‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ recap: Wedge issues

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As my mother told me before I had even stopped dragging my Snoopy around by one ear, it’s good to have a job. It keeps your brain alert, it keeps you financially independent, and, if Monday night’s show can be taken as a guide, it keeps you from being a drunk, an anorexic or an extremely vituperative cancer fundraiser who gathers all her friends in a dismal restaurant in the back of a mall, feeds them lollipops and makes fun of a woman wearing crutches.

If last week’s show was about Have-it-togethers and Definitely-do-nots, this week was about a demarcation between which lady Has Things to Occupy Herself and which Definitely Does Not.

The first evidence of the great gulf between the employed and sorely under-employed came at the expense of my new favorite cast member Adrienne Maloof, who offered Kim a trip to Sacramento to accompany her on the deeply traumatic goodbye she was offering Sacramento fans, who were losing their beloved team, the Kings, to a new arena.

This “real” event (fyi to reader: Actual things happening in ‘Real Housewives’ land are few and far between) did not -- despite massive crowds, beefed-up security and Adrienne’s own tension at how to best say goodbye to the possibly enraged city -- stop Kim from babbling in her ear the entire time about diamonds and passersby and her own need for routine. Mr. Adrienne increasingly insisted that his wife, you know, feel free to watch the game, and Adrienne did manage, finally, to descend and walk among the people, both placating them and honoring them, a massive task that still seemed, in the final determination, far easier than getting Kim to be quiet.

And what a contrast this was to Kyle’s “Children With Cancer” charity event, yet another one of the galas that seems to spring up glumly in Housewife territory, like a heap of mushrooms after a season of inclement weather. Held in what Lisa kindly called “a godforsaken restaurant in the back of the mall” (and she, with her increasingly successful Villa Blanca, would know), the thrown-together event did manage to raise $15,000, but it seemed more primed to raise the ire of the Housewives, who turned the full force of their malice on the new girl, Brandi Glanville, best known for being left by Eddie Cibrian for LeAnne Rimes.

“Her claim to fame is that Eddie Cibrian left her for LeAnne Rimes,” Kyle whispered evilly to Taylor, Faye Resnick and whomever else she could find. Yes! Kyle! We know! Forget that this was an unbearably rude comment to make about Brandi, who’d come as a friend of the Maloof’s. Forget that the 9-foot Brandi came in a cast and crutches to a seatless event, sporting a wedge that Kyle seemed determined to mock as a stiletto. (Projecting much, oh shiv-er?)

But the pot with lustrous stresses was calling the 9-foot Brandi kettle black. As Bravo Andy revealed Monday night on ‘Watch What Happens Live,’ Kyle had recently asserted her own insignificance to a far greater arbiter of wedge issues -- President Obama, who revealed that he, yes, in fact, had no idea who she was but that his wife, Michelle, watched the show.

Oh, Kyle, had you known, might you have checked some of your venom? Taylor, would you have stopped obsessing about who leaked to the press that you were too skinny? (I don’t know. Anyone who SAW YOU?) Kim, might you have laid off the sauce for awhile? Lisa and Adrienne, consumed with their businesses and families, have no judgment to fear from the equally busy first lady. But if anyone could make the other ladies learn how to behave when you’re no longer pulling a paycheck, it’s the Greatest (White)House-wife of Them All.

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-- Lizzie Skurnick. Follow her on Twitter @lizzieskurnick.