Girrrrl. you aint seen the half of it !
Yes, Kim Richards - that adorable tyke from Witch Mountain films and TV's Nanny & The Professor and sultry teen of Hello, Larry & Tuff Turf is having her big comeback on the most vile of the Real Housewives shows on Bravo. These ostentatious, neurotic, selfish, petty, desperate broads make the Orange County cows look like Carmelite nuns. Oh! it's so delicious.
And in the category of the "walking wounded" (I love how they call everybody a "housewife" even if they are divorced or single) is our Kimmy Richards. At age 46, she would rather stay at home with her brood of teens who don't really need her anymore and look at the old scrapbooks than go shopping with the other bitches or her bossy younger sister Kyle (who tells all of America that she promised their dying mom that she would "look after" her sister Kim.) Kyle didnt have half the career that Kim had - though she was in 1978's Halloween as little Lyndsey who ran for the hills at the end. Kim is stand-offish and pouty in social settings and claims she's shy...Kyle tells the audience that her sister is just judgmental.
The Richards sisters (aunts of Paris & Nicky Hilton) offer good drama to the show with their arguments and old emotional wounds exposed for the world to see.
KYLE: "...and after all I did for you!"
KIM: "After all YOU did for ME?!!!"
A reviewer at Defamer/Gawker summed KIM up this way:
Kim Richards
Oh dear. This woman is a little loco nuts, isn't she? There was this amazing, tour-de-force opening scene with her where she first said: "My mom gave me some really great advice. Don't make your kids your whole life." Who says that to a person, let alone THEIR OWN CHILD? "Don't make my mistake, daughter. I shouldn't have spent so much time loving you." Not that parents SHOULD make their children their entire lives, no of course not, but why say it? If you have to say it, you have a problem.
Then, just after that awful bit, amazingly in the same scene, Kim did this incredible reenactment of going out with her niece Paris Hilton that was just the saddest, most glorious thing I've seen since the last sad-but-glorious thing on one of these shows. "It's funny, I went out with Paris and the photographers were like 'Kim! Kim!' And Paris was like 'Huh?' And I was like 'I was here first!' and Paris was like 'Wha?' And the photographers were like 'Kim is an icon!' and Paris was like 'I'm an icon!' and I was I like 'But I was an icon first!' and the photographers were like 'Kim! Kim!'."
OK, I'm not really doing it justice. But it was so devastating. And did you notice how she clearly realized midway through her bizarre, spastic reenactment that it was a stupid, empty, braggy story and yet she couldn't stop? There was this cold bit of lightning in her eyes as she realized that she wasn't telling a very good story and you knew she wanted to just stop talking, but she couldn't. And then she laughed awkwardly as if it was no big deal that she, a grown woman with children, had just spent three minutes explaining how the paparazzi think that she is as relevant as Paris Hilton, her sister's daughter. Good work, lady. Some other good work is that Kim is looking for a new mansion to lease, rather than, I guess, buying a smaller more reasonable home. She's pretty post-divorce broke, yet wants to live in a mansion and have another kid, at 46. Good thinking!
