Former QVC Host Stacey Rusch Is Bravo's Meme Messiah

Memes of the sort seen above overtook social media this week after former QVC host Stacey Rusch pierced the reality television mainstream to become the most easily clipped woman on the internet. It's almost ironic, considering The Real Housewives of Potomac newcomer had her casemates attempt to quell her incursion and drive her from the kingdom permanently on her recently wrapped first season of the show.

The allegations against her concerned a maybe fake boyfriend and a maybe fake divorce and a maybe fake personality made for television. She quashed the forces of the old kingdom and launched her own rebellion against them with the spirited words of Maya Angelous: "But still I rise."

The show is back, as is Rusch, and her enemies have pivoted from "fake and gay boyfriend" accusations to jabs about her breath, her personality, her divorce, her star quality. Rusch has taken those blows on the chin, like a lady, and successfully diverted the combined energies of Gizelle Bryant and Ashley Darby. Her onscreen antics have only deepened the love online for a woman who has, for the very first time in human history, totally cowed the self-described "green eyed bandit."

As if my own heaping accolades weren't enough: On a recent episode of Call Her Daddy, executive producer and Bravo kingpin Andy Cohen described her the best casting the network has done of late.

I was poetic on her ability to push The Real Housewives of Potomac into further heights of humor and absurdity because that is exactly what primed social media to so readily take to old footage of Rusch hawking wares on QVC. Actually, hawking and peddling both denigrate her captivating aura on television. She is a conductor of a capitalist symphony, deftly weaving the melodies of commerce and labor relations through the silver screen.

Kicked off by a tweet from Coleman Spilde, the clips are multiplying faster than I can reasonably text my friends about. See for oneself exactly what I mean, while she describes a bumblebee broach: "Don't you just love bumblebees? They do so much for us, put a smile on our face every time we see them. Just like a little bee, right? His big, fat little body, with those little wings... he thinks his work is impossible! Yet he pollinates, he does it all. It's the incredible bee."

This clip is like a spell, and I am utterly under its thrall. Every time I watch it I lose myself for longer than I've realized, drawn into her tale of the hearty, desperate bee's fight against the forces that surround him. And yet, snapped back into reality, I am looking at a decorative broach in the shape of an insect, painted in nautical colors with a large anchor emblazoned across its abdomen. I do not know the woman who seeks nautical-themed insect broaches. Perhaps I am that woman; perhaps I've always been that woman, and Rusch's messianic declarations unlocked the truth I've kept hidden inside me.

Hyperbole aside, the clips are plentiful, each funnier than the last, more absurd in scope and detail. In one, she describes a cascade of fall iconography, intimately tracing the contours of squashes and leaves and sunflowers and pumpkins. In another, she describes the "herald" of an embroidered camel, "sending a message of what's to come... and you know what was coming? That miracle — the miracle of Christmas."

Bravo has seen it's fair share of meme-able figures emerge at the end of its imperial era, mainly from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City in the shape of Lisa Barlow and now, Britani Bateman. The Real Housewives of Potomac was likewise once a treasure trove of clips and GIFs and fodder for the high vibrational gay people who love these shows, thanks to the work of Karen Huger, recently freed from prison. But there has never, at least in my time covering these shows, been a figure like Stacey Rusch, who brought with her a ready-made treasure trove of Instagram memes.

Really, there's very few figures on Bravo that have managed something like this at all, having largely cast off-screen personalities on the various franchises that aren't The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Are any of Lisa Rinna or Kyle Richards' acting roles prior to being on reality television interesting enough to have warranted permanent space in the internet's everyday lexicon? Not really.

The only other figure in the long history of these show's I have to compare her to are NeNe Leakes and Bethenny Frankel, who had entire careers outside their shows parallel to their reality television escapades. For differing reasons, of course, like with Leakes' turn as a Ryan Murphy muse, or Frankel's late-in-life pivot to TikTok. For Leakes, this meant near-countless clips and quotes from her appearances on shows like Glee, while Frankel has a veritable Library of Alexandria dedicated to her various front-facing forays into UFO sightings, chicken salad activism and more.

But still, both things happened after they'd already made their mark on Bravo. Stacey Rusch is still just a newcomer, with a recently made 330 video long playlist of her past QVC appearances garnering thousands of views in just under a week. That number is still climbing, and I expect it will continue to as she continues to make an indelible mark on the franchise and the executives behind it.

In Rusch, Cohen and Bravo and the network's many fans haven't just found an icon, or even a perfectly delusional reality television star. They've found a meme messiah, come to lead them back to the promised land of the "Golden Years," when NeNe Leakes and Luann De Lesseps and Vicki Gunvalson were still on television, each spawning more instantly iconic quotes than the internet's then limited servers had capacity for.

Don't you need a great statement Real Housewife? Oh yes, you do! Talk about delusion, talk about drama, talk about glam, talk about Stacey Rusch!

Image via Getty