Hockey Wives: Season 1, Episode 6
This episode's structure was much more like the first episode than the last few. The episode centers on a launch party for the new social networking aspect of Brijet Whitney's hockey wives resource website and we follow everyone around as they converge on LA for the party.
Let me start by saying that the party is not particularly interesting and does not look like my idea of fun - lots of standing around in high heels drinking and making polite conversation with a bunch of people you may not know well. The lead-up to the party is much more interesting, and while some of it has the structured meetup feel to it, most of the women spending time together before the party seem to be in self-selected groups. I really enjoyed watching much of this episode, although I feel like I don't have a lot to say about most of it.
In the lead-up to everyone converging on LA, we check in with a few of the women at home. Brijet goes for a walk/hike with her daughters and asks them what they think she should do now that she has more time with Ray home. "Should teach Harper's dance class," Hanna says, to which Harper says, "No!" Brijet asks Harper what she thinks she should do, and Harper says, "Get a job. I don't know."
Tiffany Parros introduces us to her daughter Lola's diva ways: "She only wears black leggings, like Mommy. She knows her brands, like Mommy. She knows what a Gucci heel is. You know, you can't be mad when someone wants to be like you, right?" Tiffany then bribes her to go along with pajama day for school by letting her wear mommy's high heels - three or four inches high - before they leave for school. I found the way this perpetuates the performance of a specific kind of femininity uncomfortable myself, but it seems fairly mainstream as these things go.
Martine Forget and Jonathan have a photo shoot with Tyler for Today's Parent. The parts of this I liked - Martine's obvious delight in the baby and her comments about Jonathan and modeling - were pretty much the same things I liked about the previous photo shoot she went to. I'm getting the sense from Martine that she's very good at projecting the surface, and we're not seeing much of her below that.
Emilie Blum heads to Southern California and joins her photography mentor in taking photos at a dog surfing event. Yes, that is a thing that exists. Emilie wears a sign that identifies her as "PUPARAZZI."
Noureen DeWulf goes to her last day of filming on her TV show and talks about how hard it is to say goodbye to everyone she's worked with for the last two and a half years. I thought it was lots of fun to watch her chat and joke with the crew. Later, she has friends over to help her pack for Vancouver, and I also liked getting to watch her interact with two of her friends who aren't hockey wives.
Nicole Brown has the most entertaining bit of the pre-party home life bits. She retrieves Dustin from where he's playing dodgeball with the kids in the back yard, and they head over to check on the progress of the house they're building. This whole bit is great, and I spent most of it delightedly yelling, "Nicole!" In one room, she says, "That looks so huge. We'd need, like, a few more kids to fill this space, which is not happening." Dustin, Nicole tells us, is very concerned about the wiring for all of their electronics. Nicole says, "I could care less about all that stuff as long as I have my washers and dryers. In the new house, I will have three washers and three dryers, two in our actual laundry room and one set in the garage for all of the boys' smelly sports gear. I don't think that's, like, overly extravagant." This is obviously a rich people do this kind of thing, but if you think about it, I'm not sure it's that outrageous. In a household of six people, laundry probably gets done a lot faster if you can throw in two loads at a time, and if you have a family that plays a lot of sports and the luxury of adding a sports-only washer and dryer, I'm not going to begrudge you that. The bigger thing to be annoyed by is that she's still not thinking of her daughter as someone who might possibly play sports one day.
The bits of this episode where we see a few of the women hang out in what appear to be self-selected groups - or at the very least, groups of women they know well - were some of the best parts of the episode. Brijet checks out the venue for the party where she's joined by Anne Adams, Craig Adams' wife and a friend of Brijet's, and they hang out having drinks. This was really charming, and I liked how enthusiastic Anne was about Brijet's success.
