Published by Not Here to Make Friends
Words by Sophy Drouin
Not Here to Make Friends is a small magazine that’s obsessed with reality TV, in a good way. Its writers use shows like Dance Moms, Love Island, and, of course, the Real Housewives, as a lens through which they can view their own lives and the world around them, painting a unique portrait of contemporary society. We delivered the third issue to Stack subscribers in September last year, and I loved this story by Sophy Drouin, with its quiet power and disarming openness.
Watching Kyle Richards wander about her dream home alone, I cross myself.
“Please, let me not become that lonesome ghost; please let me not become Kyle.”
There are dogs, expensive furniture, objects everywhere, but her daughters are grown and her husband, Mauricio, is relishing his bachelor pad some dozens of miles away.
What was it all for?
I was compelled to watch The Real Housewives franchises by the director of a play I was in. She was trying to rouse my campiness, my clown, anything in me aside from “polite, docile woman acquiescing to it all,” and she was having great difficulty doing so.
An actor in training is a giant onion peeling itself, and what was laid bare for me was how brutally disconnected I’d become from my body and my joy. No matter how safe the room, or how silly and free everyone else acted, I couldn’t escape myself. I’d made my body a hermetic seal.
So, she gave me homework. Watch the closest thing to theater on television. “The Real Housewives,” she said, “will show you true action and reaction.”
Years before this play, before my director’s advice, before sealing myself, before I’d seen a single episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or known what the interiors of Kyle Richards’ home looked like – my dad was alive.
Back then, I would call him to say hi, call him when I was lost, speed dial when a car salesman bullied me to tears trying to get out of the too-good deal I’d negotiated. When I had bad news he made it better; when I had good news he made it better too.
I’d call him when I was late for school feeling like a failure, call him crying on the service stairwell of a Midtown hotel when no legit acting schools took interest in my auditions. He made me feel like a dreamer, like I was on a path somehow, collapsed against a concrete wall between floors fourteen and fifteen.
And then he died. Not suddenly like a car accident but suddenly like he’d been hiding a terminal illness from me for a decade and one day announced that he’d decided on euthanasia as a prelude for spring.
When the day came to gather around him in his favorite chair at home, my knees found the floor and I took hold of his left hand as a doctor prepared to inject one medicine, then another, and then one more to usher him out of his earthly body. A few days before this, dad had said that we could have all that was his, “where I’m going, they won’t let me take anything with me.”
Panicked and snot-teared, I’d begged him to take me with him anyway. I couldn’t imagine a world without his guidance and the boundaries of his love. But as always, he’d been right. When the medication stopped his heart, I did not dance off with him into the next place. He did not take a single thing with him aside from the warmth in his palms.