Last night we saw a charity event for a sick baby and — WHO CARES ABOUT A SICK BABY!!! It's Danielle time! Everyone look at Danielle! Yayyyyy Danielle.

I'll be honest. Before last night I never really got what the ire was toward Danielle. Well, OK, I got that she's pretty awful with her daughters and the whole modeling thing. That was really off-putting. But vis a vis the other Housewives, I didn't see where she was that bad. Mostly it seemed like Caroline barking strange and vague ultimatums while Danielle bug-eyed and looked sad and misunderstood. I'll admit that I sort of bought her narrative! I did buy that because of some shiftless drifting in her early years — I mean, who wasn't wearing frizzy Egyptian hat hairdos and skinny striped stretch tops and dating coke kings and kidnapping kids in the '80s? — the other mean old ladies of Franklin Lakes refused to associate with her. It seemed like snobbery more than anything else. That's how I felt. But now I understand. Now I get it. Danielle is pretty awful. And her friends are even worse.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. We have a couple other things to discuss before we get to Danielle's Angels. First, let's pass through these enormous, winged metal doors into Villa Giudice, the marble-laden Spumante palace that houses Teresa and her squiggling brood. If you remember from last week's episode, Teresa pooped another baby out of her chuckie and she named it Audrina Patridge, after her favorite actress. Well now it was time to take la bella ragazza home to see le sue sorelle. So T.T. and Bulldawg loaded her into the car and on the way home had a charming conversation about having more babies. Teresa said she doesn't want anymore, but Bulldawg does, probably because he's hoping for a boy. But Teets was all "Hell no. You gotta get your tubes tied." But Bulldawg shook his head and said no. He doesn't roll like that. He's gonna keep makin' pretty pretty princess dolls until he gets his linebacker. (Is that what mooks want their sons to play? Football? Maybe baseball. Probably not hockey. Definitely not tennis. Oh, I know. I think they want them to play Riff in West Side Story. Y'know, 'cause he's the tough one that ain't a Mexican, y'know?) But anyway, yeah.

So when they got back to their enormous stone mansion, their eldest, show princess Fiumicina, was waiting at the door. And as she walked out to greet her mother and new sister, the child did a pose. She did a sassy walking pose, I kid you not. The girl was all "Mommy!!! [pose, hold, strut] I missed you! [pout, pivot, hip] Lemme see the baby!! [swivel, head tilt, hair flip]." It was just so tragic. A small moment that spoke volumes. She increasingly doesn't know when to turn it off, doesn't know what's her and what's performance anymore. When she's a teenager she'll just walk around quoting lines from old Gossip Girl scripts mixed in with the occasional "I know you John Procter!!" She'll never say real words, her own words, ever again. Sigh.

Speaking of little Focaccia getting older, it was her birthdayyyy last night!! It was a funny coincidence because it was also my birthday yesterday (I am 57) and we spent our days in exactly the same way. First a bunch of little people wearing dresses came over and we screamed a lot. Then our daddies drove up and gave us our birthday present: an ATV!!!!!! What a safe gift to give to a ten-year-old (and a drunk fifty-seven-year-old)! That is exactly what every little girl wants, isn't it? An ATV. Poor Bulldawg. Maybe when he has his son he'll get confused and buy him a pony. Anyway, Osso Buca screamed some more and T.T. screamed even louder, saying "Do you love it? Do you love it?? Do you love it???" and then she got really mad that the girl wouldn't answer her so she stopped the whole festivities and demanded that the child say she loved it. "I liiiiiiiike it," Peroni finally whined. That is not exactly what Teets wanted to hear, but oh well. Next, both me and Penne alla Vodka got into pink limousines with the words "Sweet and Sassy!" printed on the side and headed off to makeover camp. In the girls' limo there was just so much screeching. So much screeching. And the Indiana Jones-chapeau'd chauffeur looked about ready to kill himself. Poor guy. Really shouldn't have gotten fired from that real limo service. Now he's stuck with this.

