Real Housewives of Atlanta Season Première

SPOILER ALERT

Kandi Creates "Bedroom Kandi"

We all need to zone out now and again to give our brains a rest by indulging on some sort of mind candy. Since my day begins early in the morning and ends late each night with SevenPonds, I too long for this respite sometimes. I confess: My mind candy is watching Bravo’s Real Housewives. It sates my dire need to zone out as far away as possible from the subject of death.

Much to my surprise, in tonight’s premiere of Season 4 Episode 1, Phaedra Parks of The Real Housewives of Atlanta announced her interest in purchasing a funeral home…Ahhh and here I thought I could escape death!

Compared to The Real Housewives of New Jersey, New York and Beverly Hills, The Real Housewives of Atlanta are the best behaved. They’re not perfect by any means, but the drama in Atlanta is nowhere as high-pitched as the others. They keep the show interesting by coming up with the kookiest business ideas, as opposed to the expected makeup, purse lines, or cookbooks of the other housewives. And, of all the housewives anywhere, Phaedra is the most far-out. So, it seems fitting that she would be the one to be as comfortable entering the funeral business as she was playing with sex toys in this evening’s kickoff.

Bravo now gets to trade on the tails of HBO’s Six Feet Under, except this is real life — well, as real life as each Bravo wife can portray, given the sudden fame and injection of cash the series brings to each. While the kickoff was the usual fare of NeNe, Kim, Cynthia and Sheree’s latest endeavors, this evening’s highlight was a fortuitous juxtaposition of Kandi’s decision to create her own line of sex toys — “Bedroom Kandi” — with Phaedra’s foray into the traditional funeral business, “An Independently Owned Funeral Home”. Bravo always saves the best for last, and this evening’s dessert was Kandi giving the girls (Sheree and Phaedra) a walk-through of the Liberator Boutique’s one and only factory showroom located in Atlanta. They tout tasty “Bedroom Adventure Gear”, or what we call sex toys, including erotic furniture to perform all kinds of unmentionables on. As the girls joke while strolling among high-end sex toys, like JimmyJane, we watch as Phaedra brazenly plays with a vibrator to the camera along her neck slowly up to chin.

Phaedra Enters the Funeral Home Biz

In the next scene Phaedra is in full action as she gives the eulogy for her Great Aunt’s funeral. She gets her taste for the “funeral biz” based on her “love for formalities”. She’s also planned the funeral event, acting as the family lawyer stating, as any good lawyer would, that she “also helps with their insurance policy.” As outlandish as Phaedra and Apollo’s baby shower was, the funeral biz allows her to get even crazier with speak of “bejeweled” affairs. Flowers are placed on her Great Aunt’s pink and silver encrusted coffin, and Phaedra speaks of “pomp and circumstance” as we watch an over-the-top hearse roll by pumping out music.

It becomes clear that the funeral business fits Phaedra perfectly as she crosses the fine line between how we view both lawyers and the funeral industry and gets to plan even more outlandish parties with her crazy odd duck spin. Her Great Aunt’s funeral ends with a dove release, where we watch the last of any hope for sanity in the upcoming episodes fly away.

The exact details of her new business will not get released until the next episode. Phaedra claims she has studied the business to “pick the right location” and “number of deaths” – quite the unsavory detail. When I first heard of her entering the funeral industry, I was surprised from a business standpoint. A quick search into the 3 publicly held funeral companies quickly reveals a business dying faster than its customers. The cremation rate in this country has taken a sharp turn up. Two cultures in the U.S. still favor the traditional funeral service, Chinese-Americans and African Americans, but the overall trend is away from traditional burial and toward cremation.

Phaedra’s concept of a unique funeral idea is “crossed hands with a hanky”, “creative makeup”, and  “bejeweled programs”. I can’t help but wonder who her business advisor is and if she has ever heard of or been to a memorial service, for starters. Of course, the bright lights will shine happily on her, and the Bravo exposure will make her business “pop” — surely the term “make a killing” will make its way into future episodes.