Mary Cosby threatens violence against Whitney Rose. Lisa Barlow’s husband hid a secret from her. And Monica Garcia says her mother is like a serial killer — all in the Oct. 31 episode of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
Despite the fact that Mary has been unendingly rude and obnoxious to her, Whitney is determined to “find some sort of resolve” with her. “I fully realize that it’s completely random that I want to meet up with Mary,” Whitney says in a confessional, “because, honestly, she’s not that nice to me.” So why do it? Because it “keeps coming up in my meditation, in my therapy, with my energy healer.”
In a clip from earlier in the day, Mary responds rudely to Whitney’s invitation: “If I don’t feel it, I’m not showing up.” But Mary does show up to meet Whitney for lunch at Provisions in the middle of a snowstorm. After faking a warm hug, they sit down and order food. The waitress — who is completely apologetic — spills a bit on Mary, whose reaction is over the top. In a confessional, she actually says, “Why didn’t she spill it on Whitney? That’s a sign: You should not be here tonight.”
In the restaurant, Mary quickly get confrontational: “Whitney, you better come with it. You called this shot — you better shoot your shot.”
(Charles Sykes | Bravo) Whitney Rose on a recent episode of "Watch What Happens Live."
Whitney apologizes to Mary for things she said about her, but Mary isn’t having it. She says Whitney “severed our future” when she talked about how Mary and her husband were “predators” who took advantage of members of the church they lead. (It’s worth pointing out that lots of people have said that, and there have been lots of stories where that allegation has been made. It’s also worth pointing out that Mary is a leader of a Christian church, which preaches forgiveness.)
And Mary refuses to apologize for all her mean, dismissive and insulting behavior and comments aimed at Whitney. “What do you mean, I have to own it?” she says, dismissing that she did anything wrong. The editors helpfully insert a bunch of clips of Mary acting badly toward Whitney.
“Roll up, little girl,” Mary says. “I’m done. I’m not doing this with you. … You’ve wasted enough of my time.” Whitney says, quite reasonably, “you can be mean and I can’t?”
In a confessional, Mary says, ”I can’t believe Whitney is comparing my text messages to calling me a predator. And my husband. … You can’t just say anything about people that’s not true and think that it’s OK.”
Unless, apparently, you’re Mary Cosby.
“Someone’s going to backhand you,” Mary continues. “Like, seriously, it might be me.”
Yes, Mary is threatening violence.
Whitney asks Mary to reconsider, stay and have a conversation. Mary sticks around just long enough to get her food to go, call Whitney a “bobblehead,” and leaves Whitney to pick up the check. (It’s so Mary.) “This is gross, and I really don’t think this how you want to leave it,” Whitney says. Mary replies, “I promise you, watch me walk out the door.”
Whitney doesn’t exactly seem to broken up about Mary’s latest bout of bad behavior. “It is what it is,” she says in a confessional. “I feel like Mary’s always going to find something to be mad about when it comes to me.” She goes on to say it’s “not in the cards” for them to ever be friends again. “I do not need Jesus coming knocking at my door.”
(Fred Hayes | Bravo) Monica Garcia, Heather Gay and Lisa Barlow on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Two peas in a pod?
Heather invites Monica to join her snowmobiling at Wasatch Excursions in Midway, which looks like fun. Their conversation afterward ... not so much.
Although pretty much everybody at Angie’s Greek Easter brunch in the previous episode was aghast at the way Monica fought with her mother, Heather now sounds supportive: “I couldn’t get it out of my mind to have your mom there but not helping you. You know, it just completely reminded me of the way I feel about my own mom.”
Heather says her mother raised six kids, was the “ultimate homemaker” who was “smart and creative and fun” and “taught me, like, how to be a great mom.” But they “just grew apart once I got divorced” and “it just didn’t feel like anybody had my back.”
Monica acknowledges that her relationship with her mother is “volatile,” which dates back to when she turned 12 and “my mom … decided that she wanted to chase her dream. So she dropped me off with a family in Pennsylvania and went and lived in New York.” This was after her father abandoned the family when she was 4. “So I have, like, major, major, like, abandonment issues because of that,” Monica says. “So yesterday got so intense. Because again in that moment, I felt so abandoned by her.”
“I’ve been there,” Heather says. And Monica adds, “I think you and I actually have way more in common than I would have ever thought.”
Mothers and daughters
Heather invites Whitney, Meredith and Monica to go cross-country skiing with her, which looks like fun until Whitney decides to make things tense by issuing Meredith a warning.