Kodette LaBarbera, Jenny Scrivens, and Nicole meet up to have pancakes. Nicole asks Kodette when she and Jason last got to go out together. Kodette says, "Stampede. Like, we went out one night with some friends, and we're all, like, sitting there hanging out and these girls just kept coming over and flirting with Jason, and it was so funny. ... I just sat back and laughed." This leads to a whole discussion about cheating. Jenny laughs about the women who say, "Sign my shirt," while holding their shirts out over their breasts. Nicole says, "I'm sure there's rumors out there about hockey players, about cheating. I've read stuff about Dustin, but I know fact from fiction. Until he gives me a reason not to trust him, I'll trust him," to the camera. To the other women, she says, "I was making fun of Dustin the other day because he gets this, like, box in the mail, and it's, like, this custom-made PlayStation that, like, has a screen attached to it. And I'm like, this is how I know that my husband does not cheat on me on the road because he spends God knows how much money to buy a custom PlayStation to sit in the hotel rooms to play Playstation." I was glad to see some conversation about the possibility of cheating, and I liked that all three of these women are comfortable and secure in their relationships. I understand why we don't, but I really wish we could get some conversations about other options - people with open relationships or women who've been cheated on and had their marriage survive or whatever other situations women have experienced.
Maripier Morin and Tiffany go shopping. Part of this is really great. Tiffany reads some of the funny comments about George's retirement to Maripier, and also tells her, "I have Louis Vuitton, George wears flip flops. Like, that's our relationship. When he wants to get laid, he puts on the Gucci shoes I bought him." This makes Maripier laugh, and not just a little laugh, a giant, half collapsing over herself laugh. I was glad to see her be happy, at least for a moment. Unfortunately, their shopping trip is not all laughs. Maripier holds up a sweater. Tiffany looks at it, frowns, and says, "Out of everything in the store, that's what you're picking? You need guidance." The National Post reviewers didn't think much of the sweater either; one of them said, "Also, how can Maripier dress so well but have terrible taste in sweaters? This is the second appearance of an ugly sweater than Maripier picked out. I’m beginning to think someone else dresses her..."
Tiffany and Maripier go for a walk after they go shopping, and Tiffany asks how things have been with Brandon. This is an awful conversation. Maripier talks about how she and Brandon had an argument before she left. Tiffany says, "You have to just relax and enjoy each other. You don't want to look back and be, like, you know, it could have been so much more fun." Maripier says, "I thought about couples' therapy, but there's no way Brandon's ever gonna agree on doing it." If you've ever read an advice column, you know that the standard advice here is that if you think there's a problem in your relationship that you think needs counseling to solve and your partner won't go with you, then you should go to counseling alone. This is not Tiffany's advice. Tiffany says, "You gotta stop always wanting to talk about everything, though. Don't be like this 'How do you feel? How do you feel? What's going on?' ... George has talked about something serious maybe twice in ten years of being with him. Even like with the retirement, like, 'How do you feel?' he's like, 'Stop asking me questions.' I'm like, 'Okay.'" Earlier in the episode she told Maripier, as she scrolled through her phone checking on the reaction to George's retirement announcement that day, "I'm cyberstalking George because he doesn't tell me anything." As part of the conversation about Maripier's relationship, Tiffany also says, "If you think the fights go away just cause you're married, you're wrong." She has good points in this conversation that you don't want to look back and see a life where you didn't have fun and that marriage doesn't magically change everything, but her advice seems to be to just ignore the part where Brandon won't talk about feelings and their relationship, which is terrible advice, especially because this is something that's causing Maripier pain. Maripier is not entirely blameless in her behavior in this relationship. She says, "My jealousy makes us fight. A lot. Because I see things when there's none, and I'm like, looking at his phone. I'm very nosy. Very nosy." This harkens back to Tiffany's comment last week about not marrying anyone you don't trust a hundred percent, and it's an interesting contrast to Kodette, Nicole, and Jenny's conversation. Maripier clearly doesn't trust Brandon not to cheat on her, and that's a great big relationship problem.
In addition to the hanging out and shopping, Maripier does a photo shoot for Tiffany's clothing line. Martine is also scheduled to model for Tiffany's clothing line. The shoot starts out with just Maripier, and then Tiffany tells Maripier she wants some shots of Maripier and Martine together. This makes Maripier nervous. She and Martine know each other because they were both on the Quebec version of Deal or No Deal, which, Maripier tells us, "was probably one of the most watched TV shows in history of Quebec." But Maripier is intimidated by Martine: "Have you seen her? She's an Amazon. ... I'm more like a gremlin type of model." Tiffany's comment on Maripier in this episode is, "I think MP's uncomfortable any time she is outside Quebec because she knows that she loses her status." I could see that in this episode, although I wasn't sure if Tiffany was just mentioning a thing we were seeing or if the show edited Maripier's segments to match the comment.
