“Oh bother,” Winnie the Pooh might have said as Shannon Storms Beador bent over in agony outside of the London hotel where the “The Real Housewives of Orange County” were staying. “You’ve got a rumbly in your tumbly.”
So instead of heading to The Loch & The Tyne Country Inn in Old Windsor, Shannon is getting out of the van and limping back into the hotel.
Pooh, be grateful you are a bear of very little brain and you can’t read the words the producers of the the show have printed on the screen: “Three days since Shannon pooped.”
1 of 7
Unfortunately, like Owl, we can make out some words, and yes, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” are still backed up in a very bad way.
“I’m really having major stomach pains,” Shannon complained as soon as she sat down in the van.
“Can you fart?” Jenn Pedranti helpfully inquired.
“No, I feel like I’m going to throw up, too,” Shannon replied, and then got halfway out of the van before her non-rumbly tumbly doubled her over in pain.
Someone cover Piglet’s eyes before this next part, please.
“I just need an enema (to) make it go away,” Shannon tells Jenn, Gina Kirschenheiter, and Katie Ginella as they all get out of the van and help Shannon back to her room.
“I’m so embarrassed,” Shannon moans.
“No, don’t!” her friends all say.
Actually, the producers of your show just posted “Three days since Shannon pooped” on the screens of millions of viewers. Maybe a little bit of embarrassment is appropriate.
Katie runs to the drugstore, or the chemist’s, as the Brits say, and returns with the necessary equipment. Shannon goes into the lavatory as the other three huddle outside, offering words of encouragement.
The edit shifts to Tamra, being asked by an off-camera producer if she can name all four Beatles. After getting John Lennon and Ringo Starr, and guessing wrong on Elton John, she admits defeat, and frankly, that’s almost worse than what’s going on back at the hotel.
“I need privacy,” Shannon pleads.
“Let it rip, Shannon!” one of the women shouts.
“Oh my God, it did!” Shannon reports almost instantly after, and the other three applaud and cheer.
Shannon met her Waterloo in the loo, only unlike Napoleon she triumphed over adversity.
This, mind you, was not our only incidence of unappreciated continence in the episode. Emily’s plumbing had gone awry as well. But enough of all that bother. There were plenty of other messes to mention this week, most of which revolved around Tamra Judge’s inability to stop herself from stirring up stuff.
It’s complicated, and frankly not that interesting, but Tamra managed to continue her fight with Jenn over things Tamra said about Jenn’s boyfriend Ryan. And because Shannon was the one who told Jenn those things, Tamra then goes after her by telling Gina things Shannon said about her and her boyfriend Travis.
“She’s a mean girl and a bully and she thrives in it,” Jenn tells the camera about Tamra late in the episode.
That line came as the show displayed one more dysfunctional attempt at a group meal, one which ended with Shannon storming out of the restaurant as the hapless servers arrived at the table with a candle-blazing birthday cake for her 60th birthday.
“Has there ever been a dinner with this group of women that has been pleasant,” asks Katie, in her first season on the show, to the camera.
No. The answer is no, Katie.
Elsewhere on this episode:
— At that final meal, a piercing sound erupted in the restaurant followed in an instant by Gina crying out from off-screen.
“I set that off,” she said, laughing as she returned from the water closet. “I thought, like, this is the weirdest toilet,” she continued, gesturing how she pulled down a lever in the bathroom that most definitely did not flush the toilet.
— Shannon’s twins came to London from Paris, where one of the 19-year-olds was doing a semester abroad. This was the happiest we saw Shannon on the entire trip.
— Emily, Katie and Jenn hit an English pub for lunch at one point, with Jenn asking the bartender if they happened to have Malibu rum. I am increasingly of the opinion that either Jenn or the producers are getting sponsorship from Malibu for mentioning it in every other episode. Or do they really like it that much?
“I would think in London they would like, like, a Guinness,” Jenn tells the camera before finding out that the pub was in fact able to serve her a Malibu and Diet Coke. “A Guinea? Guinness? A beer.”
And then, in what sounded like a whole lot like ad copy, she continued: “But I don’t care if I’m at the beach in the Bahamas or in the town of London, I’m drinking Malibu and Diet Coke.”
