Sonja and Luann Go from Housewives to Fabulous, Farting Dairy Queens

With every new episode of Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake, I spend each second of its runtime thinking, “This can’t possibly get any better.” But silly me! Bravo’s breakout hit reality show, which sees its Real Housewives of New York alums trying to spruce up a small Illinois town, has been defying my expectations at every turn.

Sunday’s episode took Sonja Morgan and Luann de Lesseps from their Funyun-strewn motel room to an animal shelter, to a small-town boutique called Sue’s, to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new playground that the two Manhattan socialites finagled for the town. Each new location provided its usual bevy of laughter (their wig modeling at Sue’s has to be one of the funniest scenes of any reality show I’ve seen all year), but it was their stop for sustenance at the local Dairy Queen that will live on in my heart.

Well, it’ll live on in my heart. For Sonja and Luann, the DQ trip will be living on in their farts.

After their trip to the animal shelter, the modern Laverne and Shirley climb back into their pickup truck, where Luann proudly announces, “Let’s go to Dairy Queen, I took my digestive enzymes before we left.” Immediately, Sonja’s face lights up. It was as if the two of them had been possessed by the ravenous spirits of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, suddenly ready to clear the creamery of its entire inventory and leave the other patrons of Benton, Illinois, shaking their fists while Lu and Sonja smacked their chompers together.

As Sonja chanted, “Dairy Queen! Dairy Queen!” in the front seat, I was reminded of my youth growing up in North Dakota. I know this is not a singular experience; Dairy Queen is an international franchise. But given that the restaurant was founded in Illinois, with many of its signature treats invented by franchise owners from surrounding states, it has always felt like a distinctly Midwestern place to me. A big-city Dairy Queen is just another ice cream spot, but a small-town DQ is the place to be on a sweltering summer day—especially after being grounded from doing any summer activities for two weeks because you bit your sister during a childhood argument (sorry sis!).

But I digress. Sonja and Luann pull up to the DQ drive-thru, take one look at the menu, and are already overwhelmed. “Oh my God, I want everything,” Luann says, echoing the exact same words I uttered the last time I was at a Dairy Queen, far too many years ago. But the thing about Dairy Queen is that, even if everything on the menu looks good, you know exactly what you want when you roll up to that window. Your order calls to you, softly, from the moment you even decide to go to DQ.

Luann orders a plain vanilla cone and a strawberry milkshake, because I guess it’s amateur hour over here. (I can’t fault her too much, a plain vanilla cone is a safe, sturdy bet.) Sonja, however, takes it to the next level. This is a worldly woman we’re talking about here; she partied with John-John Kennedy and Madonna all the time, of course she has a go-to order from Dairy Queen. For Sonja, it’s a chocolate-vanilla soft-serve cone, with a hard chocolate-dipped coating. And because Sonja is Sonja, she goes all out, tacking a banana split with hot fudge onto her order. Luann is filled with mirth, giggling like she just got proposed to for the third time: “Yes, yes! I was hoping you would get the banana split!”

“The problem is, Luann and I really don’t do dairy,” Sonja says in her confessional, over shots of them giddily receiving a boatload of lactose. “Luann shat a whole bed once. They had to remove the mattress.” RHONY aficionados will remember the cast’s wicked boat trip to Cartagena, Colombia, in Season 10, which miraculously did not end in a shipwreck, but still managed to destroy the gut biomes forever. Luann did, quite literally, shit her bed in the night.

All that was a scatological sight to see, but when faced with the choice of an extended bathroom trip or not having Dairy Queen, you choose the bathroom. (My strong Midwestern constitution and addiction to GT’s probiotic kombucha, which has been raging since my mid-twenties, have blessedly ensured I never have to weigh these two options.) As if I had choreographed this scene myself from flashes of my own life, Luann and Sonja park in the restaurant lot, hop into their truck bed, and contemplate their existence while sharing their banana split.

It’s a strangely beautiful scene, especially since it’s ultimately punctuated by a fart. But watching these two women having a heart-to-heart about what they can do to help the town, as they feel the heat of the Illinois sun on their backs and the chill of the ice cream in their hands, is oddly intimate. “The pictures we took at the dog shelter, my heart was sunken,” Luann says between bites of her vanilla cone. “Seeing all of these dogs in cages, it’s heartbreaking. We have to figure out something, we have to really help.”

It’s incredibly sweet, and you can tell that Luann is generally concerned, given how promptly she enlists a fencing company to create a dog run so the shelter dogs can have room to exercise and play. It’s the kind of deep thinking you can only get done in a Dairy Queen parking lot at 7 pm. The best ideas come when you’re shoveling Strawberry Cheese-Quake Blizzard into your maw, that’s a scientific fact.

Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake is such an ingenious spinoff idea because it pairs two oddballs together, who balance out each other’s different eccentricities to create some kind of irreverent, highly watchable magic. I’ve never felt closer to these two women—who have been in my life since I accepted RHONY into it like a new religion in 2017—than this moment. It’s one of those instances where you no longer wish you could be hanging out with the people on screen, and instead, you feel like you already are.

At least until that brief spell is broken when Sonja announces, “It’s amazing how fast the gas comes,” lifting her leg to break wind. And yet, these two women are undeterred. Not only do they finish all of their frozen treats, but they decide to go back for a second banana split, lactose intolerance be damned! Sonja hops out of the truck bed, dashing off into the sunset, toward the Dairy Queen entrance with Luann. For just a brief, shining moment, the world is healed.

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