Sometimes Emergency Phone Calls are Actually about the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Everyone in my family knows not to call me. I rarely pick up the phone, and I never listen to voicemails. In fact, my voicemail box is currently full. Text messages and emails are definitely the best way to reach me. Unless it’s an emergency. And everyone knows that emergencies only occur late at night and early in the morning.

So when I got out of the shower this morning and saw that I had a missed call and voicemail from my parents’ house, I immediately feared the worst. “Please don’t let it be another death,” I thought to myself, because God knows we’ve had enough of those in the past few years. “Mom’s stomach was upset last night,” I worried. “She might be in the hospital.” Or, “maybe Dad actually went into some kind of Cheez-It induced coma.” Whyyyyyyyy were they calling me so early? It doesn’t help that Blackberries notify you in 18 different ways that you have a missed call. It’s very alarming. I gathered all my strength and dialed them back. Mom answered and immediately started talking:

Mom: “Kel, what happened to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?”
Me: “Are you effing serious right now?”

See, Jeanie Carroll has seen one episode of the Real Housewives series. One episode out of hundreds. And it just so happened to be the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The one where Camille has the dinner party with the psychic/medium and she tells everyone that their husbands are cheating on them, and that she knows when and how they will die. I mean, this kind of shit will hook anyone. But I had no idea Jeanie was so involved in the lives of these women that she was now using her precious Kelly phone minutes to notify me of their trials and tribulations.

She also had the story all messed up. See, one of the wives, Taylor Armstrong, was recently in the news for divorcing her husband, Russell. And, in a gruesome turn of events, it appears that Russell committed suicide on Monday at a friends’ home on Mulholland Drive. It’s sad and horrible and Jeanie saw something about it on Good Morning America and, since she’s become so emotionally engrossed with the topic, decided that she needed to talk it out.

“So what happened? Did he kill her for money? Were they having marriage troubles? Which one was she?”

I interrupted her to straighten out the facts as I’ve read them on TMZ and the Daily Mail, and when she had processed all that info, Jeanie continued:

“So was he having money troubles? Who found him? Oh I feel so bad for their daughter.”

I was suddenly thrust back into the reality that I was sitting on my bed, still in my towel from the shower, dripping water all over the place, gripping the phone, still in a state of panic that something terrible had happened. I interrupted her again:

“Are we seriously discussing this at 7:45 in the morning?”

Jeanie started to laugh, a laugh that turned into a snort. You see, she realizes her absurdity, but ignores it. So I feel it’s my job, as her daughter, to point it out to her any chance I can get, especially in circumstances where her actions make me think people are dead or injured and it turns out to actually not be the case, she just wants to discuss Bravo television shows, or how Snooki was on Regis and Kelly and “has cellulite but still wears short skirts and she says that if her babies are pale she’s going to spray tan them.” That’s a direct quote.

“Oh no, is this going to end up on the blog?” she asked me.

No, Mom. I can keep this just between us.