Before the Real Housewives arrived at their destination in Turks and Caicos for Season 1 of Ultimate Girls Trip, Ramona Singer asked Kyle Richards over Facetime how to handle Teresa Giudice “for long periods of time.” She stopped herself from saying exactly what she was thinking and instead used a metaphor that wasn’t any more flattering than what she was thinking. “She reminds me a little bit of the Scarecrow. If she only had a brain.”
Kyle replied with “Oh my God!”
Ramona was a little off the mark with using the Scarecrow from the classic story The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor for being unintelligent. The Scarecrow was intelligent all along, he just suffered from crippling self-doubt.
Teresa’s sister-in-law Melissa Gorga told Teresa what Ramona said about her on their car ride to the plane. At first, Teresa didn’t get what Ramona meant by that, but after Melissa explained that she was saying she didn’t have a brain, Teresa retorted that with the way Ramona acts, it seems like she doesn’t have a brain.
Teresa then got confused about whether the Tinman didn’t have a brain, but Melissa pointed out that the Tinman was the one who wasn’t supposed to have a heart (spoiler alert, he did the whole time.) Teresa and Melissa concluded that the Tinman and the Scarecrow were alike because they were both “empty.”
A few minutes later, while everyone is on the plane, Ramona demonstrated that she sometimes gets expressions wrong and scrambles words just like Teresa does. She was talking about how hard it’s been for her to recognize that she was famous and recalled how all these major publications covered the debut of Real Housewives of New York. She said they were a “cool water” show, but she mean “water cooler” show, in that people at work would talk about it over the water cooler.
Ramona later spoke with Teresa on the plane ride and was impressed to find out that Teresa was a best-selling author (affiliate link) At dinner at the end of the first episode, Ramona apologized for judging Teresa based on her perceived intelligence. Ramona explained that she judged her because she only likes to surround herself with “smart women,” and she had concluded that Teresa wasn’t smart based on what some of her cast members have said about her. Ramona goes on the acknowledge that Teresa IS intelligent enough to be associated with her.
During a later episode the two of them bonded over the fact that they had both worked as buyers for Macy’s in NYC. Ramona concluded that Teresa must actually be smart because you have to do a lot of math to be a Macy’s buyer. She also, no doubt, started holding Teresa in higher esteem because she held the same job she had had, so she now has a reason to see herself in Teresa.
What if Ramona had not found reasons to see Teresa’s intelligence? Does this mean Teresa wasn’t worthy of getting to know in her eyes?
