Married to Medicine: Houston
“Monica in Waiting”
December 16, 2016
Our episode begins at ugh, spin class. No thank you please. Seems Dr. Erika is super into exercise because if she doesn’t exercise she’ll just eat giant Sam’s sized bags of Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips in one sitting, something that she says as if it’s something to be ashamed of and not just embraced as a lifestyle choice. DON’T YOU JUDGE ME.
Dr. Erika takes Rachel and Dr. Ashandra to some place called “Ryde” whose location I had to look up despite being in a shopping center I am quite familiar with because UGH, SPIN CLASS.
After class, the ladies are treated to champagne by Ryde because HOORAY! FREE PUBLICITY! Over their bubbles, the ladies discuss the brunch fight, and Dr. Erika explains that Dr. Monica feels like no one defended her when Pegah said that Imad was never going to marry her. Which I am pretty sure Pegah didn’t actually say? How, exactly, are people supposed to defend Dr. Monica from imagined slights?
The ladies then discuss Cindi Rose’s upcoming Kentucky Derby party, the one that Rachel will CERTAINLY not be attending, and Dr. Ashandra is considering skipping as well after all that nonsense about slavery silhouettes. BECAUSE WHAT WAS THAT EVEN ABOUT.
Later, Dr. Ashandra invites Rachel and Mamacita Maribel over for Sunday supper with their family, the Ashandra family all wearing their “pastels for Jesus,” as Pretty Ricky’s awesome momma says. Over supper, Dr. Ashandra mentions to Rachel that she’d like to throw a fundraiser for that dental clinic her church is trying to open, and Rachel is all YES. LET’S DO THIS THING. And then Mamacita Maribel reminisces about hanging out at Maggiano’s hour de felicidades during her “dating dias,” and Pretty Ricky’s Awesome Momma mentions that she’s been looking for a man for 35 years. “!AY JESUS, BRING HIM ABAJO!” prays/pleads Mamacita Maribel.
Dr. Ashandra and her event planner — what? you don’t have a personal event planner? — later meet with Rachel to go over ideas for this fundraiser, and decide to go with Rachel’s suggestion: Havana Nights. So take your guayaberas to the dry cleaners and dust off your douchey fedoras, we’re going to salsa and drink unnecessarily fussy mojitos! But first, for some reason they need a socialite to bestow her blessings on the proceedings, and it’s clear it’s not going to be Cindi Rose.
To that end, Rachel introduces Dr. Ashandra and the audience to one Theresa Roemer, Houston legend.
Things to know about Theresa Roemer:
- Inside her 17,000 square foot suburban home she has a 3,000 square foot three-story closet, roughly the size of my entire house.
- Said closet had been described in national media as a “she-cave.”
- Said closet was burglarized in the summer of 2014 after being described in national media as her three-story-tall “she-cave.”
- Theresa Roemer is a former bodybuilder and owned some gyms before moving to Texas.
- When she was a teenager, she only had one boob.
- Theresa is married to a very successful oilman, despite the show trying to act like she paid for a 3,000 square foot closet filled with Chanel, Gucci, Hermes and Louboutin with the money she made from her “fashion line.”
- The other Houston socialites look down their nose at her because she doesn’t live in River Oaks, Houston’s schamnciest neighborhood, and because she’s a relative newcomer to the whole social scene, having married her husband in 2008.
- Theresa throws parties in her closet.
- Theresa’s stepson hates her and is a possible suspect in her closet burglary.
- Theresa and her husband have had sex in every room of their 17,000 square foot McMansion.
- I am Facebook friends with the guy who is at Theresa Roemer’s house when this scene takes place, because we both blogged for the Chronicle. I have never actually met him in real life.
Fine, that last bullet point has nothing to do with anything, but I somehow missed that he was going to be on the show and when he came on, I was all…
Over a glass of wine or five, Rachel and Dr. Ashandra explain that they are throwing a fundraiser for Dr. Ashandra’s dental clinic and that they hope that Theresa will be able to assist them with inviting all of the people with all of the money. Theresa agrees to help, especially when she finds out that her former neighbor Cindi Rose, whom Rachel describes as Theresa’s “arch-enemy,” will not be included on the host committee.
And then everyone takes a tour of the famous three-story closet, the end.
Over in Dr. Erika’s storyline, our plastic surgeon visits with a patient who has lost around 130 pounds over the past year thanks to a gastric bypass. As she visits with the woman to whom she plans on giving a circumferential body lift to remove extra skin, Dr. Erika also gives an interview where she discusses the vast gender gap among her patients: for every man she sees, she sees 25 women. So you’re saying women have more body issues than men? Next you’ll be telling me that water is wet. But let’s just put a pin in this interesting little thought and come back to it later, shall we?
