not even close.
So we start out with Teresa, Jacqueline and Patron Saint Caroline having another go round about Joe Bro (…again, Teresa’s brother Joe Gorga, not the RadioDisney one…) and husband Jabba Joe still not getting along. The two boys are not playing nice in the sandbox as we found out last week. They are smack-talk texting back and forth threatening to get all up in each other’s face and unleash some Roid Rage on the playground. Seriously. Who does that after a certain age? Like 12 maybe? When two grown men get all Gossip Girl snarky on their Blackberries….that is just odd. I’m amazed that Jabba Joe’s pudgy fingers can even tap the keyboard, much less put together full sentences. As OCD as I am about smudges on my phone, I can only imagine how sticky his screen must be. And it’s one thing to cyber bully some poor kid half way across the world via Facebook, but it’s another to text some s*** to your brother-in-law down the street who is probably watching you through the window.
Tools.
Teresa is throwing a 5th birthday party for Matagonia or whatever she is called, and pulls out her cell to make sure that Joe Bro is going to show. Do not look directly at your screen if you DVR’d the episode. Apparently while Jabba was busy making up dirty words to send to Joe Bro, Teresa was blinging up her own phone with crystals from Michael’s Craft Store. That art project had to weigh more than the pan of lasagna on the back counter. If she could pop off half of those Swarovskis with tweezers she could get one lawyer off their backs by Tuesday.
Out of nowhere suddenly comes a charity road race that everyone has signed up for, even though we never heard a word about it before now. It’s at the butt crack of dawn which means we get to see sweaty, slobby Jabba Joe in his underwear again while Teresa tries to roll him out of bed. I swear that when their oldest girl finally snaps and tries to burn away all her bad memories with kerosene and a book of matches that Joe will still not move any faster getting out of that house.
As always, looking like his home has a slow gas leak that he never notices, Joe finally makes it down stairs to show off that Ed Hardy tattoo and unbrushed teeth. He says something about hating everything and everybody and then they go to the race.
The race itself was pretty insignificant, except for the wide range of bad fashion choices. Imagine you gave a small child all the mail order LLBean catalogs you could find, tossed in some Jersey Mall flyers from the Sunday papers and then asked them to shred out all their favorite running gear pictures. It was a mish mash of neon spandex, faux fur and zebra knit hats that even girls in the proper cyber bullying age bracket would never be caught dead in, thank you. OMG. WTF?! LOL. And then that smiley face that I still don’t know how to make.
So we got the sweat thing going again since a few of them actually ran the race. Jabba sweat simply because he’s Jabba. The rest of them just cheated and gave money to feel good about themselves in the morning.
Melissa found time to do her weekly product placement and let those interchangeable Manzo boys listen to her new CD. Someone in the RHONJ production office must have just noticed that this show was way under its Bravo TV quota for fierce gay sidekicks because they have suddenly been ramping up face time for roommate Greg. He loooooves him some Melissa. He wants to beeeeeee Melissa. If he was Melissa he’d get to have really white teeth and Louboutins. And some Joe.
Every time we see Greg he tries to be fierce and unleash everything he has learned by watching this channel. But he’s about 8 feet tall, and kinda doofy in a gangly big brother kind of way, so not so much.
Moving on to the next uncomfortable, moist moment we got to spend a little quality time with Caroline’s daughter and her boyfriend. Every week we listen to how Lauren hasn’t lost any weight yet and feels fat and dumpy and is always gonna be a loser. Instead of getting all mopey this time tho, she is going to have her guy show her how to make mozzarella cheese. That’s always good if you are trying to lose weight, sister. How about a walk around the neighborhood instead? Or a back to school gym membership?
So he plops some cheese balls into the water and rolls up his sleeves to get down and dirty. They both lapse into this slightly creepy cheese rubbing ritual, stretching it out like the world’s biggest piece of yellow Silly Putty. She has a brief Patrick Swayze “Ghost” fantasy moment, but in reality it looked like two people trying to recreate Animal Planet’s Hillbilly Handfishing in the kitchen sink. More grease and oil. I’m all set, thanks.
Then it’s party time.
Teresa is trying to wrestle her cranky 5 year old down so she can get Barcelona, or whatever she answers to nowadays, dressed for her birthday party. It becomes painfully clear early on that Teresa has never laid eyes on either the family checkbook or one single episode of What Not To Wear. That kid’s closet is packed to the brim with more fluff and lace and pink than Greg could ever wish for in his wildest Melissa dream.
Unfortunately Teresa chooses to put all of it on her daughter at once, and LeaveMeAlonia goes screaming out of the room in a blinding mix of patterns and tears. Teresa tracks her down trying to make her life go away by crawling under a desk, crazy skirt and legs hanging out like the dead witch under Dorothy’s house. If that witch was color blind and on acid, that is.
Teresa finally caves and dresses the kid in 28 pounds of pink tulle that would make any My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding girl jealous. She left the house looking like a parade float. A parade float with big eyebrows and a bad attitude. You know the kind.
Since Jabba and Teresa are cutting back expenses, the high society way of saying bankrupt, they decide to hold the birthday bash at the Pizzeria where Jabba works part-time. Don’t tell the boys at Engine House #42 but that joint was way over fire code.
Teresa put the usual “it’s not the money, it is the love” spin on the party, even though you knew she was dying inside. I’ll bet my salary she didn’t even know there was a Dollar Store at the strip mall until last year. Roll your quarters honey, birthdays aint’ cheap.
Jabba thought it would be fun to show all the kids how to make pizza. Child labor is cheap, and he already lost most of the employees from his construction company, so why not? Picture way too many screaming kids in 200 degree temperature, slaving away in close quarters trying to follow the directions of a loud fat man sweating all over the tables. I didn’t know if they were making pizzas or denim jeans in Taiwan.
After 3 minutes when the kids lost interest, they went directly to the entertainment, like any well budgeted cocktail party.
Gia Wouldn’tWannaBeYa, had written a song for her little sister which she sorta sang to the crowd. Melissa kept a close eye on her to make sure the kid wasn’t better than the pitch tweaked demo that she had just stuck in the Manzo laptop. It was close. Everyone was wiping sweat from their brows and tears from their eyes when Gia went into her second song dedicated to Joe Bro and Teresa, and it became as obvious as the drips down Joe’s face that this kid is losing it.
Tear stains. Grease stains. Sweat stains.
Pass me a napkin, please.
What’s for dessert?
