Famous People #67: Summer House S1E7, I feel like you're gonna cry
Kaitlyn: Hello, my heart is thumping. As you may recall, the typical episode of Summer House contains material from two consecutive weekends in the Summer House. However, this episode of Summer House is all about just one fateful weekend, when so much happened and all of it unnecessary by almost anybody’s definition. We start with a montage of the crew at work: Carl sending “confirmation” of something to a doctor, Stephen demanding the delivery of champagne to an event, Kyle docking a Citi Bike—he loves Citi Bike so much—and Lindsay talking about marketing for small bottles of perfume. (Her genius idea? Call them stocking stuffers!) Throughout this montage, the Summer House soundtrack repeats “Is you alive???” at a desperate pitch. YES, I IS. AS I SAID, MY HEART IS POUNDING OUT OF MY CHEST.
On a serious note, this is one of the worst pieces of music I’ve ever heard and it keeps popping into my mind while I’m using the oven. I don’t know how to explain that. For a year, I had this problem where I would get a terrible Rascal Flatts song from the early aughts stuck in my head whenever I opened the refrigerator, and I tell you, when I realized it was because the name of the main character in the song was also the brand name of the jam in my fridge, I threw that jam away and lived freely again. But this day will likely never come for me and “IS YOU ALIVE” of Summer House, so instead I’m working on acceptance.
Anyway, the sun is rising on the aftermath of Everett and Lindsay’s breakup. She is fairly sad, as this weekend is her 30th birthday. “Single and 30, that’s fun,” she remarks. Well, it could be, but I do sympathize. Everett is so dazed that he wanders into the 23rd street subway station and takes the train one stop—five blocks—to Union Square. Kyle and Carl go to a very fancy face-shaving place where they are pampered by two old men. “Any girl who loves stubble, if she touched this right now she might be a convert,” Kyle says, rubbing his jaw. But it’s so much funnier than I can capture in this staid medium we call the written word, because he pronounces “convert” not like the noun but like the verb. As in “convert these decimals into fractions.” He does it twice! I love him so much! This is where the week’s lightness ends.
Friday night, everyone goes out to Montauk to prepare for Lindsay’s hoedown-themed 30th-birthday party. She wants daisy dukes! She wants “teaser hair!” While all the girls are getting blow-outs and makeovers—except Jaclyn, who was told by the makeup lady to go wash her hair first, unfortunately making me feel a slight fondness for Jaclyn—Lindsay tells everybody she sent Everett a “huge email” and then they broke up. Stephen does this sort of callous bit about how shocking the news is, and Kyle dresses himself up in a pair of overalls with nothing underneath. “I’m gonna send it,” he tells us. He too, is unmoved by the breakup. Lauren is unmoved by the basic strictures of reality and announces that things are going well with Carl. “I feel like I’m halfway to my summer goal which was to meet someone and to be on the way to dating them,” she tells us. Okay! Well.
We cut to Lindsay at the hoedown-themed bar, where she is tossing hay bales around and arranging them into strange triangular structures. She is sweaty and sad but determined to have a GREAT TIME at the party without Everett. She does this for about five minutes before our number-four guy arrives—severely parted hair, severely tucked-in checkered shirt. They take a sheepish little walk to the bar together and exchange non sequiturs. “I need you to step up,” Lindsay says. “I will dig deeper,” Everett replies (?) and they are reunited. Smooch, smooch! Kyle is now wearing a mullet. He asks a woman he does not know, “nipples in or nipples out?” referring to the placement of the straps on his overalls. Again, he is shirtless.
I paused to watch:
Here comes another dramatic entrance to simply the worst bar I can imagine: Carl!!! Wearing heinous acid-splashed dark denim overalls (also no shirt) and a wide-brimmed hat (it’s not a cowboy hat, I honestly haven’t seen a hat like it before), he is flanked by two women in cut-off shorts. Immediately, Christina turns to Lauren and says “Who are these hookers?” and Lauren laughs a loud “HA! Oh shittt!” It’s super rude and they’re both too old to act like that, but it will become important later. Stephen is sipping a gin and ginger and watching it all unfold. Kyle is very excited to flirt with one of the women—specifically the one who is blonde. He slurs that he is who he is today because of “New Hampshire,” and also his parents.
Of course, Lauren’s mind spins in conspiratorial directions immediately. Carl is sending her a message by bringing these women. But what is the message? And in what way could it mean that he actually does like her a lot? It could be that her sister Ashley scared him, or that Christina is “meddling,” as everyone likes to say, and now he is just lashing out at the general situation. She glares at Christina from across the bar, to illustrate her belief that this theory is most likely. In a talking head, Carl says “I don’t feel bad at all.” Moments later, he proves this. Lauren sits him down and asks him about the women. He says one of them is his friend, and the other one he just met, “kind of like you three weeks ago,” and then he says, and I am not kidding: “A, B, C what my D can do for the E, so go F you in the G.” I am not kidding! Then he stomps out and flashes a peace sign behind him.