Teresa kept bragging about how the party cost a pretty penny, but boy was it worth it! Little girls love riding in sassy limousines and doing makeovers, because that's just what little girls are made of. Little boys are made of snips and snails and ATV accidents, and little girls are made of pink limousines and facials. I felt happy watching last night, because I know that Gloria Steinem is a big fan of the show and seeing T.T. and the girls at their hair party must have made her feel so good. "My work is done," I imagined Gloria saying contentedly to herself. And then there was a blare of Joni Mitchell and women the world over felt at peace. As for my birthday, well at least I had fresh polish on my nails and a nice new hairdo as my ATV careened into a ditch. At least there was that.

So that was that for T.T. Yayyy T.T. Next up we have the older kids. These are Jacqueline's daughter, Hat, and Caroline's two sons, shining Stradivarius son Albie, and sinister failure, Failure. They are all intertwined because they are family and, say it with me now, are thick as thieves. Jacqueline is still worried because Hat is dating her 23-year-old boyfriend, Mingus, and isn't 23 a little old for an 18-year-old? Plus no one really knows where Hat lives. She claims that she is living with "a friend," but she couldn't even convincingly lie to the interview cameras that she wasn't living with Mingus. "You know... I'm taking birth control, I'm making good decisions." Oh? It sounds to me like you're maybe trying to keep bad decisions from going from bad to worse, but whatever. So she's clearly living with the kid and it's all a big cover-up. Even Mingus's mom is in on it! She invited Jacqueline over for a Jersey Tea Service (wine, in the afternoon) and she extolled the virtues of darling Hat and said that the girl even initiates cleaning in the house! Jacqueline just about fell over at this news! No, not that the mother had clearly let it slip that Hat was living in her house, but that Hat actually endeavored to clean anything! Then Mingus's mother leaned in close to Jacqui and took a long gulp of wine. "You know, we never give her alcohol in the house, because she's not old enough. I just wanted you to know that." Well, I mean, shouldn't it have been assumed? I would assume that my teenage daughter's boyfriend's parents weren't giving alcohol to a strange child, but OK. Good to know it hasn't happened. It seemed to please Jacqui, anyway.

Next we moved over to the Manzo's. Albie, Caroline 2: The Revenge (Caroline's slouchy daughter), and Failure were all hangin' out in the kitchen, doing some pre-Ham Game stretching, when there was a piercing whine and in walked a short, skinny dynamo that was introduced as Failure's best friend. He is basically the rattish Peter Pettigrew to Failure's sniveling Tom Riddle. Though maybe that's a poor analogy. Because the friend, named Whippet, seemed a bit more sly and confident than gnarled old Failure. There was a confident strut to his walk, that kind of charming short guy over-compensatory swagger, that makes him seem a bit more winning than withered, black-eyed Failure. The dynamic of their relationship is interesting. Even more interesting when you consider that Whippet's mother is a crazy Debbie Reynolds impersonator who is driven around by a black fellow and is good friends with... Danielle. Horrors! But, more on that later. Back to the kids. So Whippet is an interesting presence that we will hopefully see more of. For now, though, we had to sit through a scene in which Hat, Mingus, Caroline 2, and blessed star hunk Albie had a tense dinner. See Albie is really into this whole over-protective big brother/big cousin thing, so he doesn't really approve of Mingus and his older dude ways. Albie would rather Hat was dating someone her own age, would rather she wasn't clearly living with him under his parents' blessing, would rather that the girl sitting next to him was the tanned, ice cream sundae-breasted bikini nurse goddess that he deserves as a date, not his mumbling sister. But oh well. Will we ever get to see Albie work his magisterial game on a young lady? We may not. Maybe it works too fast, maybe it is too bright and beautiful and blinding for us lowly humans to witness. Maybe Albie is a gay person. Who knows! We will just have to wildly speculate until Bravo capitulates and gives us the Real Kids of Housewives of New Jersey spin-off series we all want. Sigh. So what will happen next in the Love Ballad of Hat & Mingus? We'll have to wait and see. I don't predict a good ending.

