For a few episodes now, Tamra Judge has talked about her sex drive and how it’s more of a Buick these days than the Ferrari it once was.
But hey, there are things “The Real Housewives of Orange County” can fix, and after hesitating earlier this season, this week Mrs. Judge puts the T in Tamra with a testosterone boost.
Or wait a minute, what’s that name now?
“I have a room reserved under the name Juicy,” says Tamra, who turned 59 on Wednesday, Sept. 2, as she walks up to the reception desk at a beachfront hotel in Laguna Beach.
“OK, Miss Juicy, we’ll check you into your room,” the desk clerk says without batting an eye at the name or the fur-trimmed black leather coat that gives the illusion that Miss Juicy isn’t wearing anything under it but her black stiletto heels.
“I’m trying new things,” Tamra says in a confessional about her desire to jumpstart the physical part of her relationship with husband Eddie. “I’m trying to spice this [bleep] up.”
Then she gets real.
“We had a big fight six months ago in Big Bear,” Tamra says, her voice thick with emotion. “And as we were driving home, he said, ‘I think it’s time we file for a divorce.’ So that scared me.”
It probably scares viewers, too, for as wild and unhinged as Tamra can be on the show, her marriage with Eddie had seemed quite solid.
“I know that I’m like a really tough, hard person, and I don’t give a lot emotionally,” she continued. “And maybe I’m the problem. But I can’t let this marriage go. He’s such a good man.”
Eddie meets Tamra in the hotel bar, champagne for her, tequila for him. She slides a room key across the bar top, and they chat while looking out at the ocean below the cliff on which the hotel is perched.
Tamra, who has never been known for her subtlety, tells Eddie she did not bring any sweats, and with that, unbuttons her coat and reveals, well, almost all that a black lace bodysuit can’t cover.
“OK. Can you please cover that? We’re in public,” Eddie says, which may or may not be the response for which she was hoping.
Eddie and Miss Juicy depart for the room, where the coat gets tossed aside and a deck of sexy suggestion cards comes out. As Eddie draws one card after another, he reads and she answers, so to speak.
“Trace your partner’s body under the clothes,” the first one reads. “Give your partner a sensual spanking,” the next one commands, and we’d have blushed here but for the fact that after one or two pats Eddie can’t keep a straight face and bursts out laughing.
“Bark twice,” the next card instructs, and Tamra, on her hands and knees on the carpet and game as ever, ruff-ruffs for him.
“Let’s go in the bedroom,” Eddie says out of desire for his wife or just to end this silly game. “Let’s get naked.”
Then it’s on to the romance between Vicki Gunvalson and her boyfriend Michael. On previous episodes, Vicki had told the others that Michael had bought an engagement ring months ago, but they were waiting for the right time to get officially engaged.
Apparently Mike had been in Las Vegas while the housewives were on a girls’ trip and snuck over to visit her at one point, Tamra tells Emily Simpson and Gina Kirschenheiter over lunch as the show opens.
“That night, when he came over to our room, he said, ‘She’s got 90 days to not piss me off, and she gets to 70, and we’ve got to do it again,’” Tamra says of what she’d interpreted as the test Vicki has to pass to grab the golden ring. “What has she done that’s so bad she can’t get that ring?”
Cut to Mike and Vicki at home, and honestly, Mike is probably a great guy, but he’s not a great TV character. Rarely speaking or showing emotion, he seems entirely uninterested in being on camera.
“You have to get into your mindset; you’re gonna quit working,” Mike tells her, picking up what clearly seems to be an ongoing conversation about his desire for her to retire like him, and Vicki’s utter lack of interest in not working. “It took me a long time to slow down.”
Vicki suggests they continue their discussions about “life plans,” which Mike declines to do at that particular moment. He gets up from the table and starts to walk off.
“Can we wait to talk about it?” he says. “I’m still miked up.”
Yeah, Mike doesn’t like the microphones. And as Vicki noted during a garden party later, he’s not going to like all of them speculating about him and that engagement ring, either.
“He’s gonna lose his [bleep] if this comes on TV,” she said, forgetting for a moment exactly how a reality TV show works.
Elsewhere on this week’s episode:
— The housewives drop in on Shannon to bring a surprise birthday party to her. They’d been touched by her tears and the confession that she, the only housewife without nary a husband nor a boyfriend in her roost, is often lonely.
Then she surprises them by sharing that on a recent night out with her daughter Sophia, a man in a plaid jacket picked up her tab. When she tried to pay, he said, “You will never pay for anything with me.”
The housewives are excited by this. They lose their minds over what comes next.
“And then, in front of the Uber, we made out.”
— Jenn Pedranti hosted a garden party at Huntington Beach Central Park. She brought along her “intuitive reader” friend Lisa, who started the reading by asking each of them to just think, “What does the universe want us to know right now?” The housewives all looked serious on camera as each housewife’s deepest desires were expressed in voiceovers.
“Today, I am choosing peace,” Gina said.
“Go be fearless. You can do it,” Jenn’s interior monologue revealed.
“I can’t do this,” Carmela Garcia thought.
“You’re boring, my ass,” Vicki told the universe with her mind.
“Does my hair look like [bleep] after being in a hat?” Shannon Storms Beador wondered.
“I can’t tell if I’m hot or cold,” Heather DuBrow pondered.
“Greece. Amalfi Coast. Yacht,” Emily’s mind demanded.