Episode Report Card Tumbleweed: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bad Timing And Dirty Laundry
By Tumbleweed | Season 1 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.15.2000
Previously: Elispa is smitten with a guy big on distressed leather. Despite their buses passing in the day, they remain ships passing in the night. Jill resolves to ask Jack out, but reconsiders when he finds her applying her tongue to Anchormatt's tonsils. Later, Jack tells Jill that she and Matt are "pretty serious," and he counters with news of his impending date with Allison, Esquire. Jill's eyebrows face off against Jack's eyebrows in a duel to see which ones can most closely approximate French accent marks.
The camera gazes at Jack from the depths of a washing machine. Her hair, which she has apparently styled with a salad spinner, is badly in need of a dryer sheet. While loading her lacy unmentionables into the machine, she is interrupted by Jill, who leans suavely on an adjacent washer. She scolds him for sneaking up on her and he says, "I know. But I could say the same to you," then launches into a soliloquy on how before she moved into the building he thought he was happy and in love -- until he heard the strains of her siren song -- which, as we later discover, was written by Queen. Need I say more? Jack says, "I am more than happy to discuss your apparent identity crisis or whatever, but you'll have to be a little more specific." Jill scraps specificity for soul-smooching, hoisting Jack on the dryers for the PG-13 clinch we all saw on the previews. Jack helps him strip off her purple gauze shirt to reveal a dazzling white under-wire Wonderbra. She says, "Finally! Because like for so long I've been --" but Jill muffles her babble with his lips. Jack then reclines erogenously with her head over a washer opening, perhaps to investigate the hair-styling potential of the spin cycle. Cut to a blindingly bright scene of pale white folks lying in sunlight under ecru linens. Jack has just thwacked Anchormatt during her steamy Jill-centric dream sequence. It dawns on me that even in her dreams, she's annoying. With bad hair. And ugly clothes. But I digress. "Bad dream?" asks Anchormatt, who, unclothed, still looks like the Arrow Shirt Man. Jack withdraws her hand from his chest as the full import of the dream sequence sinks in. "Could it be," she seems to be thinking, as she stares ceiling-ward in her black negligee, "that I'm attracted to the man with whom I trade combative wisecracks on a daily basis, a man who, though devilishly handsome and physically proximal at all times, is unattainable due to certain established -- though serially resolvable -- obstacles? Because if so, this is a circumstance unheard of in all of film and television history, not to mention the romantic comedy genre from Ernst Lubitsch to Howard Hawks to Nora Ephron. No, I simply can't believe it." Roll credits. As manimal noted, Justin Kirk inexplicably appears in a wife-beater and boxer shorts. Jack collapses on a bed of teddy bears with Jill. But sadly, he won't be springing for her feminine protection unless she cures those frizzies with Finesse.
Still under the spell of her dream, Jack gazes out the window of Cloudia's Café. Elispa flounces in and offers a penny -- or more -- for her thoughts. Jack claims she's thinking of her laundry, but the anvil-bludgeoned audience knows better. Elispa prattles on about a new scheme for snagging Mr. E while Jack fails to point out that a cruller has gotten caught in her partial updo. None the wiser, Elispa confides that she's thinking of placing an ad in The Village Voice personals section. Jack reads a couple of uproarious, acronym-fraught examples and concludes, "These people are not normal. What does YPG mean?" I believe it means "You're a Post-operative transsexual masquerading as a Girl." At any rate, Elispa flips to the Voice "Bulletin Board" and reads a random posting with hyperbolic enthusiasm. Launching into the second example, addressed to "the curly-haired blonde on the corner of Thompson and Bleecker," Elispa bubbles to the end of the passage -- an invitation to "meet me where this whole thing started tomorrow night at 9" -- before realizing that a plot device has arrived by Express Mail with her name on it. She and Jack erupt in an aria of ear-splitting shrieks. The sassy punk barrista boy (Cloudia, I presume) drolly asks, "Must we squeal?" But the girls keep right on screaming, forwarding the show's thesis that women are excitable ninnies whose whole lives revolve around catching men.