Monica arrives at the cross-country skiing with a rented Range Rover, because, she says, her mother, Linda, took her car. Apparently, although Monica is making the payments on the car, she put it in her mother’s name. “So every time she gets mad at me, she takes the car,” Monica says, adding that Linda threatened to call the police and say it was stolen. “She’s angry and it’s a control tactic. And she’s throwing a tantrum.”
And then Monica compares her mother to a serial killer: “It’s like Ted Bundy, right? No one ever thought he was a murderer because he was so charismatic.”
In a confessional, Heather says, “there’s a lot of legends in Utah about Ted Bundy. I didn’t know Linda was one of them.” (Note to Heather: Those aren’t “legends” about Bundy in Utah. He killed at least five — possibly eight — young women here.)
Whitney says she didn’t speak to her mother for 13 years after she divorced her first husband, married her boss (with whom she was having an affair) and left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Monica says it’s “so crazy that we all have daughters, and we all have these insane relationships with our mothers.”
Well, not all of them. Meredith says she has “plenty of trauma, but I do speak to my mother all the time.”
(Brett Colvin | Bravo) Monica Garcia and Meredith Marks on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Monica vs. her mother
Monica meets Linda at Monarca — and things quickly take a bad turn. Linda starts to cry immediately, and Monica isn’t the least bit sympathetic because she believes her mother is trying to manipulate her.
Linda’s second gambit is to say she watched a movie about a mother and daughter who “had issues,” the mother died with those issues unresolved, “and I don’t want that to happen to us.”
Then Monica says, “you want me to feel bad for you, but when I was crying you didn’t give a[n expletive]” at Angie’s brunch. “You made me feel completely alone. You picked everybody else’s side. You were apologizing for me to those people that you just met.”
(It’s worth remembering that Monica’s behavior that day was abominable.)
Linda denies she’s asking Monica to feel bad for her, although she clearly is. She says she just wants to have a “conversation,” but adds, “I’m not going to talk to you like some weak-ass bitch, either.” She insists she was just trying to calm Monica down; Monica insists that her mother got in her face and humiliated her.
And Monica says Linda’s tears were fake. “Mom, you’re not going to scold me like a[n expletive] little child anymore,” Monica says. Linda shoots back, “And you’re not going to disrespect me. I’m still your mother.” Then, in what is probably a first for “Real Housewives” — certainly for “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” — a mother calls her daughter “a motherf-----.”
Linda tells Monica, “when you’re ready, we can sit down and figure out where did this start.” But Monica has already figured it out. “Uh, my childhood,” she says. Their fight at Angie’s “was reliving my abandonment as a child.” Linda insists, “I didn’t abandon you.” Although she sort of confirms that she did — that she left Monica with friends when she was 12. “I had to start my new job! New York was far more expensive than I thought. … I was not prepared for New York.”
Linda asks how they can move past Monica’s trauma. Monica says Linda also has trauma because “your mother hated you and … was never there for you and abandoned you. And your dad abandoned you. I bet you went through a lot of abuse.” Linda says she’s “over it,” but Monica disagrees. “You are not over it, because you treat me the same way that you hate how your mother treated you.”
In a confessional, Monica says she comes “from a long line of complicated relationships between mothers and their daughters. ... Everything my mom did was, like, a complete disappointment” to Monica’s grandmother. “My mom got pregnant, my mom became ... a member of the LDS Church and left Catholicism. My mother moved out of Boston. My mother never got married.”
Back at the restaurant, the argument heats up. “You treat me like I’m still that little tiny girl that you can [expletive] on. … I’ll sit in the back of a trunk of a car while you make out with one of your [expletive] boy toys.” Linda’s response: “That happened one time.”
Monica accuses her mother of not giving “a[n expletive].” And Linda agrees: “No, I don’t.”
Monica says that response is “very on par for my Mom. I’ve dealt with emotional and mental abuse my entire life. So I think I’m just completely [expletived] up.” All I can do is make sure my kids never feel that, and break that cycle, I guess, of emotional and mental abuse.”
Back at the restaurant — where they’re drawing attention for their loud, profane argument — Linda yells, “When do I get forgiven?” Monica replies, “When do you get forgiven? You told me you don’t really feel bad, so not today!”
Monica says she is drawing the line when Linda’s behavior affects her daughters. “When you take our vehicle. I’m done,” Monica says. Linda replies sarcastically, “Oh, so it’s my fault.” (Well, she did take the vehicle.)
“We need therapy,” Linda says. “There’s no other way.” Monica is noncommittal about that, and she gets up and leaves.
(Charles Sykes | Bravo) Lisa and John Barlow on the "Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" Season 3 reunion.
At home with the Barlows
Lisa is still smarting because her 18-year-old son, Jack, told pretty much everybody he’s going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before he told her. And when she sees this episode, there might be even more drama.
