\n<\/p>\n
When I\u2019ve thought about the small but mighty state of Rhode Island in the past, it\u2019s mostly been in the context of A) getting rejected from Brown (honestly, I had a B-minus average; what did I expect?) or B) wishing I was at Taylor Swift\u2019s Fourth of July party<\/a> in Watch Hill. Now, though, I will likely associate the Ocean State forever more with The Real Housewives of Rhode Island<\/em>, my current favorite Bravo juggernaut and the main reason I didn\u2019t so much as pick up a book last weekend.<\/p>\n I was, admittedly, an easy target for this show, given my history with the Eastern Seaboard-set Real Housewives<\/em> franchises: I cut my teeth on The Real Housewives of New York City<\/em> as a teen and wrote most of my first book with The Real Housewives of New Jersey<\/em> on in the background. (I don\u2019t know why the dull roar of the Manzos and Giudices was so conducive to cranking out pages, but it was.)<\/p>\n And, at its very best, RHORI<\/em> reminds me of the early, Danielle Staub-led days of RHONJ<\/em>, when the show was mostly a lot of beautiful Italian broads yelling at each other about who was or was not an escort, with breaks only to go shopping or swill wine at various establishments owned by the other wives\u2019 husbands. My knowledge of Rhode Island\u2019s local culture was somewhat paltry prior to starting the show, but now I know that the state has, among other things, a notable Italian mob history<\/a> and a sizable Syrian-American community<\/a>, which tracks with the makeup of the show\u2019s cast, most of whom are Italian, Syrian, Lebanese, or a combo thereof. (I beg you to simply imagine<\/em> the mozzarella-studded mezze plates they serve up while fighting with one another over who sent photos of whose husband\u2019s side piece to the group chat!)<\/p>\n Thanks to the RHORI<\/em>\u2019s dubious subtitling and its cast\u2019s consistent strings of inanity (at one point, star Alicia simply tells the camera: \u201cI ran over a woman.\u201d That\u2019s it! That\u2019s all we get of that story!), I have almost no sense of what\u2019s happening on the show at any given time. But that\u2019s the magic of the Real Housewives<\/em> industrial complex in a nutshell; I\u2019m pretty much always confused, yet I\u2019m also locked in in a way that belies the upsetting amount of money my parents paid for me to \u201cthink critically\u201d throughout my primary, secondary, and collegiate education. At least if the season continues at this pace of inscrutable drama, I may get a second book soundtrack out of it? God willing!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n