Remember when I said that Whippet's mother is good friends with Danielle? Let's talk about that. The woman, who we'll call Debbie because that would make her ever so happy, clearly wants to be on television. She clearly hired the driver (the Sassy Limo driver's brother-in-law, both equally miserable, both cursing the strict rules of Carmel Limo Service) to look flashy. Unless she lost her license because of drunkery or something, which could be possible. Anyway, she's just kind of a weird mess, which makes her a perfect friend for Danielle. They just kind of coo at each other and tell each other that they're fabulous and it feels good for a while, for a few hours outta the day, and what more can you really ask for, y'know? So Danielle was invited to that charity event for the sick baby at the Brownstone. Remember that? Yeah, well, the date is upon us and Debbie has purchased a ticket and they are going to arrive together in style. But though she's glad to have Debbie, Danielle feels she needs even more backup, so that's why she brought in her creepy friend, Scraps, a parolee with a history of mob ties. Scraps seemed a bit jittery and unpredictable last week, and boy was that instinct correct!

All the Housewives were whispering about Danielle making an appearance at the Brownstone. They all thought it was gonna be weird, but hey, she was invited to a charity event for a sick baby, so who would they be to do something crazy like deny her entrance to the event. There were way more important things to focus on that night than silly squabbles between wealthy reality show stars. Or were there?? Danielle very deftly made the whole charity event, the whole shebang of the show, about her. It was about her being scared to go to the Brownstone and needing to dress up all fancy and arrive with an entourage to prove that she is a strong and brave lady who can play in the sandbox with the big girls. This is, it turns out, way more important than paying respect to the fact that a baby is dying. Danielle's attitude aside, what really made her whole partygoing adventure such a tremendous disaster was the crew that Scraps arranged to essentially crash the event. Yes, crash. They didn't buy tickets or anything (that being the whole point, the ticket money going toward the dying baby), Danielle just figured that because she was an Honored Celebrity Guest, she could bring whoever the fuck she wanted. And whoever the fuck she wanted was whoever the fuck Scraps wanted, and you know who Scraps wanted? An olio of ex-cons and shifty fellows and the head of the local Hell's Angels. Danielle told us that little fact, about the Hell's Angel, with a kind of "So, now you see" reverence. As if she honestly expected the other girls to be impressed by that. Yeah, that's how you gain nouveau riche snobs' respect. Garishly invite the head of a biker gang to crash a charity event for a dying infant. Yay Danielle! And really, why the focus on showing up with all these dudes? Well, she said she figured that if she brought men, people would respect her more and treat her nicer. Enjoying the program, Gloria?

So this whole ridiculous menagerie of felons and fame whores arrived at the Brownstone and were immediately greeted awkwardly. As he watched them pull up, Failure retreated into the shadows, not wanting to get involved. But Danielle sniffed him out and slithered over to shake his hand and say thank you for hosting the event and that it was an important cause and that that's all that mattered that night. Which made us think, OK, fine, Danielle is being slightly reasonable right there. But then the idiot got in the damn interview box and was like "That was a subtle 'fuck you,' saying hi to Failure and shaking his hand," and we all groaned and threw the remote at the TV and burst into tears. C'mon, lady. Just c'mon. After that little morsel, Debbie sashayed over to Failure, her son's best friend, and was acting all coy and charming with him. Failure was just blatantly rude, telling her that she was in for a surprise. That wasn't the rude part. The rude part was what Debbie didn't hear or pretended to not hear over her own "Ohhh a surprise!" The rude part was when Failure implied that the surprise waiting for Debbie and Danielle once they got inside was that they were wayyy overdressed, done up in their stupid version of what they think glamorous means. Burn, Failure! That was an ice-cold ice burn! Well done. Debbie said "Ah huh huh!!" and darted off to catch up with Danielle, who was making a grand show of talking to the baby's bereft parents and telling them all about how she cried at the story. Oh Danielle, you cried at the story of an extremely sick baby? You truly are a saint among insects. Bless you.

