On Sunday’s Mob Wives, Take This Book and Shove It, things are relatively calm, but a storm is brewing. Carla Facciolo’s husband is finally a free man, while Drita D’avanzo can’t figure out when Lee will be joining her on the outside. Renee struggles with her destructive relationship with Junior, and Karen fancies herself a James Patterson and can’t figure out why frenemy Drita won’t serve as her editor.
“Celebrate good times, come on!” Joe is being released from the slammer after just six years of incarceration (mere minutes compared to the other ladies’ husbands and fathers). Carla grabs her Louis Vuitton luggage (oh, and the twins) and heads out in her Mercedes SUV to collect Joe from prison. I was curious about the luggage until I found out Joe isn’t coming home but heading to a halfway house. Yeah, nothing says pass the shower soap like the dude in the halfway house using his wife’s designer bag after serving time for organized crime.
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Carla calls Drita right after she and the twins have picked up Joe from the clink. These women are speaking about it as if Carla and the kids just picked up Joe at the airport after a two-week long business trip. Drita relates this glorious moment to the last time she picked up Lee from the joint. Well, looking at Lee’s current jail time as “glass half full”, Drita will thankfully get to do that carpool again…although Lee is being more and more shady as to when that time will be.
Karen visits Renee and Renee tells her she’s seen some of Junior’s text messages. She can’t believe he’s shacking up with her while seeing a gaggle of mobster groupies behind her back. The nerve! Again…I am confused. Why is it so hard for Renee to wrap her head around Junior’s behavior? He’s an ex-con who is no. longer. married. to. her. While I’m sure he appreciates the fact she’s still head over heels enough to house him while he traipses around Staten Island with his ladies, he really doesn’t owe her any kind of explanation. She needs to kick him to the curb. Of course, she’s been with him twenty-something years. And these b*tches are calling and texting? And he’s bleeping bleeped them more in the last bleeping years than he’s ever bleeped her? I refuse to even try to fill in the blanks there.
After picking up Joe and then dropping him at the halfway house, the twins are less than thrilled about their five minutes with daddy. Not only did they just learn he’s a jail-bird and hasn’t been “working” for the last six years (unless you count making license plates), he’s not even coming home with them! Poor Joseph is devastated and an ambivalent Carla calls Joe and instructs him to talk to his sad son. Oh Carla, you look like a younger Cindy Barshop, with the personality of, well, Cindy Barshop.
After all of their knock down drag out fights ups and downs, Karen meets with Drita and hopes that the two will become “unseparable” once again. Karen needs advice on her book that doesn’t glorify the mob life or spill all of Lee’s dirty laundry and who better to talk to about it than Lee’s old lady Drita? It’s not awkward AT ALL considering a while back Karen basically vowed to call Drita’s hubby out in her tome because she didn’t bleeping give a bleep. Apparently, Karen feels like their fight is water under the bridge…Drita? Not so much.
Renee has an appointment with her therapist who points out that the men Renee chooses bring her neglect instead of love. Renee is devastated thinking she’s the only one to blame for the awful parade of men who have been marching all over her life. She says she doesn’t know how to break out of this cycle with Junior. I’m not sure which is more sad…the situation she’s found herself in with her ex, or the fact that she is fully aware of how bad it is, but continues to do it anyway.
Drita and Carla head to the gym and discuss Joe’s homecoming. Am I wrong or is Carla working out in black, acid-washed jeans? Carla tells Drita that her son Joseph thinks that Joe’s time behind bars sounds a lot like being at camp because daddy plays a lot of ball in the slammer. Joe sets him straight saying that besides all the fun and prison yard antics, daddy also had to mop floors and clean toilets. Carla thinks that Joseph has been set straight–no matter how much fun it sounds like to go to jail, no one wants to scrub a potty. Carla admits that being a dad is going to be a big adjustment for Joe, as it’s a big difference between the two-year-olds he left and the eight-year-olds he’s coming back to after his stint in the slammer.
