Q: Just tell us, who is your favorite Housewife?
A: You have got to be kidding me.
Q: OK, you punked out on that. So, who’s your favorite supporting player on Bravo?
A: Well, that’s an even harder question, because there are so many. Let’s examine three notable supporting-player categories on Bravo: Gay Sidekicks, Moms, and Maids.
The gay sidekick, no surprise, is big on Bravo. My favorites are the high-heeled boys in Atlanta: Dwight, Derek J, and Miss Lawrence, each delivering something delicious and fun to the show while brilliantly empowering and entertaining their ladies.
Moms, though, are the real scene-stealers. On Million Dollar Listing, Josh Flagg’s grandma Edith is a grande dame, a Holocaust survivor with wisdom coming out of her little toe. She keeps Josh in check, and I’m proud to see a woman like her on our network. Jill Zarin’s mom, Gloria, has a special place in my heart. Drily hilarious and sage, she was the ultimate pint-sized Jewish mom jetting in from Boca. Not since Jimmy Carter has the state of Georgia produced a peacekeeper like Kandi’s Mama Joyce on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. And Miami’s Mama Elsa has it all—one-of-a-kind style, winning wit, wise words, and she can tell the future, because she’s a witch. She told me she wouldn’t fly to New York from Miami to appear on my show, so we sent a couple of staff members in a car to pick her up and drive her 1,288 miles to SoHo. Who cares that she told me, “Dandy, you are incapable of love”? I’m proving that wrong by putting it in print that I love YOU, Mama Elsa!
I’m sure Alice from The Brady Bunch would be pleased to see cleaning ladies so handily stealing the spotlight on Bravo. Have you ever met a maid like Jacqueline on Million Dollar Decorators? She’s chic, she’s French, she loves to smoke, and she covets her boss’s leather pants. And I was heartbroken when Rosie left LuAnn’s employ in Season 3 of RHNYC. This was a lady who seemed to be the glue that held the Countess’s brood together, and when she moved to be closer to her own family, I selfishly wished she’d decide her own children were doing all right and come back to us. But you know that the woman who owns my heart is the woman who loves her telenovelas, the lady who was so nervous about not understanding my English during our first Flipping Out reunion that she got overheated and had to leave the set: It’s Jeff Lewis’s maid, Zoila. And by the way, she may have been nervous back then, but now, between her on-camera charisma and the face-lift Jeff bought her for her birthday last year, she could host the damn thing and look amazing doing it! Hey, that’s not a bad idea … te amo, Zoila!
You may have noticed that I have left out a very important sidekick group: dogs. Well, keep reading.
Being manhandled before the launch of Season 2 of The Real Housewives of Orange County
THE HOUSEWIVES
This is the point in the book when housewives take over my life. Sure, I’d always worshipped divas. But housewife divas? I only knew them from the soaps … which I guess means I actually knew them pretty well. The Housewives franchise was going strong before I realized that my youthful days of watching All My Children had not been misspent, but incredibly well spent. I had unknowingly groomed myself for career success!
Before I go in deep about the ladies, I’m going to tell you a story about their dogs. Why? Because the biggest divas of all do not have two beautifully waxed legs, but four furry ones, and their antics encapsulate one quality I find so endearing about the Housewives—the absurdity. And I love being in the middle of it all.
Before Bravo, I’d never paid any attention to pets—my sister and I had a puppy for exactly twenty-four hours, returning home from school to find it gone, sent to “a farm” by my clever mother, who’d looked into her future and seen fifteen years of taking care of it with no help from us. We were devastated, but not scarred enough for me to remember the banished creature’s name. My life proceeded happily from that point on in an almost completely petless fashion, with the exception of my brief crush on Tammy Faye Bakker’s outrageous dog, Tuppins. Then came Dina Manzo of the New Jersey cast and her hairless cat, Grandma Wrinkles, and I was shocked awake from my pet-related apathy. Grandma Wrinkles was impossible to ignore, and that is because she was one of the ugliest animals I’d ever seen. When Caroline Manzo reported that old GW stank like bacon, I became mildly obsessed—from afar. A bacon-scented hairless cat named Grandma Wrinkles? As they say, you cannot make this shit up. When Dina eventually brought the animal to the Clubhouse, I fell in love. More accurately, I fell in love with hating her. Because while she didn’t leave fur everywhere—how could she?—I swear she left a faint oily spot where she rested her scaly body on the lap of one of my favorite suits. Kind of like bacon does to a paper towel. While remaining disgusted with the cat, I have grown to admire her mistress’s eternal
