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Ramona and husband Mario at last night's viewing party
Last night we hit a Real Housewives of New York City viewing party hosted by Ramona Singer. A few observations from the night: Bethenny is tiny, even at seven months pregnant, and the two new housewives — Sonja Morgan and Jennifer Gilbert — seem like promising additions to the already eclectic and outspoken cast.
Our predictions: Sonja will be the resident sex bomb and Jennifer will try to bring order to the squabbling socialites. But do we believe that her life is drama-free? Hardly.
Sonja, blonde, wrinkle-less and dressed in an up-to-there cheetah-print dress, talked to us about her obsession with yoga, dealing with her messy divorce and her relationships with the other Housewives. “I think New York Housewives set themselves apart from New Jersey and Atlanta in the fact that you can really only go so far with the fights. We have a little more to offer the audience,” she told us. “Once you punch someone out or throw a table, where do you go from there?”
“You’re going to see people really getting to know who they are and who their friends are, and really evolving. My favorite word is evolving, ” she went on. “Someone I’ve seen really evolve in my mind is Ramona. Since her dad died, she’s been getting in touch with her feelings and she’s just as passionate and outspoken, but in a different way. I’m also really good friends with LuAnn. She and I both recently went through divorces — mine terrible, her’s unfortunate. LuAnn’s really evolving, too. She’s handling it really well and she has her yoga and her spirituality.”
Sonja told us that to deal with her own divorce she has tapped into her own spirituality and gone on yoga retreats in upstate New York. “My exercise and just having my family, that’s how I get through it,” she said. “It’s hard.”
We met Jennifer in a quiet back room, which sort speaks to what she said she hoped to bring to the show: peace and order. The accomplished entrepreneur — she founded event planning company Save the Date in her 20′s — told us she was “normal,” so we asked her what the motivation for a normal woman would be to go on Real Housewives.
“Two things: one, I have a 16-year-old business, I’ve won Entrepreneur of the Year, I’ve won awards, I have a $30 million company, and I couldn’t buy this type of PR,” she told us. “I was brought on to be the event planner for one of the women — and I’m not allowed to say who — so I was brought in as a professional to do what I do. Second thing is, I feel personally motivated to change the world. I have three small children and I feel responsible to leave this planet better than when I came in. And if I can encourage change in any way, if I can reach five people to wake up and be kinder and gentler and nicer, then that means something to me.”
Jennifer told us she eventually wants to launch a non-profit foundation to effect change, and maybe Housewives will give her the platform she needs to achieve her dream. She’s also hoping to bring sanity to the current cast. “I sort of feel like there is no voice of reason on the show,” she said. “I always said I may get voted off the island because I don’t have drama, I don’t want drama, I try to defuse it. I’m a party planner, so I walk into chaos and I create order…That may be too boring for this show, but I owe it to myself.”
