Bethenny Frankel has spent a good portion of the summer making chicken salad far more interesting than chicken salad has any right to be.
So naturally, the next logical step was Burning Man.
The former Real Housewives of New York City star, entrepreneur and professional teller-of-exactly-what-she-thinks headed into Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for her first Burning Man experience — and thankfully for the rest of us, she brought her phone.
Because Bethenny at Burning Man is exactly as entertaining as you would expect.
Frankel has been documenting the experience for her millions of social media followers, taking them from her arrival and very Bethenny-fied RV to the outfits, the people and, most notably, the dust. Lots and lots of dust.
But one particular video may have won the trip.
Wearing goggles and navigating the dusty desert around her RV — at one point climbing a ladder onto the roof — Frankel paired the whole scene with the ridiculously cheerful viral Jet2 Holidays voiceover advertising a lovely vacation.
The timing is perfect. The surroundings are anything but.
And that’s the thing about Bethenny: love her, hate her or occasionally wonder what in the hell she’s doing, the woman knows how to make something funny. More importantly, she’s always in she on the joke.
Burning Man isn’t exactly known as a luxury vacation. The annual event creates the temporary Black Rock City in the Nevada desert, where tens of thousands of people gather for art, community, radical self-expression and an experience that can include some seriously unforgiving desert conditions.
Bethenny, however, was never going to quietly disappear into the desert.
She arrived by Burner Express, settled into an RV that looked considerably more put together than most of us manage to keep our actual houses, brought plenty of wardrobe options and began documenting the entire adventure.
Predictably, not everybody loved that.
Some Burning Man devotees criticized her approach, arguing that constantly creating content runs counter to the spirit of being present at the event. Frankel addressed the criticism directly and made it clear that she intended to experience Burning Man her own way.
Which, if you’ve watched Bethenny Frankel for any length of time, shouldn’t exactly come as breaking news.
She also went into the experience sober and has described the trip as something she hoped would teach her something and bring her closer to people she cares about.
Whether Burning Man produces some profound new Bethenny era remains to be seen.
But after a summer of chicken salad taste tests, the Supermodel Café and everything else that somehow becomes an event when Bethenny gets involved, watching her climb around an RV in goggles while a cheerful vacation advertisement plays over footage of dust blowing through the Nevada desert feels like a pretty solid ending to the season.
Chicken salad to Burning Man.
Honestly, we should have seen this coming.
