Just Real Life, With a Larger Bust Size

Time was when a good solid rain on Trabuco Creek could make the only road into Coto de Caza impassable and shut it out from the outside world. This week, a Coto resident told a national cable TV audience she’d had breast augmentation that pumped her up from a 32A to a 32D.

In some quarters, that would be considered progress. I find myself longing for the good-old days.

I watch more TV than I should, a fact never made more clear to me than Tuesday night while flipping to and from “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” a new “reality” series on Bravo. The show features five Coto de Caza women dealing with life in a gated community that most people would kill to live in, unless, that is, they lived next door to any of these women and their families.

I joke, because I’m confident that none of the women are really like this in real life. I keep telling myself they probably had a blast taping the seven-episode series and, shoot, what’s wrong with having some fun on TV.

As any of the women on the show might say, I totally get it.

But I must touch one base: On the slight chance that the women actually represent the real housewives of Orange County, then, yes, our society is doomed.

You can watch the series and make up your own mind about the women, whom a Bravo press kit describes as “sophisticated.”

Hmm. Episode 1 showed one of the moms accompanying her daughter to a beauty salon where she was getting dolled up for the senior prom. The daughter thought Mom was a bit overbearing and acting like it was her prom she was planning for.

Damn straight, Mom told her, noting that she was flashing back to her prom night and wanted to be part of her daughter’s experience, too. “It’s not just you,” Mom told her unsuspecting daughter.

If that’s not the definition of sophisticated, what is?

But let’s remember, this is all a put-on. These women and their kids are tremendous actors just trying to give us a good show.

I’m not allowed inside the gates of Coto, unless someone lets me in, so I did the next best thing and phoned acquaintances Dave and Adrienne Kirkey, who lived there for 12 years before moving to Tennessee in 2004.

Dave hadn’t seen the show yet, but suggested that the behaviors I described to him from the first episode didn’t tell the whole Coto story. Sure, BMWs and Mercedeses roam the streets, but he says he used to ride his horse to the general store in the community and hitch it to the post outside.

With the astronomical housing prices inside the gated sanctuary, Kirkey says, he wouldn’t be surprised if a self-centered materialistic mind-set exists. “I’d say it probably attracts people who want to feel influential,” he says, “but Coto was and probably still is a very diverse community.”

Kirkey retains fond memories of Coto but wonders if the trappings of financial success that its residents display is real money or leveraged money. He and Adrienne loved its rustic beauty, even as outsized homes began to proliferate. Coto started out as a getaway, Kirkey says, where people rode horses, shot skeet and could feel like cowboys in suburbia. Even into the 1990s, he says, the gates separated residents from the Orange County that was developing rapidly. But in time, Coto caught up and became, among other things, a haven for nouveau riche dot-com millionaires from the Broadcom crowd.

If I were a true friend, I probably should have talked him out of catching a future episode of “Real Housewives.” I have a sneaking suspicion he might be a bit turned off.

On the other hand, he and Adrienne may be irritable-proof. They’ve just moved into a new home 20 minutes outside of Nashville and, as we talked, were about to head into town to meet with an old friend who used to play with Buck Owens.

“I’m just sitting here having a cup of coffee,” Kirkey says, “and there are 17 deer grazing in the back grounds.”

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Dana Parsons be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.