Real Housewives Recap

The Real Housewives of Dallas are naughty yachties in Mexico

D'Andra, Brandi, and Stephanie in Mexico, Real Housewives

D'Andra, Brandi, and Stephanie on a boat trip in Mexico.

This week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Dallas picks up right where last week left off: with a catfight in a bat cave in Mexico. Brandi is accusing Cary of putting down other doctors, while Cary is upset that Brandi didn’t defend her against LeeAnne’s threats on her life.

Let’s be clear about those threats, though. While disturbing (as LeeAnne is wont to be), the remarks weren’t actually clear threats on Cary’s life. The whole thing has been blown wildly out of proportion and somehow morphed from a vague, drug-fueled rant into “LeeAnne wants to strangle me with her bare hands.” Is that something LeeAnne could feasibly do? Absolutely. But she never actually said that.

Less clear is what, exactly, Cary said about Brandi’s doctor. Brandi remembers Cary warning her that he “killed people on the operating table,” but Cary swears this never happened. As dinner ends, the argument remains unresolved, and the group splits up for a night of fun in Mexico.

Fun is pretty subjective in this case, though. While Brandi, Stephanie, D’Andra, and LeeAnne indulge in still more tequila and dance the night away on top of a bar, Cary and Kameron put on face masks, snuggle into their jammies, and go to sleep.

The next morning, Cary and Kameron are bright-eyed and well-rested, while Brandi and Stephanie struggle to get their bearings in the midst of what have to be massive, earth-shattering hangovers. Kameron lectures Cary about what poor friends Brandi and Stephanie have been, clearly plotting to finally gain her own “ride or die” buddy in this gang.

Meanwhile, Brandi and Stephanie plot to reclaim “Sexual Chocolate,” the large, brown dildo Brandi brought on the trip, as he seems to have gone missing in the chaos of chasing Kameron around the beach, wiener in hand. As viewers, we didn’t see what happened to ol’ Sexual Chocolate after LeeAnne confiscated him and buried him in the sand, but Stephanie swears she saw LeeAnne dig him back up and bring him to her room. She is determined to save him.

Anyway, before the great dildo hunt begins, D’Andra has taken a page out of Mommy Dearest’s book and planned some team-building exercises for the disjointed group. She pairs the ladies off, joining LeeAnne with Cary and Kameron with Brandi. D’Andra will be with Stephanie, which is all well and good, but if everyone in those other pairings survives this day of “fun on the beach,” I will be shocked.

To test the ladies’ patience, a trio of Mexican cabana boys has set up the lamest obstacle course ever. They have to spin around a pole a few times, shimmy under a volleyball net, dig up a ball and throw said ball into a bucket, then return to the start where they will tag their partners, and the whole thing will go down again. Brandi dubs her team with Kameron “Team Sesame Street,” because Kameron is Big Bird and Brandi is Elmo. It’s not clear if Kameron is aware of this designation, but Brandi’s impression of ~~Big Bird~~ Kameron is spot on.

Big Bird reveals that she had her chromosomes tested, and she is endowed with a “professional athlete gene,” which she puts to use, easily winning the obstacle course. LeeAnne gives up, citing her recent breast surgery, while D’Andra can’t find her balls, which feels very much like a metaphor for her relationship with her mother.

The second part of the team-building is a game of volleyball, and somehow (Hint: It’s because she was captain of her high school volleyball team, and she knows she can win), LeeAnne’s boobs heal in time to crush her opponents.

After the game, at a relaxed beachside lunch, Brandi can’t seem to let her newfound peace with Kameron endure, choosing instead to poke the Big Bird by quipping about how unsophisticated she, Brandi, is. Then, when Cary comments that she has to go “wash the sand out of her vagina,” Brandi points at Kameron, challenging her to lash out at the impropriety of the statement.

“She legitly has a medical condition,” Kameron replies. “Legitly.” She’s a smart blonde, y’all.

Later, Brandi and Stephanie take advantage of LeeAnne and D’Andra being out of their suite to sneak in and reclaim Sexual Chocolate. They dress up as LeeAnne and D’Andra — Brandi in a glittery bodysuit and too much makeup and Stephanie in a gold headband that I swear D’Andra is actually wearing later in the episode. They convince the front desk manager that they are LeeAnne (“I’ve been in a lot of movies … Miss Congeniality … I’m a really big deal.”) and D’Andra (“LeeAnne, stop it!”).

Once in the suite, the girls manage to find Sexual Chocolate hidden beneath LeeAnne’s pillow. Do you have a lot of questions? I have a lot of questions.

