Jersey Shore Family Vacation Recap: Cruising for a Bruising

All is well in the shore house, now that the 1.5 meatballs that are Deena have returned to the flock. To celebrate, Nicole has planned what she refers to as “a fun adult party,” which, contrary to that description, is not an Eyes Wide Shut masked orgy, but an excuse to fuck around with slip-and-slides, free-rolling human hamster balls, and various other massive inflatable toys in the backyard. Burger King caters some extremely conspicuous sponcon, for the second time this season. Vinny is so committed to his paycheck that he consumes his first carbs in 27 days.

It’s decided that Angelina and Vinny will “joust,” seeing who can balance the longest on a platform while playing, essentially, a full-body, full-contact version of tetherball. Vinny suggests an intriguingly specific wager: The loser must kiss the winner’s feet. For whom are the stakes higher? He cites her distaste for underwear and infrequent showering schedule; she cites his “disgusting, dirty, ugly talons.” After a long, mutually well fought battle, Vinny wins. Angelina kneels on the grass and pays homage to his very veiny foot, then runs away, screaming. Apparently, this was all Vinny required to end their feud. They hug. Toe kissed, beef squashed.

The gang splits up along gender lines to go out. The gentlemen are in for an uneventful evening at Jenks, where it proves to be a snoozy country music night. They sit outside on the patio and eat ice cream cones (Vinny, having entered a full-on a sugar spiral, will also house a funnel cake by night’s end). A young man approaches their table and dances, by himself—his solid repertoire of moves includes shoulder rolls, Elaine Benes-esque little kicks, and picking up a chair and then putting it back down for some reason—for an extended period of time. There is something very Twin Peaks about this whole scene.

The girls’ trip to a schmancy wine bar begins with Jenni lamenting that she didn’t think to smuggle a chianti bottle in her vagina for the car ride and ends with Nicole pouring an unfinished red into the impromptu doggy bag that is an empty Gatorade bottle. As they leave, an extraordinarily rude man wearing white linen pants with ripped knees (if I have to live with this mental image, then so do you?) says, “Every girl is fat.”

Marty McFly : Hearing someone call him “chicken” :: JWoww : Hearing someone call her friends “fat,” particularly if one of those friends is pregnant. She storms back inside to confront him. “Were you just making fun of a pregnant girl?” she asks. “I was,” he says. Please don’t tell Nicole I said this, but—purely in terms of physical appearance—dude reminds me a little of an older, less cute, evil Jionni. So, Wajionni?

She calls him a “fucking bitch.” He cops to being a “big bitch,” and calls her a bitch for good measure, too. Then she threatens to “whoop [his] fucking ass,” but is removed from this establishment by her friends before she has a chance to execute.

The next night, all the roomies are out to dinner when who should appear at the bar but our homunculus friend with the puckered features of a Troll doll, minus the exciting hair? This time, he’s wearing a trypophobia-inducing, hole-ridden Givenchy T-shirt that I am pretty sure was not intended to look like it’s been devoured by moths, but here we are. Among Wajionni’s associates is Chrissy, a girl Angelina recognizes and despises.

“That girl’s such a trash bag. She stalks my life, she’s obsessed with me, wants to fucking bang every guy that talks to me. She’s a stripper and she’s a piece of shit,” Angelina explains in a confessional. “Other than that, she’s a really good person.”

The person who is pregnant and the person who is on federal probation agree that the two of them will keep their distance, should shit indeed go down, but then Wajionni is standing right next to Mike, pumping his hand and blabbing about an alleged mutual friend. When everyone inevitably starts yelling at him, he denies calling Deena fat, despite the fact that we have recordings of him both a) doing that and b) admitting to doing that.

The roomies ditch him for the rooftop lounge and the partying resumes. But Mr. White Linen Pants follows them there, flipping the Jersey Shore crowd the bird. When he pushes past the hovering security guy to move towards them, Pauly gets in his face: “What’s up cousin? You want something, my guy?” The crowd chants “Pauly!” as Wajionni is escorted out of the lounge.

But this is not the end of our tale. Downstairs, Ron walks out of the men’s room and right into Turdface himself. Wajionni announces that he has more money than Ronnie, and also that Ronnie is nothing, and also that Ronnie is shit. “I call a fat chick a fat chick, baby,” he says, poking Ronnie’s chain. A magnitude 6.5 Ronpage has been triggered: Ron is ready to fight.

Me when there’s any kind of high-profile boxing match: Why would people pay money to watch a fight? That’s barbaric!

Me right now: Kill this man. I wish to see you pull his entrails out from his abdominal cavity with your teeth.

Ronnie heads upstairs to ceremoniously give his chain to Pauly, as Wajoinni screams at him, “You come to my yacht parties, and I show you who gets paid. You fucking 5 foot 3 loser!” This is an especially ridiculous insult given that the two men were just standing right next to each other, and they are, like, exactly, uncannily the same height.

Outside, Wajionni is nowhere to be found, but Angelina’s nemesis is very much present. The cast are standing on a slightly elevated patio; Chrissy is screaming “Angelina’s a whore” from the sidewalk. She and Angelina smack at each other and pull one another’s hair as security on either side does their best to separate them. Shoes are suddenly flying everywhere; there are perhaps more shoes in play than there are human feet.

“You might as well lock me the fuck up. I’m on probation. I’ll kill that bitch,” Chrissy says, before deploying a parkour move to boost herself up to the patio. Just then, Jenni arrives from the rooftop to—in slow motion—dump the entire contents of a plastic water bottle on Chrissy. (Aww, I guess this means Angelina really is part of the family now!)

Angelina makes a run for the end of the patio, throwing a folding chair WWE-style down at her rival’s head. I look forward to talking to Chrissy about this moment in 10 years, for the second volume of the Jersey Shore oral history.

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