"Eighty-five percent of the women around here have had breast implants," says Kimberly, matter-of-factly.
It's what passes for a census study behind the gates of Coto de Caza, an O.C. development for the nouveau riche and the setting of Bravo's sad and highly watchable new reality soap, "The Real Housewives of Orange County."
Middle-aged Kimberly, first glimpsed in various compromising poses with her Pilates instructor, is quite content with her new 32Ds, although she thinks her 13-year-old daughter can wait. "I know out here that it's very common that girls receive breast implants for high school graduation," says mom.
The show, an obvious riff on "Desperate Housewives" and "Laguna Beach: The Real OC," is less glossily executed than those but also, for all this, trashier and more believably grotesque.
As "Laguna Beach" did, "Real Housewives" (that title, given the saline and Botox, is a nice irony) posits Orange County as a vacuous paradise found. Here it's soccer (ish) moms get to act out their lives for the cameras. The show is built either to nauseate or fascinate; I myself danced between periods of both, which is probably just what the producers, layering on the scripted scenarios, intend.
And yet, when I least expected it, \o7voila\f7 -- pathos. For in their urgent, unapologetic acceptance of this kind of life, the ladies come off, finally, as sad and alone -- adherents to an extreme kind of community as much as the wives of HBO's polygamist drama "Big Love," but without the camaraderie.
It's hard, in that sense, to tell how mean the show's producers will ultimately get with their guinea pigs; half the show is a wry, knowing glance from the editing room. For sure, "The Real Housewives" is built for gawking as at a zoo, the gates a controlling metaphor. Coto de Caza, according to its website, is one of Orange County's older planned communities, where "the first residents ... were Shoshonean Native Americans called Acaghchemen." Now the place is inhabited by Kimberly and Jeana and Slade, with kids named Brianna and Colton and Ashley. Their rituals include face peels, overseeing escrows and, to get away, vacations to Mexico.
"Lick it, suck it, slam it, Brianna. Do it, Brianna. Do it, do it!"