A few of the women featured on the show have a get-together before the big event of Brijet's party. This is the first time Maripier is meeting some of the other women, which is mostly interesting to me because she introduces herself as MP. The conversation turns, since it's a thing the show seems to want to harp on without really exploring in any way other than talking about the fact that it happens, to the way wives and girlfriends are treated differently. This is not very interesting. The part of it that connects most with the rest of the episode is Brijet saying that she sees her job to be welcoming to new women who join the wives and girlfriends, which is what she does with her website.
In the very last-minute run-up to the party, we see Tiffany and Maripier sharing a hotel bathroom mirror as they get ready. Noureen comes to join them to go to the party together. Maripier takes one look at her and says, "Holy fuck! That's what you're wearing?" not in a mean way, but in a way that feels like an impulsive child. To the camera, she says, "She's wearing see-through lace pants. I'm like, 'Dude, who are you?'"
Then there's the party itself. I did enjoy the camera lingering on and the show captioning various guest wives including Kelly Williams (Justin Williams' wife), Anne Adams, Kristy Barrie (wife of Len Barrie, mother of Tyson Barrie), and Wandamae Lombardi. Emilie is doing photography for the event, and she comments, "I'm definitely intimidated ... but when I have a camera in my hand, it's like a sense of confidence I get when I have this role as a photographer." Tiffany literally turns away from conversations about retirement. Maripier continues with her impulsive child impression when she says of Martine's engagement ring, "What the fuck is that? How much is that worth? ... Did you see that ring?" There is one really great interaction where Noureen and Martine are laughing about how their partners (both goalies, remember) are both playing each other the night of the party and have fought before. Noureen tells the camera, "It's always awkward, you know, when you're around a wife, and you know your husbands have had a physical altercation."
The best part of the party is the very end of the episode. Kodette gets up to say how much they all appreciate Brijet and what she's done to make things easy for the other women. Then it's Brijet's turn. We get the drama of her being nervous - "I typically don't have a problem standing up and talking in front of people. This just feels different. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's kind of my baby," she says to the camera - but then we get a really lovely commentary on their lives as part of her speech: "Hockey kind of brings us together, but it's our friendships that remain. It doesn't matter if your husband has retired." The episode ends with Brijet talking to the camera and tearing up as she talks about how she worries about losing her closeness with other wives if Ray retires, and about how much it meant to her that so many women came to support her.
Let me start by saying that the party is not particularly interesting and does not look like my idea of fun - lots of standing around in high heels drinking and making polite conversation with a bunch of people you may not know well. The lead-up to the party is much more interesting, and while some of it has the structured meetup feel to it, most of the women spending time together before the party seem to be in self-selected groups. I really enjoyed watching much of this episode, although I feel like I don't have a lot to say about most of it.
In the lead-up to everyone converging on LA, we check in with a few of the women at home. Brijet goes for a walk/hike with her daughters and asks them what they think she should do now that she has more time with Ray home. "Should teach Harper's dance class," Hanna says, to which Harper says, "No!" Brijet asks Harper what she thinks she should do, and Harper says, "Get a job. I don't know."
Tiffany Parros introduces us to her daughter Lola's diva ways: "She only wears black leggings, like Mommy. She knows her brands, like Mommy. She knows what a Gucci heel is. You know, you can't be mad when someone wants to be like you, right?" Tiffany then bribes her to go along with pajama day for school by letting her wear mommy's high heels - three or four inches high - before they leave for school. I found the way this perpetuates the performance of a specific kind of femininity uncomfortable myself, but it seems fairly mainstream as these things go.
Martine Forget and Jonathan have a photo shoot with Tyler for Today's Parent. The parts of this I liked - Martine's obvious delight in the baby and her comments about Jonathan and modeling - were pretty much the same things I liked about the previous photo shoot she went to. I'm getting the sense from Martine that she's very good at projecting the surface, and we're not seeing much of her below that.
Emilie Blum heads to Southern California and joins her photography mentor in taking photos at a dog surfing event. Yes, that is a thing that exists. Emilie wears a sign that identifies her as "PUPARAZZI."
Noureen DeWulf goes to her last day of filming on her TV show and talks about how hard it is to say goodbye to everyone she's worked with for the last two and a half years. I thought it was lots of fun to watch her chat and joke with the crew. Later, she has friends over to help her pack for Vancouver, and I also liked getting to watch her interact with two of her friends who aren't hockey wives.