In the car back to the Summer House, Stephen says what we are all thinking: “I would be crying all night if that was my birthday. There was not even a cake.”
After this sordid event, Lauren goes out on the town alone. Good for her! Kyle and the blonde woman—whose name is Keri—make out all over the house. Carl and Sabrina—the other woman—make out in a fairly graphic way as well. There’s some dry-h*mp*ng. Okay, sorry! In the morning, a man drives Lauren home and Carl goes “Who was that guy? Who?” Amazing. Kyle reveals that he has forgotten Keri’s name, and we are forced to sit through another flashback to his hot tub times with Stassi Schroeder. Give us a break! I understand that Kyle is a huge dummy but I also don’t think Keri would be that bothered by him forgetting her name. She told him to stop talking multiple times, because everything he said was so dumb and all she wanted was to make out. This works for everyone!
The next scene is one of my favorite in all of Summer House history, I think. Everett and Carl go to a driving range for some boy time, which I sincerely hope is not a reflection of how men actually interact with each other. For example, Carl tells Everett that Everett’s girlfriend looked “so fucking hot last night,” and then Everett says, “speaking of looking hot last night,” as a segue to ask Carl about Sabrina. Okay, disgusting. But wait, please just wait. They start to talk about Everett’s relationship with Lindsay and he says she makes him feel like he’s “soaring.” But then Carl is like, uh, isn’t it pretty bad sometimes? And Everett goes, completely seriously:
Oh yeah, I’m fucking soaring and then it’s fucking wings clipped, crash and burn, drag my face in the fucking beach and like, rip my skin off.
IS YOU ALIVE????????
I wrote this quotation down by hand, every single word, laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. Where is my pulse oximeter? I suspect my key biometrics are off the charts. I can’t even begin to describe how funny I found this statement. A grown man, in his 30s, discussing his relationship, said sometimes it feels pretty good and other times it feels like he has plunged from the sky to the earth, ripping his skin off of his face. I’m younger than everyone on this show except Stephen, which should really make you think. (Unless you think I’m as immature as they are, which is your opinion!)
Back at the house, Kyle is napping in his bed with flip-flops on. Then he wakes up and goes to the kitchen to drink some brown liquor directly out of the bottle. For whatever reason, Christina is in there explaining the “guest policy” of the Summer House in great detail, saying Carl has not erred in his selection of guests, but rather in his commitment to communication about the guests. Sabrina is like, “If it’s not about the guests, why’d you call us hookers?” This is a big ooooooooooh moment. Christina’s face freezes, then takes on the sticky-sweaty glaze of a fresh doughnut. “I was sticking up for Lauren,” she says weakly, as Kyle gapes at her. Lauren interjects that she would never want anyone to call anyone a hooker, especially on her behalf, and that she doesn’t appreciate Christina involving her in this. As if we didn’t all see her laugh loudly at the original comment, on television!
Christina starts biting her bottom lip with just one incisor, and apologizes to Sabrina and Keri. They are very gracious about it, but then Keri is like “I feel like you’re gonna cry.” Christina says no and shakes her head, without removing her tooth from her lip. “You are, you’re lying,” Keri says. Christina says no again and takes a sip of her beer without opening her mouth. I don’t feel bad that Christina got called out for an objectively insane comment, but I do feel bad that Lauren got away with being such a smarmy little liar! The night continues in this vaguely tragic manner. Everyone goes to the club, and afterwards, Kyle eats some cold cuts and then some pasta salad with his eyes closed.
In the morning, Lauren is dropped off again by some man. Carl is like, “I’m curious who this guy is a little bit.” Then the crew goes paddle-boarding and Ashley tells Lauren, “I get scared because you do have bad judgment,” and they both cry. I don’t know, I don’t think either of them make very much sense most of the time, but I instinctively side with the single twin over the married twin. Lauren is 28 years old, it is not going to kill her if she makes a few stupid make-out decisions and maybe gets her feelings hurt a little bit? Her sister acts as if she’s a baby deer who won’t stop running out into a six-lane highway, or like, the victim of an extremely obvious identity theft scam.
This is not quite the end of the episode, as we have to have a quick shot of Stephen telling Lindsay that Everett recently “slept in a bed with four people.” Okay, good night!
KEY FACTS & FIGURES
Is Carl still employed?
Yes! Assuming he got that confirmation from the doctor about something.
Does Kyle wear a wig?
Yes! The mullet was not on theme, but it was present.
Drink of choice?
Gin and ginger?? Frankly, sounds disgusting.
Summer Fun levels:
7/10 letters in the alphabet, if you ask Carl. Nobody had fun except me and Kyle, and that’s how I like it!