Once the terrible posse entered the dining room, even more hell broke loose. You see, Danielle & Co. were simply shocked that there wasn't a table waiting for the ten prison escapees who had crashed the party. Scraps was really mad, ain't nobody pushes him around because he's Scraps and you gotta listen to Scraps and make Scraps feel accommodated, so he decided to go down to the basement and yell at some random staff members about "getting a fucking table up here." Which, good work Scraps. Way to start an incident. There was much hubbub and the Manzos started getting pissed and everyone was just blinking a lot and Debbie was standing by a mirror, twirling back and forth in her flowy getup, saying "Ah ha ha, oh Eddie, you shouldn't have! A ha ha..." Scraps was pacing around the room saying, very loudly, "You gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me, you gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me," while pictures of an adorable baby, who is dying, played in a slide show on a projection screen behind him. Hooray for perspective, eh folks?

Eventually Failure went up to tell Papa Manzo what was going on and that pretty much put a kibosh on the whole thing. They'd tried to accommodate Scraps' kind requests for a table, but Danielle hadn't been satisfied with its placement, so what more could they do? They asked the whole entourage of chain-wielding, brass knuckle-wearing charity enthusiasts to please leave the premises, and their little bug too. Yes, they asked Danielle to leave. How embarrassing. Of course Danielle tried to spin this into another big persecution myth, but the proof was in the pudding, which was splattered on the wall, which, when mixed with another metaphor, clearly shows Danielle to have behaved abhorrently during the whole nightmare. In the end we learned nothing about the baby's well-being. Sigh.

I don't really know if there's any way to elaborate upon what Danielle did or was thinking last night. It was all pretty clear. She's a desperate person who does desperate things without really thinking about the people around her. That's arguably true of every Housewife on every iteration, but with Danielle there's something a bit more obvious and gross about it. Danielle wants us to think that she's this reformed person, a hard-liver who has righted herself and turned into a classy lady-about-town, with beautiful successful daughters, high-profile friends, and a comfortable mansion in the woods. She wants us to be proud of her, to be jealous of her. (In a strange, sad way, proud and jealous are the same thing to Danielle.) But in actuality she's just an overbearing stage mom, a lazy brat who wants wealth returned to her for putting very little in, a strange creeper who brings mobsters and Hell's Angels dignitaries to dying baby charities so she can feel protected from a little red-haired woman the local kids call Strega Nona. That's Danielle's true self, her real exoskeleton. She hasn't reformed. She's just gotten choosier about her crimes. She doesn't do law crimes anymore, she does social ones. She thinks we won't notice, because she tells us not to. "Look at my pretty daughters and my manicured face and my friend with the black chauffeur. Don't look at that hulking mound of ugly stuff in the corner. And if you do see it, it's Caroline's fault. All of it. She put it on me. Went back and time and did that to me." It's actually kind of crazy? It might be kind of crazy.

I don't know what else to say about that. It was pretty gross, right? I think it was. Grosser than T.T. playing good mommy while her children climb up banisters and scissor-attack televisions and slide quickly into robotic showmanship. Grosser than Mingus' mother telling lies about Hat to the girl's own mother, grosser than Jacqueline sort of knowing it's a lie but figuring she doesn't have a choice but to try and believe it. Grosser than Debbie pretend breastfeeding an 8x10 headshot of Carrie Fisher. Grosser than Failure sitting wicked and alone and wheezy, while tanned muscle prince Albie and sly Whippet stand across a room looking at one another and suddenly feel a strange new... something. Grosser than Sassy Limos and Gloria Steinem's still-twitching corpse lit soft blue by the television set as the cat meows and meows and meows, wondering why its mother is dancing her old Joan Baez dance horizontally, on the floor.

Grosser than the muck on the carpeting of Larry the Limo Driver's pink sassy limo. He scrubs and scrubs and scrubs, huffing about his life, full of regret, full of bewilderment. He scrubs and wipes, scrubs and wipes, wondering how these girls, these once charming-seeming girls, could possibly have made all this mess.