LITTLE ELM — “The most important thing to know is that the women are literally rewarded for having the most drama,” texted my friend, a Real Housewives junkie, as I drove an hour in traffic on Friday to attend a wedding for people I did not know. “They get more screen time and more money.”
I was wearing a clingy red dress, because the online invitation had said, “Channel Met Gala energy in your favorite shades of red — from romantic rose to deep crimson.” My closet was low on “Met Gala energy,” but I did have a showy piece of costume jewelry, a Marilyn-style diamond choker so fake I rarely wore it.
The wedding of Jassi Rideaux, 32, and Darius Harris, 29, was at Knotting Hill Place, a replica French chateau built in 2017 near Denton in the once-sleepy flatlands of Little Elm. The venue was something you’d find in Vegas: lion statues and a water fountain out front, with a big parking lot, where cars lined up at the valet. Clusters of women tumbled out in heels and shades of red, adjusting their hair in gusts of wind and taking selfies before heading up the carpeted steps and through the enormous double doors, where a party was waiting.
Jane Austen for the 21st century
I’m one of those reality-TV apologists — it’s anthropology, it’s human conflict at a cool remove — but The Real Housewives franchise has never been my bag. Too much yelling. I prefer the warmer waters of Love Island and Love Is Blind, and I rarely turn off a competition show like Top Chef once it starts. Who won??
I’d spent the last few days bingeing The Real Housewives of Potomac, featuring an all-Black cast in Maryland, one of the lesser-known entrants in the empire. I found it to be Jane Austen for the 21st century: status competitions about mating and motherhood, fights over etiquette, fashion flexes. The women wore ball gowns in their sit-down interviews and changed wigs so often — first brunette, then platinum blonde — it was hard to track the cast members, who thankfully appeared in each episode’s intro with a glamour pose and voiceover.
“New money is good, but old money is so much better,” said an older woman named Karen, ruler of the roost and also — by the ninth and most recent season — facing a DUI charge for drunkenly crashing her car into a tree.
Jassi Rideaux hadn’t made the opening credits (yet). She was more of a featured player. A pretty flight attendant with Bambi eyes, she showed up at boozy brunches as an aspirant in the kingdom, the upstart. The audience was introduced to Jassi as a woman dating a linebacker on the Kansas City Chiefs. Yes, she’d met Taylor Swift.
I’d seen her boyfriend Darius Harris on the show, a strapping man with a bashful smile. But in 2024, Harris was dropped from the Chiefs and signed by the Cowboys. Now he was the upstart, an aspirant in a very different (and equally cutthroat) empire. When I asked a few male friends, my Cowboys junkies, about Darius Harris, they’d never heard of him. To be fair, he’d been on the roster for a season.
The wedding crashers
That a couple who met in Los Angeles (outside a club) and spent time in the D.C. area, where she has a home and he has family, were getting hitched at a replica castle in Little Elm was a head-scratcher. But the PR rep had invited me, and in the months leading up to the event, I’d found her kind, helpful and quick to return emails, which is not always the case. Could The Dallas Morning News bring a photographer? Of course, Bravo cameras would be there, too. Was it really OK for me to attend this ceremony? Sure, it would be a big party.
I felt like a narc as I took a seat near the back of a grand ballroom with vaulted ceilings and clear Lucite chairs lined up on either side. I sat beside a Cowboys linebacker named Damone Clark, a nice guy in a black suit with Vans sneakers, and he accurately clocked the crowd at about 180 people. We were chitchatting long enough that I had to confess I was a reporter, and when I got up to use the bathroom, I returned to find Clark was seated somewhere else.
The wedding was scheduled for 3:30 p.m., but by 4 p.m., we still weren’t close to game time. Champagne flutes made the rounds as guests sat on the (not entirely comfortable) clear chairs, and I found myself beside a different Cowboy, Andrew Booth, dressed in a snazzy burgundy suit. He was a cornerback who knew at the age of 7 he’d be in the NFL. He’d come to Dallas a year ago after playing for the Minnesota Vikings, and he didn’t seem to mind that I was a reporter.
I typed in my Notes app as he watched me. “Andrew won’t tell me his age, cute dimples, doesn’t watch TV or use social media,” and I looked up to find him flashing his dimples again.
Several Cowboys players were seated near me. DeMarvion Overshown wore a black cowboy hat. Malik Hooker, Buddy Johnson and Juanyeh Thomas were around here somewhere, a fact I learned because their names were listed on a seating chart for the sit-down dinner. Kemon Hall, a Cowboys cornerback, was a groomsman.
Two-hour delay summons my inner Karen
It was 4:30 p.m., and then 5 p.m., and our roaming photographer, Elías Valverde II, sent dispatches to my phone.
“Wendy, Stacey and Ashley filming with Bravo upstairs,” he texted at one point, referring to the Real Housewives of Potomac cast members in attendance by first name, because, unlike me, Elías is a Bravo fan. “They’ve just been filming TikToks and taking selfies.”