That evening, the group reconvenes for a relaxing jaunt on a yacht. As LeeAnne, Stephanie and Brandi pose for a photo before the sunset, Kameron starts whispering to Cary about how fake that trio is. To her credit, though, she doesn’t keep these thoughts to herself. She comes right out and asks Brandi and Stephanie why they’re being buddy-buddy with LeeAnne after making fun of her and her crazy boob doctor when they first arrived in Mexico. Then she asks why they didn’t have Cary’s back in her dust-up with LeeAnne the previous night.

Before either can respond, D’Andra calls out Cary for making fun of LeeAnne’s fiancé, Rich. Cary admits to “joking” that Rich is in possession of “the world’s smallest penis,” which LeeAnne quickly refutes by zooming in on a photo of Rich’s crotch on her phone. And ... well ... good for you, LeeAnne.

Cary apologizes, then (rightfully) throws Brandi under the bus for continuing to gossip about everyone around her. Brandi freaks out about constantly being put “in the middle,” and proceeds to (rightfully) throw LeeAnne under the bus for claiming that Cary’s husband, Mark, “gets his dick sucked at the Round Up.”

Cary immediately transforms into the lady who doth protest too much, swearing that Mark is doing no such thing and harping on how hurtful LeeAnne’s claims are to her family.

And then, as if Mother Nature wants in on the argument, the winds pick up, the waves grow choppy, and the serene yacht ride becomes the water roller coaster from hell. Two hours after the swells start, Stephanie is literally hitting the deck, unable to walk from a mixture of drunkenness and seasickness. Cary, Kameron, and Brandi seem to have bonded over laughing at Stephanie, until Stephanie vomits over the side of the boat and Cary commences her sympathy retching.

Once the boat finally docks, the argument between LeeAnne and Cary reignites, with LeeAnne claiming Cary gets away with saying whatever she wants, while she, LeeAnne, is always the bad guy. They end up apologizing to each other (let’s see how long that truce lasts), and Stephanie breaks the tension by asking to see LeeAnne’s newly doctored boobs. LeeAnne refuses and threatens to chase Stephanie around with “that big, black dick,” which is the perfect segue for Brandi to reintroduce Sexual Chocolate to the gang. Yes, he’s been on the boat the entire time.

Because she learned nothing from Kameron’s earlier freak out, Brandi starts to poke at her with the dildo again. Kameron absolutely cannot deal with being in the same ZIP code as a dildo, so she storms off the boat, calling Brandi and Stephanie “trashy” in about 15 different ways. She’s not entirely wrong.

When Cary and D’Andra implore Kameron to go back on the boat, she delivers the best line of the night, saying that if Brandi won’t apologize to her, “she can suck it.” The most amazing part of that outburst is that Kameron didn’t even realize she made a joke until D’Andra and Cary started laughing hysterically.

Oh, Big Bird. Never, never change.

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road trip with a rock star

Grace Potter's SXSW Audience Award-winning film gets nationwide release

Photo courtesy of Grace Potter

Grace Potter executive produced a film about finding family through music that's premiering at SXSW in 2024.

At South by Southwest in 2024, the music documentary Resynator won the Audience Award, a contest based on audience votes right after the film is shown.

It was a stamp of approval for the film's merit beyond its star power; some people may have been drawn in knowing it was produced by musician Grace Potter or that it featured lots of her famous peers, but they ended up loving the work as a whole.

The Resynator team has now announced that people all over the country will be able to watch the film, which chronicles an early synthesizer invention and family fallout, starting December 13. Anyone can rent or buy it via AppleTV, Prime Video, Google Play, and Fandango At Home, and select theaters will play a live screening. (Unfortunately, none of them are in Austin.)

To introduce the work to new audiences, below is CultureMap's original coverage from February 9, 2024 — about a month before the film's premiere.

Grace Potter has always wanted to be someone specific and perhaps surprising: "a woman who drove an old truck and had a laundromat in Austin, Texas."

Well, we suppose there's still time for that. Before that dream is realized, she'll be a woman who plays Austin City Limits Live on February 16, then one who has executive produced a documentary premiering at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 10, 2024. And that's nothing to scoff at.

Since the early aughts, Potter has become known as a real-deal rock musician — one who stands up to the old ideals of classic rock while embracing a more contemporary, versatile aesthetic. She's known for songs like "Paris (Ooh La La)" with her band, the Nocturnals, and "Something That I Want" as a solo project featured on the Tangled soundtrack.

Grace Potter is known for her vintage rock style.Photo courtesy of Adrien Broom

Both of her most popular songs are overtly feminine on opposite sides of the spectrum — from gritty and rebellious to hopeful and bubbly — but neither trips over the benevolently limiting tropes strewn around for women musicians. She doesn't need a schtick; she's gained rock credence from her own artistic vision as well as projects with the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers Band, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young.

