Episode Report Card Djb: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Oh, Crap!
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.19.2004
It's just that I don't know if any of this is being played for camp or not. Keith walks through the lobby of the Meridien Hotel and hands a small black case to the gentleman who interviewed him for the job. Two other black-suited men stand wearing Matrix-y sunglasses as they watch the gentleman open the case, which contains a diamond necklace and earrings. "C.D.'s bling, he explains." Keith asks with a tremendous amount of excitement if he's going to meet Cameron Diaz, but I've seriously never met anyone in L.A. who has a relationship with stars that isn't either a bout of righteous indignation that their crappy Stepford Wives premiere is blocking the one Coldstone Creamery in Westwood which we'd been talking about going to for ice cream for almost five hours until we realize there's no way to get there and get really, really mad because shut up, Nicole Kidman. This, er, happened to a friend of mine.
Sorry, y'all, you'll have to speak up. I'm having trouble hearing you over this insanely loud pissing contest going on in the Fisher kitchen. George sits at the table reading the newspaper and synthesizing the most boring facts to relay to a dispassionate audience in the least engaging way, all the way snacking on heaping spoonfuls out of a big-ass canister of yogurt clearly marked "Arthur." Economy-sized tubs of plain yogurt! It's perfect! This boy is a walking kitchen cabaret of character development. It really is perfect. Arthur takes the plunge, noting again how much he likes the table, adding that he misses the old Formica one. And then, the smackdown, which will have to be rendered in clay and acted out inside a cage, Celebrity Deathmatch style: "I'm sure, being a geologist, you know Formica was originally developed as an electrical insulator, created as a replacement for mica, a silicate mineral. Hence the word...Formica!" George doesn't even wait a moment for Arthur to hold onto his "milk does a body good, and I should know because I eat it in EVERY FORM AVAILABLE" smug smile before he rebuts, "Formica is a plastic laminate developed for kitchen furnishings in the 1920s." And he should know, because he helped invent it and then he went out and relaxed at a speakeasy with his flapper girlfriend even though he didn't stay out late because he was already very old then. Arthur holds the anguished smile and apologizes, "I stand corrected." Ruth, who I didn't even mention was at the kitchen sink scrubbing a pan because it seems like then I'd have to include all things so self-evident like "And then breathing helped sustain life, so everyone did it" or "the Fisher kitchen has not mysteriously relocated to Turkmenistan," leaps in just then to try and smooth things over (just like Formica!) and tell them that both of their theories sound very interesting. But Arthur has already been schooled, so he takes this chance to lash out and tell George that Arthur's name is clearly marked on the side of the yogurt Geroge is eating, and that he hopes what George ate will be replaced. With that, he storms out, closer in sensibility to a Fisher child than he has perhaps ever before been. What they left out of their Carousel Of Progress passion play is that, somewhere around the 1950s, Formica also became The Official Building Material Of Long Island. Seriously, that shit was everywhere in my house growing up. Tables. Chairs. Flatware. I have a cat made of one, but he broke. Poor Mike.