Her husband, and Jack’s father, John, says in a confessional that he “wasn’t as impacted as Lisa was” by Jack’s secret-keeping. “He actually told me two weeks before he told Lisa” — warning him not to tell his wife. A producer asks John if he’s afraid of how Lisa will react if she finds this out, and John replies, “she’d beat the [expletive] out of me, probably.”
John shares things he wrote and pictures he took on his Latter-day Saint mission with Jack, who’s days away from finding out where he’ll be assigned. John gets pretty emotional; Lisa is clearly upset. She asks Jack if he’s “freaking out” awaiting his call. He says, flatly, “No.”
In a confessional, Lisa says, “I’m realizing that Jack does not, like, have any value in anything I say or feel.” In a flashback to a week earlier, she says that Jack’s choice of food for the “mission reveal” party — Liquid Death (canned water) and charcuterie — is “boring.” Jack replies, “Boring is good.”
Back in her confessional, Lisa says, “We’re in Jack’s world right now. It’s all, like, Jack’s doing what Jack’s doing.” And then she insults his choice to get his hair frosted: “Why are we reliving the ‘90?”
John, on the other hand, tells Jack, “we’re proud that you’re doing this, even though you didn’t tell us for a while.” And, he adds, when he was growing up, he “had friends whose parents borderline threatened them that if they didn’t go on a mission, that they were going to kind of be kicked out of the family.” (That probably won’t make church leaders happy, but John is far from the first one to tell that sort of story.)
“Words can’t describe how I feel about Jack. He’s progressed so far,” John says in his confessional. “Proud of Jack doesn’t even cover it.”
However, both John and Lisa tell their son that if, after he arrives at his mission, he wants to come home, he’s welcome to do so. Lisa prefaces her comments by telling a story about her college roommate, who she caught wearing her clothes. The roommate’s explanation was that she wanted to know what it was like to be Lisa for a day.
“You’re going to have companions that you’re going to not like, and you’re stuck with them in close quarters,” she says. “If it doesn’t feel right and you feel like I need to be back home, that’s fine too.”
(Bravo) Jack Barlow on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
The big mission reveal
Not surprisingly, Lisa serves a lot more than canned water and charcuterie for Jack’s mission announcement, including a cake topped with a faux Elder Barlow missionary name tag that is “going to make me cry,” she says.
In a confessional, Lisa says, “oh, my God. Today is the day we are going to find out where Jack is going to spend two years of his life.” And getting your mission call is “a huge thing in Utah — like a gender reveal party.”
Lisa insists she’s “not a control freak, but I might like things my way.” (She has consistently displayed control-freakish behavior on the show.) She laments that she has “zero control over … where Jack goes, how he lives. And it’s really, really a lot.”
Jack reads the mission call, and he’s headed for the Colombia Bogota North Mission. Lisa’s reaction is predictable, although to be fair it’s the same reaction a lot of parents would have: “oh, my gosh, I cannot believe he’s going to Colombia. He’ll probably be held up at gunpoint at least once or twice on his mission.” However, she adds, “I mean, overall, it’s thrilling.”
(Presley Ann | Bravo) Whitney Rose and Meredith Marks in the Sept. 19 episode of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Whitney warns Meredith
Whitney tells her husband, Justin, that she’s inviting Meredith to their daughter Bobbi’s upcoming 13th birthday party, even though things between them are “not good.”
Later, at the cross-country skiing outing, the subject turns to Bobbi’s birthday party, and Whitney invites Meredith and tells her Angie — with whom Meredith has been ferociously feuding — is also invited.
Whitney brings up that Meredith has “repeatedly said” she wants to “ruin” Angie’s life by spreading rumors that Angie’s husband is cheating on her with men. That’s not precisely true. “I have never said I would ruin anybody’s life,” Meredith says. (Not in those words, but we’ve heard her make threats along those lines.)
Whitney says Meredith did the same thing with Jen Shah, Lisa and Mary. “As your friend, I’m telling you this seems to be your pattern and what you do,” Whitney says.
As Meredith has done repeatedly, she changes the subject when she’s confronted about her bad behavior.
She questions how Whitney could have driven by her, neither stopping nor calling for 48 hours, after a “near fatal” car accident. According to Whitney, the accident didn’t look that bad; she didn’t know it was Meredith in the car; and, in a confessional, she questions whether Meredith’s life flashed before her eyes “or did she see an opportunity to throw out something that we can’t challenge her about” to make people “feel bad for her, and no one’s going to want to bring up the fact that she started these rumors about Angie.”
Meredith promises to behave herself at the party. “I don’t threaten people,” she says, inaccurately. “I’m not hurting people. I’m not inflicting harm or even wishing ill towards anyone. Including Angie.”