"I think that coked-up white dudes from the '70s have been celebrated a lot," says Potter from her tour bus in Macon, Georgia (of course). "And I've been a part of a lot of that celebration... The entire generation of people that made music at that time seem to just touch on a blend of musicality in an era where music from all different corners of the earth started to gel together. I think there's a real ubermusical moment there."

Resynator
Her SXSW project, Resynator, continues following the impactful-men-from-the-'70s thread through another feminine lens.

Director Alison Tavel, Potter's best friend and tour manager at the start of the film, has been collecting information for a decade about her musician father, Don Tavel, who died when she was only 10 weeks old. Don developed a synthesizer called The Resynator, which he himself called "the precursor to MIDI," but this particular synthesizer fell out of use, and it became his daughter's goal to revive it.

Money Mark and Alison TavelStill from Resynator

The film offers a tour through some of the music industry's greatest innovators and entertainers: Peter Gabriel, Fred Armisen, Gotye, Jon Anderson, Mike Gordon, and Potter's husband, producer Eric Valentine, among others. But between the star power and the electronic tinkering are more emotional, personal scenes with family. Alison's mother represents a level of complication in Don's image that was invisible to his daughter; Don's mother represents an origin for this complexity.

Potter, who appears briefly a few times, holds space for pivotal moments: the inception of the idea, the shift from fact-finding to traveling with The Resynator, and eventually, the posthumous resolution between father and daughter. Although she must have been a useful collaborator in parlaying with all these famous musicians, she is also one of the women forming the emotional core of the film.

"There were moments all along the way where [Alison] wanted to quit," says Potter. "Basically my job as EP was to get her in front of as many musicians as possible, [and to] create as many opportunities as possible for her to continue pushing through her vision and of course the occasional mental breakdown."

Family and nostalgia as art engines
A mother herself, Potter doesn't know why exactly she gravitates toward stories about family and images of nostalgia. She seems good at the common creative advice, write what you know.

She remembers as a child trying to dismantle the "female singers" section of her mother's record collection, yet now realizes its existence steered her to a strong appreciation of Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and Nina Simone. She doesn't seek out family projects, but her latest album, Mother Road, is a direct result of returning to her hometown with her husband and son, grieving a miscarriage, and becoming obsessed with long rental car drives.

"[The nostalgia is] very much always there. It's not something at the forefront of my mind," says Potter. "It's such an amazing thing to wake up ... and to feel like I was born into the wrong time, but I love this. And [we] have the shepherds of our family to bring us to influences and inspiration that allow our creativity to flow."

She continues, referring to the familial questions that drove Resynator, "It really brought in so much gratitude for me that I had the ability to come up in a world where I didn't have to ask those questions. But it also made me [think about] my kid — Sagan, he's 6 now — what kind of table am I setting for him to sit down at?"

Texas and South by Southwest
Whatever tables she sets, the nostalgia clearly inspires some wanderlust in Potter. Although the singer is from Vermont, she grew up spending the winters with her grandparents in Albuquerque. She often uses images of the Southwest, especially in Mother Road, and has plenty of admiration for Texas as part of it.

"I just remember it being so foreign at first, the terrain and the way that the hills roll, especially as you get through New Mexico and and start entering into Texas," she says. "There's that big-sky, wide-open-range, horizon-for-days experience. I was so cosseted in Vermont. I mean, every mountain around me felt like a hug. And as I grew up, I think that curiosity and that sort of headlong-into-the-howling-wind feeling ... was urgent, like on a cellular level. And it is the epitome, I think, [of] Texas."

Grace Potter desert landscape The artsy thrifted aesthetic works for Potter wherever she goes.Photo courtesy of Grace Potter

In a much more urban sense, South by Southwest represents a similar unknown in its potential for making creative encounters. (If you see her this year, ask her about Dr. Dog, Jack Antonoff, Phoenix, Robert Plant, and her hotel room party.) She's been going in various capacities since 2005, and always leaves room in her schedule for impromptu collaborations.

"There's so many things about the film industry and the music industry that I've always enjoyed, that cross over," Potter says. "And South by Southwest is one of the rare places where you can really actively see it happening. You can see and meet filmmakers who are inherently inspired by [music] — sometimes even their whole story starts with a song."

"It's been many years of me wanting to find my footing in both the film and music worlds ... and make some kind of a Trojan horse out of the whole thing," she concludes. "And it's finally starting to come together. It only took me 20 years."

music film movies sxsw texas live music