The four women sit in their bikinis and call home on their cell phones. Kim, who apparently has no family, is exempt from this planned activity and just has some snacks over by the side. We get a shot of Irv, at home while Denise moans about how much she misses her daughters. Considering how much time she spends on this trip crowing about being on vacation without them, this seems a little disingenuous. A shot of the girls looking confused about who Irv is talking to one the phone. “The nice lady who pays for the house” he’ll explain later. We get to see Skinny Trish’s cute husband and even cuter toddler. Wow, I didn’t realize she had a kid. I have new respect for her abs of steel. Then Michelle talks and we are treated to a shot of Brandon sitting on his lawn, looking adorably disreputable, while Al tortures Mac beside him. Mac screams. At least your Aunt Denise isn’t babysitting for you again Mac, so stop complaining.
Phone calls over, Denise says “Do you remember before we were married and had kids? It’s like being back in high school.” I highly doubt that Denise knew any of these women, besides her sister, a year ago, much less in high school. Also, who goes on awkward televised trips to Hawaii in high school?
They walk along the beach, awkwardly shoulder-to-shoulder and talk more about how weird it is to be there without the kids and seriously we get it. Denise, Single Mother of the Year, misses her kids. Because when not on vacation she is constantly in their presence. If she keeps talking about his, perhaps we’ll believe it. They notice a man with a camera, walking actually, and not taking pictures of them, and point and say “Is that the same guy from the airport?” They draw his attention and he starts to take pictures of them while Denise walks up to him and asks him who he works for. He demurs, but Denise says she’ll know when the pics come out because he’s the only one there. He is apparently the only paparazzi on the island, at least the only one remotely interested in Denise. I kind of feel like maybe he’s just waiting for someone more famous to show up.
“How can we cut loose and enjoy ourselves?” with the photographer around, Denise rhetoricals. She needs to stop staying stuff like that, because really, it’s just depressing. Doesn’t she realize that talking about having fun isn’t having fun anymore than complaining about missing your kids is parenting? She says “now they know where we’re staying.” Um, Denise, now he knows where you’re staying. Everyone else is on the other side of the Island because they heard a rumor that Phoebe Price might be there. Or anyone, really.
The girls discuss that the nude beach might be out, and Denise says “well, they already have my vagina on the internet” which is a nice, if anatomically inaccurate, way of saying that they already have pictures of her Enormous Labial Flap the internet. Which, frankly, I would be more pissed about than she seems to be. But I guess you don’t get Google hits without showing some crotch these days.
Coming up: The girls take their tops off, which is really stupid.
We’re back and there’s a montage of the girls doing pretty lame touristy-looking stuff like learning to hula and clinking large girly drinks with umbrellas in them. Denise and Skinny Trish sign up for lessons in paddle surfing, which is apparently this thing where you stand on a surf board and paddle around. It looks like fun, but also something that it’s impossible to do without looking a bit ridiculous, even if you don’t fall down. More photographers (it looks like there’s all of two now) snap pictures while Denise stands on the beach in booty shorts, sucking in her stomach. “There’s paparazzi everywhere” she exaggerates. She and Trish enter the water and look predictably dorky while the paps snap pictures. They fall down a lot. Old Blonde Friend and Michelle chat on the beach looking fairly unimpressed.
The next day Denise emphasizes again that it’s their “last day without kids” and urges them to “do something wild.” You know what’s almost guaranteed not to be followed by wild times? An exhortation like that.
They sit around a table and discuss going topless to get rid of their tan lines. Denise whines that her “boobies don’t look the same” since she had kids. “Mine shrunk.” Having your implants removed also shrinks your breasts, Denise, but that goes unmentioned. They discuss that “no one” tells you things that will happen to your body when you have kids. Like having to get your implants removed? Skinny Trish says “or you think, that’s not going to happen to me.” Since Skinny Trish has washboard abs and no stretch marks it’s safe to assume that none of those things did happen to her, so that was kind of an obnoxious thing to say.
Denise interviews “I can’t believe we are sitting around here talking about boobs. Which, we would never be doing this if our kids were around, or husbands, or boyfriends.” If Denise refuses to have the World’s Most Boring Conversation About Breasts in front of her hypothetical boyfriend, I kind of don’t want to see what she would talk about. They talk more about going topless on the beach and engage in another forced toast, this time with juice.