Renee takes her son AJ out to dinner at one of her favorite childhood restaurants. She reveals that she used to always want AJ to follow in the family footsteps. So, basically, she used to hope that her only son would become a hardened criminal and spend the better part of his adult life in jail. Every parent’s dream, so I’ve been told. Luckily, Renee’s come to her senses and now wants AJ to shun the mobster lifestyle and go to school, not prison. Wow…she should have a parenting handbook–such fabulous advice! AJ seems (yet again) like he’s the brightest bulb on this show, saying he just wants to “be legit” and work hard while raising a family…several years down the road, I hope.
Drita joins Karen for dinner, where Karen gifts Drita with the first chapter of her new book, Shadow of the Bull. Not surprisingly, Drita is not thrilled as it reminds her of how Karen was less than loyal regarding talking about Drita’s convict husband Lee. Karen, on the other hand, sees giving the chapter to Drita as a mea culpa and hopes Drita will read it and give her honest feedback. Umm…maybe a floral arrangement or a tray of baked goods would have been a better offering from Karen.
Renee is getting back into styling, with her first client being Ghostface Killah. She’s on her way to start stylin’ and profilin’ the member of the Wu Tang Clan. She discusses Junior with her friend Nicole, saying her intentions are always good (reuniting AJ with his father), but her choices are always poor. Again, she KNOWS how destructive her decisions are. Ghostface Killah is dressed to impress by Renee but makes the mistake of joking about an ankle bracelet. Renee informs him that the only ankle bracelets she’s familiar with are monitored by law enforcement and modeled by Lindsay Lohan.
Drita accepts a collect call from Lee in the slammer and passes off the phone to their daughter Aleeya who needs homework help. Aleeya asks her dad if he was mad at his friend for being a rat (again, the fact that she know what a “rat” is in the context of lighter sentences and plea bargains is sad enough). Bleep, yes, Lee was bleeping mad, but he bleeping apologizes for getting upset while on the phone with his young daughter. Aleeya asks her father when he’s getting out of jail…since he told her he’d be out by the end of her fifth grade year. “What grade are you in again?” Lee asks…seriously? What else do you have to do in jail but track your child’s schooling? Geez. Aleeya patiently reminds her father that she’s in fourth grade, so basically she expects him back home in a year or so….good luck with that.
Meanwhile, Renee is packing Junior’s bags. While I’m proud of her self-empowerment, I’m slightly concerned about her plan to kick an ex-con out of her home, but at least she’s neatly packing his belongings and leaving them by the door as opposed to just throwing his stuff out the window and onto the yard. She believes she’s setting a better example for AJ by being strong, and I’ll definitely agree with her there. Karen tells Renee that she’s concerned that Drita has been avoiding her since handing her Chapter One of “the book.”
Drita instead meets with Carla and admits that she hadn’t read the chapter because she’s worried Lee is in the book. Carla tries to advise Drita that maybe Karen gave her the book so she’d know there wasn’t anything in it that was disrespectful to Drita. Drita seems to think that, based on her and Karen’s past altercations, that Karen won’t be leaving out anything about Lee from her book. She’s bleeping getting very heated and putting a crap-ton (yes, that is a legitimate measurement) of sugar in her coffee. It’s funny, just by reading the ten page (at 24 point font—that makes it so short!) chapter, Drita would know if her anger/anxiety is even warranted. She can read, can’t she? Drita is Caroline Manzo being the mama bear and wanting to shield Aleeya from any of her father Lee’s bleeping mistakes. Drita is cussing up a storm and there’s a lot of talk about her smashing Karen’s face into various objects if she plans to exploit Drita’s family in her novella. It’s all about the family…cue the Family Matters theme song while the Winslows connect over a feast—wait, that is NOTHING like Drita and her clan.
Next week, on the season finale, Drita finds out something that is apparently over-the-top, mind-boggling, shocking and dramatic about Lee. Like seriously, it looks major. Karen is pissed miffed that Drita is avoiding her about the chapter. The ladies go for cocktails and Drita and Karen get into (yet another!) brawl over Lee–Spanx and candles are a’ flyin’!
TELL US – THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE? DID DRITA OVEREACT TO KAREN’S CHAPTER OR WAS SHE JUSTIFIED? DO YOU THINK RENEE IS DONE WITH JUNIOR FOR GOOD?
