It’s always exciting when Real Housewives of New York City star and crumbling townhouse owner Sonja Morgan makes an appearance on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live!, in part because it’s an opportunity to really hone one’s listening comprehension skills.
Sonja, one of Bravo’s most beloved housewives, has a flair for self-mythologizing and often speaks about the minute and occasionally made-up details of her personal life as though they are plot points in a Russian novel that everyone has read. She has also been known to make surprise WWHL appearances, interrupting and drunkenly hitting on the actual guests.
This season of Housewives has shown her dramatically torn between Rocco, an age-appropriate man plucked straight from The Sopranos, and “Frenchie,” a weird French guy in his 30s who, as Sonja tells it, just decided to start living with her all of a sudden. Merde! On Tuesday night’s episode of WWHL, where she was serving in an official guest capacity, a caller asked Sonja about her current dating status and about her “stance on guys you marry versus guys you sleep with.” (Sonja says there are guys you marry, and then there are guys you sleep with; the guys she sleeps with, she has clarified several times, are not allowed to kiss her on the mouth.)
After hearing the question, Sonja nodded sagely and responded with the following:
“Alright well the first thing is, I get over to Paris to open, reopen the family museum, Frenchie’s, uh, chef is in the hospital, so he had to stay there. He could not come. Now, Rocco is coming to St. Tropez! He’s coming to, we are going to the uh, Leonardo DiCaprio foundation ball again together, so he’s GETTING ahead of Frenchie. Then Frenchie texted today to say he’s going to come see me in St. Tropez also, towards the end of the month, AND he’s coming to New York in September because the renovation is done and he sent photos of the first room renovated at the hotel and it’s: ‘Sonja.’ The Sonja Suite.”
As a person familiar with the show and Sonja’s plot line in particular, I can say with confidence that it took me multiple views and a transcription to semi-comprehend what the fuck she’s talking about. The other guest, Steve Gold from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing, was able to catch some of it and ventured to ask Sonja whether those were her lovers’ real names or their nicknames.
She replied: “Well, Frenchie’s Edgar. I don’t want all you girls getting your clutches on ‘em, or my costars.”
God bless.