They lie on a rather crappy-looking secluded beach and giggle without enthusiasm. They dare each other to remove their tops and then agree to do it on the count of three. It becomes clear that they’re not actually intending to go topless for real, just do that thing where you remove your bikini straps and lie on your stomach. Which is sort of like claiming that wriggling out of your bra beneath a sweatshirt is doing a strip tease but whatever, they needed their sound bite and “topless” sounds better than “untied bikini straps.” For some stupid reason, Denise just pulls off her top, in a manner that requires blurring and tosses it to the side before flipping over. If I was nervous about going topless, that’s not actually how I would handle that.
On cue, the photographer arrives and Denise grabs a towel over her front and charges down the beach at him, creating a picture even more likely to be in the tabloids. What’s truly ridiculous about this however, is if you go Googling for the pictures from this incident, all there seems to be is screen captures from the show itself. Not that I looked that hard. Googling “Denise Richards topless” unfortunately fills you screen with the approximately one million other times she’s been photographed with her boobs out. Old Blonde Friend Kim charges after her, though with the intelligence to actually wrap a towel completely around herself first and drags her back. Denise lies “He’s lucky I didn’t throw his camera in the ocean.”
Denise obviouses that it was stupid to take her top off on the beach when she knew there were photographers around. Self-awareness always comes a little too late for our Denise. She worries that Irv is going to be mad, which, frankly, I would love to see, but we won’t get to.
Denise says that “After what we’ve been through today, we are pooped.” It looks to me like they had breakfast and lay on the beach for a while, but I guess I’ll take her word for it. They sit on a bed and order room service. Seriously, going on vacation with Denise looks like the most boring thing imaginable. Denise says “This is a fun weekend. I had so much fun.” Again, whatever possible energy or excitement that could have been in the room is instantly sucked out.
Denise complains some more about the photographs and calls her father and tells him “not to go on the internet.” The whole internet. With the kids asleep and Denise out of town this seems like prime adult surfing time for her widowed dad but whatever, of course, Denise’s needs need to come first. Also, why should he do what she says?
We’re spared watching Denise annoy an entire plane full of people again and the women simply arrive back at Denise’s house and are greeted by Irv, who looks well-rested. He’s just getting ready to pull some cookies out of the oven. All four women dash to Denise’s computer to Google themselves, apparently willing to endure their constant yearning for their kids for a little while longer. They exclaim over what turns out to simply be a rather unattractive photo of Denise paddle surfing. “I told you that French toast is catching up to me” she says. She gives a shout out to Perez Hilton who captions the photo “Not Hot”. Skinny Trish pulls a face and asks how good Perez Hilton would look in a bikini. Which is So. Not. The. Point. because while he would certainly look hideous, he doesn’t appear in the habit of appearing in bikinis where there are photographers and then complaining when they take unflattering photographers. Or maybe he is, I don’t really read him. There’s something distinctly annoying about watching the four women huddled over the laptop, Googling for topless pictures of themselves on the beach, while pretending to dread the fact that there might be some. Also kind of weird that you can already find tons of pictures of Denise without her clothes on on the internet, because as can’t be mentioned enough, she posed for Playboy. Not that posing for Playboy gives people the right to try and take pictures of you naked without your permission, but I would expect you might at least relax about it a little. Like I feel like it’s the first time that the entire world sees your bathing suit area on the internet that’s the most upsetting. Once you rip off that particular band-aid it seems a little silly to get too up in arms about it.
I think it’s pretty clear that what Denise is most worried about is that the topless photos will be unflattering. We see thumbnails of Denise looking ugly and angry as she runs down the photographer clutching a towel to her chest, which for some reason don’t seem to bother her. However it appears that the photographer appeared after they took their tops off and so didn’t get shots of their boobs. Trish, who’s wearing a ridiculous amount of makeup, looks a bit disappointed because this was probably her big break.
Irv pokes his head in and asks what they’re doing and they pretend to be nervous about being caught. He announces that the cookies are ready and leaves. “Thank God” says Denise “We dodged a bullet” and the four women awkwardly hi five. “ Let’s go get some Bleeping cookies” says Kim and they all laugh merrily like it’s the end of a Brady Bunch episode and stomp out of the room.
Next week: Kim actually seems to WORK for Denise! Denise does her press tour and gets defensive in some kind of Valley of the Dolls hair. Denise cries. It’s so unfair.
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