Every good reality television star has a catchphrase, and Scheana Shay’s is so iconic, she has it tattooed on her forearm.
“It’s all happening,” she declared, eyes shining, in the first episode of season three of Bravo’s reality series Vanderpump Rules, when discussing her upcoming wedding to then-fiance Michael Shay. She then hoisted her ink to the camera, underlining it with her finger in a way that became her signature.
“It’s all happening,” she declared again, in season six, episode 11. The relationship with Shay hadn’t worked out (they’d divorced after a tumultuous season five, during which Scheana discovered her husband had been hiding an addiction). But Scheana’s romantic life was back on the upswing—she’d reconnected with an old flame, Rob, who was handsome, successful, and could, she said, “hang a television on the wall in less than 7 minutes.” And while that relationship also didn’t make it to the next season, it was a classic Scheana Shay moment, revealing an unrelenting optimism that her dream life was within her grasp.
It’s this type of extreme determination to craft her own fairytale, despite sometimes less-than-ideal circumstances, that ultimately defined Scheana during her 11 seasons starring on the hit Bravo show, which followed a group of servers and staff at the West Hollywood restaurant SUR as they attempted to make it in the entertainment industry. First introduced to the audience as a “homewrecking whore” (her words) on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she spent her first season of Vanderpump Rules trying to avoid being ousted from the show by some of her castmates, who she says have admitted they lobbied production to fire her. She was cast in the role of the outcast, the one who couldn’t break into the popular group and endured snickers when she attempted a singing career, releasing a dance-pop single, Good as Gold, to the derision of her coworkers.
Yet Scheana, now 40, persisted. Over the next decade, she mentioned it all, refusing to allow her embarrassing moments, missteps, or admittedly bad decisions get her down. She got married on the show, got divorced on the show, was dumped on the show, bought another love interest a penguin and was then promptly rejected on the show, and was called every name in the book, from the aforementioned “homewrecking whore” to a “bootleg Kardashian.”
Often, she says now, she felt misunderstood by both the viewers and producers, who, she felt, seemed more interested in portraying her as a hot mess than capturing her genuine moments. But in some ways, she got the last laugh. Good as Gold has become a defining Bravo anthem, and “it’s all happening” has become so linked with her that Almost Famous is shaking with irrelevance.
“People don’t even know it’s from that movie,” she tells me over coffee in New York. “They’re like, what Scheana said, and I’m like, oh, thank you. I wish I owned the copyright.”
So it’s no surprise that a small hiccup like Vanderpump Rules being recast hasn’t put a damper on Scheana’s ambition, nor her ability to run a news cycle. Earlier this month, Scheana shocked fans when she revealed to Glamour, in an exclusive excerpt from her memoir My Good Side, that her husband, Brock Davies, had cheated on her while she was pregnant in 2021 with their daughter.