Nicole Brown has the most entertaining bit of the pre-party home life bits. She retrieves Dustin from where he's playing dodgeball with the kids in the back yard, and they head over to check on the progress of the house they're building. This whole bit is great, and I spent most of it delightedly yelling, "Nicole!" In one room, she says, "That looks so huge. We'd need, like, a few more kids to fill this space, which is not happening." Dustin, Nicole tells us, is very concerned about the wiring for all of their electronics. Nicole says, "I could care less about all that stuff as long as I have my washers and dryers. In the new house, I will have three washers and three dryers, two in our actual laundry room and one set in the garage for all of the boys' smelly sports gear. I don't think that's, like, overly extravagant." This is obviously a rich people do this kind of thing, but if you think about it, I'm not sure it's that outrageous. In a household of six people, laundry probably gets done a lot faster if you can throw in two loads at a time, and if you have a family that plays a lot of sports and the luxury of adding a sports-only washer and dryer, I'm not going to begrudge you that. The bigger thing to be annoyed by is that she's still not thinking of her daughter as someone who might possibly play sports one day.
The bits of this episode where we see a few of the women hang out in what appear to be self-selected groups - or at the very least, groups of women they know well - were some of the best parts of the episode. Brijet checks out the venue for the party where she's joined by Anne Adams, Craig Adams' wife and a friend of Brijet's, and they hang out having drinks. This was really charming, and I liked how enthusiastic Anne was about Brijet's success.
Kodette LaBarbera, Jenny Scrivens, and Nicole meet up to have pancakes. Nicole asks Kodette when she and Jason last got to go out together. Kodette says, "Stampede. Like, we went out one night with some friends, and we're all, like, sitting there hanging out and these girls just kept coming over and flirting with Jason, and it was so funny. ... I just sat back and laughed." This leads to a whole discussion about cheating. Jenny laughs about the women who say, "Sign my shirt," while holding their shirts out over their breasts. Nicole says, "I'm sure there's rumors out there about hockey players, about cheating. I've read stuff about Dustin, but I know fact from fiction. Until he gives me a reason not to trust him, I'll trust him," to the camera. To the other women, she says, "I was making fun of Dustin the other day because he gets this, like, box in the mail, and it's, like, this custom-made PlayStation that, like, has a screen attached to it. And I'm like, this is how I know that my husband does not cheat on me on the road because he spends God knows how much money to buy a custom PlayStation to sit in the hotel rooms to play Playstation." I was glad to see some conversation about the possibility of cheating, and I liked that all three of these women are comfortable and secure in their relationships. I understand why we don't, but I really wish we could get some conversations about other options - people with open relationships or women who've been cheated on and had their marriage survive or whatever other situations women have experienced.
Maripier Morin and Tiffany go shopping. Part of this is really great. Tiffany reads some of the funny comments about George's retirement to Maripier, and also tells her, "I have Louis Vuitton, George wears flip flops. Like, that's our relationship. When he wants to get laid, he puts on the Gucci shoes I bought him." This makes Maripier laugh, and not just a little laugh, a giant, half collapsing over herself laugh. I was glad to see her be happy, at least for a moment. Unfortunately, their shopping trip is not all laughs. Maripier holds up a sweater. Tiffany looks at it, frowns, and says, "Out of everything in the store, that's what you're picking? You need guidance." The National Post reviewers didn't think much of the sweater either; one of them said, "Also, how can Maripier dress so well but have terrible taste in sweaters? This is the second appearance of an ugly sweater than Maripier picked out. I’m beginning to think someone else dresses her..."
