The nine fallen princesses of VH1’s You’re Cut Off wake up grumbling in their shared rooms and bunk beds for round two of hilarious little rich girl rehabilitation. But, no one wants to be the first diva to crack, so amid a flurry of eyeliner application they talk smack about each other and steel their sparkly wills against the previous day’s nightmare of declined credit cards, shrunken supplies of designer bikinis and tiaras, mysterious tubes of raw ground beef, and one particularly menacing pillow fight.
“Living in this house for even one day,” pillow smackdown victim Jacqueline announces, “has been hell.” And when hot-headed nemesis Gia turns down the offer of a peanut butter sandwich with “Hell no! That’s frickin’ poor people food!” it seems they’ve found at least one thing other than Louis Vuitton luggage to agree about.
But it’s about as fun as hearing the girls whine about the same old misery as it is to watch them straighten their hair. So Life Coach Baron gathers the girls onto the off-brand couches at which they turned up their surgically-enhanced noses the night before in order to lay on a fresh layer of normal-people hell.
Presenting the girls with a chore chart and a Spanish-speaking assistant (you can practically hear the girls simultaneously think “yay! a maid! she’s mine.”) named Sylvia, Baron explains that day’s lesson will be respect, and respect will be earned by suffering the manicure-ruining horrors of manual labor. Jessica continues to earn the golden tiara for face acrobatics:
Along with respect the girls will get a weekly $200 stipend for groceries and lipgloss. “Two hundred dollars,” Leanne helpfully points out, “won’t even buy a bottle of Grey Goose in club.”
The girls predictably expend more energy convincing Sylvia to do their chores for them than actually working. While Chrissy sticks around to pose like a 1950’s Good Housekeeping model as Sylvia vacuums, Erica and Leanne literally run away from a push mower.
Chores done (gracias, Sylvia!), the girls are whisked away to a McMansion for Baron’s next big reveal. Sylvia is not a real maid! She’s a self-made millionaire who runs a cleaners-to-the-stars agency, and the girls will be her crew for the afternoon. This reaction alone is reason for a permanent botox ban for Jessica.
The girls reluctantly change into uniforms and line up for assignments, except for Gia, who doesn’t fall out of character for a moment, explaining “these hands were made strictly to just have diamonds on them and just look pretty.” Cleaning partner Erica joins her by the pool. Chrissy pretends to supervise and then ducks out, and the rest of the princess crew shrieks and gags their way through a post-party mess of dirty dishes, vomit, and, most strangely, a shower full of hair weave.
In a twist that could’ve been skipped, the house turns out to belong to old-school reality TV diva Omarosa, who struts around oozing fake menace for a few scenes, wags her finger in Gia’s face, and then disappears. Her imperious posturing ain’t got nothin’ on Gia’s seething hatred of everything but attention, or on her pillow-wielding freakout.
Sylvia reports the results of Operation Maid Service to Baron, and the good — Pam, Leanne, Jessica, Jacqueline, Courtnee, and Amber — are rewarded with a spa day at a “bargain” massage parlor. The lesson is luxury can be cheap and located in the ghetto, and that it’s totally normal to expect a day at a celebrity-frequented spa as reward for being merely adequate at a job for a single day. Check out Leanne’s spa-going get-up, an outfit that mixes sparkles and tackiness at a level rarely seen outside of Toddler and Tiaras.
The bad — Chrissy, Gia, and Erica — forfeit their wages but wind up neither homeless nor starving. Instead they bicker about topics as varied as mosquitoes, botox, and who was born with the classiest silver spoon. “There definitely a difference between old and new money. Chrissy and Gia are new money, and that’s why they’re so trashy,” explains Erica as she wears this classy little number.
At the end of the night, the girls gather for a group session with Baron to keep up the illusion that all this spectacle exists to be therapeutic. There’s an incoherent Jessica outburst, an insincere Erica apology for bailing on the chores, and Omarosa’s regaining her Queen Reality B!tch title by uttering the best dis of the episode: “Gia’s just a little angry troll.” As usual, Gia’s not amused.
Everyone but Chrissy, Erica, and Gia are pronounced slightly improved and thus one lesson closer to regaining their “benefactors” and fabulous lives of excess. Jacqueline is name VIP, “very improved princess,” and earns totalitarian control of chore-assignment and budget allocation. She’s also the recipient of a diamond-sharp sideways cut from Jessica, which bodes well for all-out b!tchfests to come.
