Girls gone wild with guns: Real Housewives somehow manages to shoot itself withdirty talk

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit, he had no idea what hell could really be like. He wasn’t watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Sartre’s classic play creates an existentialist nightmare from three utterly incompatible people trapped forever in a hotel room. If you’re looking for your own private hell of fiscal, sexual and choreographic embarrassment, Sunday night's episode is the one for you.

At Aftershocks we have an awfully high tolerance for trash. Normally, the quips write themselves. But after some of the weirdest, worst, most maddening and most mortifying mess on television, we both needed a cigarette, and only one of us smokes.

Life in Franklin Lakes begins in relatively familiar territory, as Melissa and Teresa continue their much-anticipated sit-down to end the family feud that has fractured the Gorgas and the Giudices all season. Predictably enough, each insists on the value of family and the need to make up. In their competing video diaries, however, each continues to bitterly blame the other.

As Teresa tries to paint her husband Joe as a neutral party, she raises the issue of an apparently unpaid plumbing bill that her brother Joe owes a contractor. Melissa snaps, “Do you really think you’re in any position to talk about money?”

Everyone’s a flutter about the upcoming trip for a little R&R at the Giudice family cabin in the Catskills. As Jacqueline and Chris prepare, it becomes clear what this weekend will be about. They load large plastic tubs with bottle after bottle of wine. Some of the bottles are so heavy that Jacqueline can barely lift them. Naturally, Chris heads to the family gun safe for his vacation fire arms. Jacqueline gasps as he reaches for rifle after rifle.

“I’m getting my period,” she blurts out, “Do you really want me around guns?”

Jacqueline may have fantasies of girls-with-guns-gone-wild-in-the-woods, but when she and Teresa arrive with their husbands in tow, she can’t look away from the horrible spectacle of glassy-eyed, taxidermy stags and mountain lions above the door.

“Who could shoot something like that? Cold-hearted bastards,” she objects in a video diary.

Of course being shot by New Jersey yahoos, stuffed and stacked on a shelf is nothing compared to what these animals had to witness in the cabin. If only their eyes had been sewn shut!

Teresa, Jacqueline, their husbands and the Giudice extended family down bottle after bottle of homemade wine. Jacqueline insists that it smells like “old dog fart,” but she drinks anyway. Soon the conversation turns to — what else? — sex.

Joe and Chris like to compare notes about how a Real Housewife performs in bed. Jacqueline, apparently, is quite famous for her fellatio while Teresa barely gets a passing grade. “I tell you it’s good when you’re doing it,” Joe tells her, “but it’s not.”

Teresa claims she wants pointers but insists she’s “never going to share a glass” with Jacqueline again. Then the men discuss the pleasures of dirty talk. Teresa shares with the family that Joe calls her a “slut” as they’re doing it.

We’re used to the crass, dear readers, and after two seasons of Danielle “Garbage” Staub, of sex-tape-scandal-fame, we thought we could handle anything. We were wrong.

The sun rises on Joe and Teresa in their nuptial bower. The camera shifts between shots of Joe and Teresa writhing and Teresa’s video interview. Joe wears long underwear, his lumpy ass bulging beneath the over-stretched white fabric. Meanwhile, Teresa explains and demonstrates their favorite sex toy, an elastic ring with a small vibrator that makes her feel “all tingly.” As she snapped the band to make sure we knew that it stretches to accommodate her husband, we were definitely not feeling tingly.

Back in New Jersey, Joe and Melissa Gorga show up at the Fred Astaire Franchised Dance Studio to see their daughter perform in what subtitles describe as a “Holiday Dance.” Kathy and Rich and their two kids arrive, and even Joe’s mother joins in the festivities. Little Antonia might be only 5-years-old, but already she is “working the room,” as Kathy explains.

Here at Aftershocks, we’d like to think that we’ve seen everything. We’ve made it through more than a few bad Nutcrackers over the years. We’ve witnessed the horrors of Toddlers and Tiaras. And this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a Real Housewife put her daughter on parade in order to gather all the compliments for herself.

But nothing prepared us for the atrocious pageant that was about to unfold at the Fred Astaire Franchised Dance Studio, somewhere in the vicinity of Franklin Lakes.

“I feel like I’m in The Twilight Zone,” says Rich as the music picks up. Oh, we were with him on that account. Joe Gorga covers his ears to the pulse. And Melissa looks around at the others with a facial expression that says, “Now, behave, all of you.”

The show begins with two lower-echelon gays in white pajamas and bare feet promenading center stage with black and white feather fans. We don’t mean to insult our own people just after Gay Pride, but let’s be real: straight men just don’t dance that way. These boys seem overly serious, or maybe they’re just angry about the large, older woman who stands in between them. They have trouble lifting her, and then the camera pans to Melissa, her jaw dropped, looking at the rest of the family for their reaction.

Next, another pair of dancers, who seem to be living in their own private Mummenschanz, twirl so that the black-and-white strips of fabric covering their hooded unitards fly out, creating what they must have hoped would be a dazzling spectacle. This is when we wondered if someone had snuck peyote into the veggie burgers we enjoyed at dinner. An elderly woman in a flapper outfit appeared. It was all going by so fast! And then the magic moment arrived.

The music seemed suspiciously similar to the Trepak Dance from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Similar, that is, if you rearranged a few of the notes and played it on an electric keyboard. A 6-foot-tall man does a brief solo mimicking a sailor on deck, and then little Antonia runs up behind him and they twirl and twirl. And twirl. And then they twirl some more. He lifts her onto his shoulders, and then finishes with a promenade in which she holds her bent leg as high as she can reach.

Melissa and Joe Gorga run up to embrace little Antonia at the conclusion, and Melissa says excitedly, “it was the best you ever did it!”

As the weekend winds up in the Catskills, Teresa takes her guests to see the family chapel of St. Michael the Archangel. We suppose she wanted a little absolution after all the swearing, drinking, sex and wanton destruction of nature the family had enjoyed that weekend.

The gesture falls flat for Caroline, who says, “Twenty yards ago you were shooting guns.” The camera cuts to a patch of ground littered with countless, multi-colored shell casings. For once we found ourselves agreeing with Franklin Lakes' most sensible hausfrau.

“It’s like a whore going to church.”