AC: So you had cancer.
KZ: (nods) I wouldn’t choose to walk around with a hairpiece EVER. Nobody would, and for you to say that, NeNe, you knew. I mean I got really skinny, I was sicker than …
NeNe: That I knew what?
KZ: That I was …
NeNe: I didn’t know that you were sick, that you had cancer; that was the first time I ever heard that.
KZ: I mean I was used to having beautiful hair, that’s what I was known for; that was my signature growing up.
NeNe: Let me go on the record to say, I never knew that you had cancer. Had I known that, things would have been different. I thought you wore the hairpiece for style. I don’t have a problem with it, you do. I mean if that’s what you want to wear, that’s what you do. I NEVER knew you were sick.
AC: And are you cancer-free now?
KZ: You know, they found that I did not have cancer, that I had some other problems.
AC: So you didn’t have cancer?
KZ: No, I did not. I lived about three weeks. I remember sitting in a Chili’s waiting for my test results and it was terrible and they were like, “You are healthy this way, but we got some other stuff going on.” Which is not what I want to talk about but there was some other stuff. And it’s been almost three years and my blood work’s great and it changed my life. I’m just happy to be here.
AC: Okay. So you DIDN’T have cancer.
KZ: No I did not. Thank God.
Did that make sense? Besides the sitting-in-Chili’s part? You might wonder: How hard is it just to establish whether a person did or didn’t have cancer? But if you’re wondering that, you may not have watched many Housewives reunions. Talking in circles was never more predominant than at the DC Housewives reunion, where Michaele and Tareq Salahi simply refused, over and over, to respond directly to a question, as if it was everyone else who was nuts for even asking. Forget the hours we spent going around and around like a Ferris wheel dissecting their infamous night at the White House. Listening to Michaele “answer” the question of whether she was or was not ever a Redskins cheerleader would drive a levelheaded person as insane as, well, Tareq and Michaele Salahi appeared to be.
Andy Cohen: Laura from AZ wants to know, was Michaele ever a Washington Redskins cheerleader for the NFL? There have been a lot of conflicting reports.
Michaele Salahi: The Redskins in the nineties, uh, well, no, in the eighties, I had worked with, and they came to me at the millennium.
AC: You had cheered with them in the eighties?
MS: Not as a full-time cheerleader. I was kinda, I went out in one or two games. I went and fluffed it and did their promotional—they had a show called Redskins Sideline Report. Then in the millennium Terri Lamb had come to me and said would you be interested in joining the alumni? And I said, no not really, to be honest—
AC: Well, why would she—?
MS: It would hurt me to join it. Because I would have to divulge my age.
AC: Okay.
MS: And she said, well if I made you ’91 would you join the alumni? So for the last seven, eight years I’ve been paying dues, and I’ve been a part of it.
AC: So Terri Lamb, who is in charge of the Redskins—
MS: Still a good friend—
AC: —cheerleaders, she says that you weren’t a cheerleader in the eighties. Or the nineties.
MS: Right, because well, I’m on the roster. I’m on the roster, so I don’t know. I still have the roster and—
AC: But, I mean, I read the Diane book [Diane Dimond’s Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust]. She, in all her research, has no record of it.
MS: She can’t find our answer. She can’t find that I am or that I’m not.
AC: Your brother—your brother apparently said you were not a cheerleader.
MS: Right, well, he didn’t know—
AC: The head of the Redskins cheerleading organization said you were not a cheerleader.
MS: Yeah, but my—I wasn’t a cheerleader.
Stacie Scott Turner: And you didn’t have the roster. The roster?
MS: I do have the roster.
SST: That—well, no, not in the book.
MS: Yeah, well, the thing is, Terri and I have the roster, but Diane interviewed Howie—
AC: Hold on. But you just said to me—hold on.
Mary Schmidt Amons: They’re saying no!
AC: You just said to me that you weren’t a cheerleader, that’s what you just said.
MS: No, I’ve gone out two times. I was never an NFL cheerleader out of our league. I never said that.
AC: So, what does that—you hopped on the field twice? On the show you said that you were a Redskins cheerleader.
MS: Right, because that’s what I’ve been told to say by the alumni.
MSA: (sigh)
MS: So, when they said—
AC: It’s a circle. It’s a circle.
(general groaning)
MS: No, so, no, was I a cheerleader? Yes. Did I go out two times? Yes. Does that constitute as a cheerleader? I don’t know.
So, was she ever a Redskins cheerleader? By the end of it, I neither knew nor cared.
A great Housewives reunion, for me, is when tempers flare and friends, enemies, and—my favorite relationship moniker—frenemies alike lay it on the line. All my voyeuristic thrill buttons are pushed by witnessing such direct, intense encounters from just five feet away, for instance Bethenny telling Alex and Simon to their faces that they’re social climbers, or NeNe lunging at Kim in the first ten minutes of the first Atlanta reunion.
Actually, that first Atlanta reunion was an interesting case: great television and delightful for me as a network executive, but not all that fun for me as a host and a person, now that I think of it. NeNe Leakes was initially the one who