Meanwhile, Dr. Monica is redecorating her home with the help of an interior decorator friend who is preeeety sure Dr. Monica needs $4,000 chairs. No one needs $4,000 chairs. No one. Not even Theresa Roemer.
While shopping for $4,000 chairs, Dr. Monica reveals to her interior designer friend that she ran into her ex-husband and his fiancée at a bar recently and it FREAKED HER OUT, especially since Imad is not showing the slightest interest in marrying her. Her interior decorator friend advises Dr. Monica to give Imad an ultimatum: marriage or GTFO, and Dr. Monica is all, “I did that already. Kinda. Sorta. But not really. Not at all.”
Later, Dr. Monica, Dr. Elly, Pegah and Dr. Erika all go to Cindi Rose’s house to make Kentucky Derby hats for the upcoming Kentucky Derby party, because THAT’S a normal thing that normal adults do all the time.
The point is: Dr. Monica and Dr. Elly manage to be in the same room together without killing each other and everyone celebrates by watching Cindi Rose do her best approximation of twerking. This is a thing that happened.
Finally, this Kentucky Derby party in which people put on giant hats and seersucker suits, sing a deeply racist song together (not shown), drink bourbon at 1 in the afternoon and watch a 2 minute horse race.
Imad is back in town and he is in a pissy place. On their way to the party, Dr. Monica tries to lighten the tension between them by burbling about the flowers on her Derby hat, only to have this asshole snap at her, “ENOUGH ABOUT THE FLOWERS.”
Once at the party, Dr. Monica is reunited with some medical school classmate of hers, who immediately begins asking her if she’s married yet while Cindi Rose licks her chops nearby.
Elsewhere, Cindi Rose’s husband, Dr. Rose, yammers at Dr. Erika about the plastic surgery business and how their job is to make beautiful women even more beautiful. Cool! Very cool and very feminist and all of this is very fine and very healthy. Look, plastic surgery is a necessary specialty and plastic surgeons do important work, but what is not necessary and what is not important is bragging about playing off people’s women’s insecurities to profit. That’s just gross.
Later, Dr. Elly, Dr. Erika and Dr. Monica are joined by Cindi Rose who drags with her some woman who used to work for Joel “Smiley” Osteen. Cindi Rose then has this woman pray over them all. And if a Jewish socialite forcing a prosperity Christian to pray over an Indian, a Persian and an Asian without their permission at a Kentucky Derby party ain’t Houston, I don’t know what is.
Cindi Rose then begins pointedly noting that Rachel and Dr. Ashandra aren’t in attendance. Cindi Rose insists that Rachel has no reason to be upset with her: why, the last time they saw one another, Rachel was “barking at [her] like a dog.” Cindi Rose then goes on to claim that Rachel called the woman who offered her a makeover a “scallywag,” and everyone knows that’s a slur against Mexicans (it is not), which that woman was (which Rachel did not know, but even if she had, “scallywag” is still not a slur against Mexicans). Q.E.Duh: Rachel is racist against Mexicans.
All of this is amazing.
But Cindi Rose, she is not done yet. She next turns her attention to Dr. Ashandra, wondering why she isn’t in attendance: after all, the ticket only cost $100.
Cindi Rose then explains that she believes the real reason Dr. Ashandra isn’t there is because Dr. Ashandra wanted to charge her $2500 for an implant that Cindi Rose happens to know costs $1800, and ever since she didn’t allow Dr. Ashandra to overcharge her, Dr. Ashandra has held a grudge.
And in closing, Cindi Rose is an insane person.
Dr. Erika explains that actually, she saw Rachel and Dr. Ashandra earlier in the week, and Dr. Ashandra was pretty clear that her issue with Cindi Rose was the whole slavery silhouette thing. Cindi Rose is DEEPLY OFFENDED that anyone could imply that SHE is RACIST and she storms away from the cameras table in a huff.
Dr. Erika sighs heavily and retrieves Cindi Rose, explaining that no one is calling Cindi Rose a racist (I am), and that Dr. Ashandra just misunderstood Cindi Rose (no, she didn’t). Cindi Rose protests that she CAN’T be racist, why, she herself is part Egyptian! ergo, ipso facto, res ipsa loquitur, she’s part African-American and can not be racist against herself.
But we don’t get to hear any more about what Cindi Rose learned from her AncestryDNA results, because the race begins and just as quickly it ends and everyone takes a selfie together in their dumb hats, and with that we close up this Old Kentucky Home for another year.
Married to Medicine: Houston aired on Bravo on Fridays at 8 p.m. But it SHOULD have aired when someone might have actually seen it because it was pretty good.