I slipped into the entryway to find the trio posing in front of a welcome placard, which one of them accidentally knocked over. I couldn’t tell if this was a comic stunt, or the logical result of champagne and stilettos. Ashley seemed to be the ring leader, a tiny gorgeous woman in a siren-red mini-dress with a long train. Stacey trailed behind her, statuesque in her red dress, while Wendy fluttered past in a flowy fuchsia gown with a crisscross in front that revealed generous cleavage, or what a friend once dubbed “neathage,” aka, underboob.
Cleavage practically plays a starring role on The Real Housewives of Potomac, the kind of jiggle and bounce that would make ’90s-era Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders blush. This was also true of wedding attendees, who had, after all, channeled the Met Gala in sequins and satin with plunging necklines. It felt rather poetic when I checked my phone to find that Hooters was closing over 30 locations, including one in North Texas. When your business model becomes wedding attire — you’re cooked.
“Apparently there’s an issue with a bridesmaid’s dress,” Elías texted. “A sewing machine just went into the bridal suite.”
The seated crowd amused themselves. Women flapped out handheld fans and thwapped them to the beat of R&B jams. “If I Ever Fall in Love Again” by Shai sparked an impromptu sing-along. A Bravo cameraman stood on the sidelines, hoisting a 30-pound camera on his shoulder as he captured these outbursts. Andrew Booth popped Skittles as I watched, and I know he would have shared, but I didn’t ask.
At 5:23 p.m, I headed into the hallway again in Karen mode, ready to knock some heads, only to find the most delightful lineup of cute kids and giggling grandmas and Darius Harris, beaming in a white tux with black trim. I was only an interloper, after all, so I returned to my seat and told Andrew it was go-time.
Jumping the broom, and other wedding joys
It feels weirdly intimate to share details of a wedding ceremony, even one that had invited press, but I’ve rarely attended a wedding with so much palpable love and joy. The groomsmen entered past the seated Cowboys, who clapped and dapped Kemon Hall. Everyone leapt to their feet and cheered when Darius entered, more like a party than a sacred ritual, although this was both. I watched a bridesmaid walk down the aisle in a pink gown that looked perfect from the front, but the back had this odd crooked strap.
Jassi was pretty as a Disney princess: shiny corseted white top, long lacy veil. She sniffled during the ceremony, presided over by a pastor who told me he was a family friend. He ended the ceremony with a jump-the-broom ritual, and now it was my turn to sniffle.
I’d never been to a wedding with a jump-the-broom demonstration, a practice that stretches back to pre-Civil War plantations, where Black men and women weren’t allowed to marry but they did anyway, a small human triumph amid inhumane conditions. They gathered in secret and “jumped the broom,” where a literal broom was placed on the ground, and now our couple of the hour did this, too. The room counted down as Jassi and Darius held hands, gave a little hop, and just like that: They were married. Huge applause.
Guests filtered onto the lush grounds of the back patio, a miniature version of Versailles, as the wedding party whisked off to take photos. Servers offered brie en croute and birria empanadas and tiny roasted potatoes with a dollop of creme fraiche and caviar. A cover band played Stevie Wonder in a shaded dance area where the counter of a bar was lined with lavender vodka cocktails, hot pink sugar around the rims. I opted for a Diet Coke and found a seat in a small gazebo whose shade quickly lured two junior bridesmaids in pink frocks.
“These heels!” one of them proclaimed to me, as though we were already friends. She was Jassi’s niece Shayla, who’d come from Muskogee. She asked if my house was two stories, because she’d noticed so many houses in North Texas were that way. She sipped a Coke alongside the other junior bridesmaid, a bit quieter, a 12-year-old named Jaleea.
Shayla had been practicing “Boots on the Ground,” a Southern dance tradition that was on tap for the cutting-loose portion of the evening. I wouldn’t be staying for that. I’d reached the reasonable limits of a media onlooker (plus I wasn’t on the dinner seating chart), and I made my way toward the entry as women in gowns and flip-flops headed toward a dining hall, where guests sat at round tables and posed at a selfie booth. The Bravo crew was packing up their gear, and I followed suit.
Here comes the bride
I did run into Jassi, who’d been taking pictures out front. She was so lovely it almost hurt my eyes. I was embarrassed to be someone she didn’t know, so I began to look away, but she warmly said, “Thank y’all for coming,” as I stood there with Elías, smiling and nodding.
The words felt gracious, welcoming, as though he and I were not wedding crashers but two people who’d come to document what just happened. We could tell the others how singular and fun and grand it had been, how nothing had been fake (well, maybe some boobs and flowers), even if the specter of reality TV made it seem so.
We’d been part of a real wedding, a real union, the start of a life together. I was happy for Darius and Jassi, even if I didn’t know them. One reason I love reality TV is how it opens a window to people Hollywood may have forgotten — the cute niece from Muskogee, the social-butterfly flight attendant from Oklahoma, the shy and handsome linebacker who might not have gotten a lot of game time (yet).
I drove away smiling, heels kicked onto the floorboard of my Bronco, and I’ll tell you this much: If Jassi Rideaux isn’t in the opening credits of Real Housewives’ next season, I’m gonna need to speak to a manager.