Tiffany and Maripier go for a walk after they go shopping, and Tiffany asks how things have been with Brandon. This is an awful conversation. Maripier talks about how she and Brandon had an argument before she left. Tiffany says, "You have to just relax and enjoy each other. You don't want to look back and be, like, you know, it could have been so much more fun." Maripier says, "I thought about couples' therapy, but there's no way Brandon's ever gonna agree on doing it." If you've ever read an advice column, you know that the standard advice here is that if you think there's a problem in your relationship that you think needs counseling to solve and your partner won't go with you, then you should go to counseling alone. This is not Tiffany's advice. Tiffany says, "You gotta stop always wanting to talk about everything, though. Don't be like this 'How do you feel? How do you feel? What's going on?' ... George has talked about something serious maybe twice in ten years of being with him. Even like with the retirement, like, 'How do you feel?' he's like, 'Stop asking me questions.' I'm like, 'Okay.'" Earlier in the episode she told Maripier, as she scrolled through her phone checking on the reaction to George's retirement announcement that day, "I'm cyberstalking George because he doesn't tell me anything." As part of the conversation about Maripier's relationship, Tiffany also says, "If you think the fights go away just cause you're married, you're wrong." She has good points in this conversation that you don't want to look back and see a life where you didn't have fun and that marriage doesn't magically change everything, but her advice seems to be to just ignore the part where Brandon won't talk about feelings and their relationship, which is terrible advice, especially because this is something that's causing Maripier pain. Maripier is not entirely blameless in her behavior in this relationship. She says, "My jealousy makes us fight. A lot. Because I see things when there's none, and I'm like, looking at his phone. I'm very nosy. Very nosy." This harkens back to Tiffany's comment last week about not marrying anyone you don't trust a hundred percent, and it's an interesting contrast to Kodette, Nicole, and Jenny's conversation. Maripier clearly doesn't trust Brandon not to cheat on her, and that's a great big relationship problem.
In addition to the hanging out and shopping, Maripier does a photo shoot for Tiffany's clothing line. Martine is also scheduled to model for Tiffany's clothing line. The shoot starts out with just Maripier, and then Tiffany tells Maripier she wants some shots of Maripier and Martine together. This makes Maripier nervous. She and Martine know each other because they were both on the Quebec version of Deal or No Deal, which, Maripier tells us, "was probably one of the most watched TV shows in history of Quebec." But Maripier is intimidated by Martine: "Have you seen her? She's an Amazon. ... I'm more like a gremlin type of model." Tiffany's comment on Maripier in this episode is, "I think MP's uncomfortable any time she is outside Quebec because she knows that she loses her status." I could see that in this episode, although I wasn't sure if Tiffany was just mentioning a thing we were seeing or if the show edited Maripier's segments to match the comment.
A few of the women featured on the show have a get-together before the big event of Brijet's party. This is the first time Maripier is meeting some of the other women, which is mostly interesting to me because she introduces herself as MP. The conversation turns, since it's a thing the show seems to want to harp on without really exploring in any way other than talking about the fact that it happens, to the way wives and girlfriends are treated differently. This is not very interesting. The part of it that connects most with the rest of the episode is Brijet saying that she sees her job to be welcoming to new women who join the wives and girlfriends, which is what she does with her website.
In the very last-minute run-up to the party, we see Tiffany and Maripier sharing a hotel bathroom mirror as they get ready. Noureen comes to join them to go to the party together. Maripier takes one look at her and says, "Holy fuck! That's what you're wearing?" not in a mean way, but in a way that feels like an impulsive child. To the camera, she says, "She's wearing see-through lace pants. I'm like, 'Dude, who are you?'"
Then there's the party itself. I did enjoy the camera lingering on and the show captioning various guest wives including Kelly Williams (Justin Williams' wife), Anne Adams, Kristy Barrie (wife of Len Barrie, mother of Tyson Barrie), and Wandamae Lombardi. Emilie is doing photography for the event, and she comments, "I'm definitely intimidated ... but when I have a camera in my hand, it's like a sense of confidence I get when I have this role as a photographer." Tiffany literally turns away from conversations about retirement. Maripier continues with her impulsive child impression when she says of Martine's engagement ring, "What the fuck is that? How much is that worth? ... Did you see that ring?" There is one really great interaction where Noureen and Martine are laughing about how their partners (both goalies, remember) are both playing each other the night of the party and have fought before. Noureen tells the camera, "It's always awkward, you know, when you're around a wife, and you know your husbands have had a physical altercation."
The best part of the party is the very end of the episode. Kodette gets up to say how much they all appreciate Brijet and what she's done to make things easy for the other women. Then it's Brijet's turn. We get the drama of her being nervous - "I typically don't have a problem standing up and talking in front of people. This just feels different. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's kind of my baby," she says to the camera - but then we get a really lovely commentary on their lives as part of her speech: "Hockey kind of brings us together, but it's our friendships that remain. It doesn't matter if your husband has retired." The episode ends with Brijet talking to the camera and tearing up as she talks about how she worries about losing her closeness with other wives if Ray retires, and about how much it meant to her that so many women came to support her.