Episode Report Card M. Giant: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Say Quakerism, You Say Aneurysm
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 07.23.2005
Keith answers the knock on his apartment door. It's a neighbor named Benny, who asks, "Keith, can you tell me what this is?" Although confused, Keith is able to correctly identify the item Benny's holding as a side mirror that's been ripped off a car. Benny explains, "It's no longer attached to my car because your kid knocked it off with your ginormous truck trying to park last week." Oops. Sounds like David might owe Ruth an apology, sort of. Keith scoffs that Durrell is 12 years old. Benny just looks at him. "Fucking kid," Keith grumbles, and pulls out his wallet to pay for the damage. "280 dollars," Benny says. Yikes. Who's selling him his new mirror, Rico? Keith says he'll write a check. Get a receipt, Keith.
Lawyer Ted comes up to Claire's cubicle and asks, "So, was that you I saw crawling out of a lime-green hearse yesterday?" Claire says it's more of an avocado. Noting Ted's confusion, she explains that her dad was a funeral director. Ted grins at her little joke, then realizes she's serious. She adds, "I grew up in a funeral home. I still live in a funeral home." Ted asks if living with dead bodies is scary. "Not compared to this," Claire says easily, gesturing around her. Heh. Ted grabs a cookie from the plate on her desk and takes a bite, while Claire makes an awkwardly belated "oh, yeah, help yourself" gesture. Ted seems to appreciate the funeral home cookie. To make the awkward moment stop, he snatches Anita's flyer off the cube wall where Claire stuck it. Grabby dude. He asks if she's going to the art show tonight. She unhappily says, "It's just these friends from school who I don't see any more." Lawyer Ted says he's got the same thing with his old frat brothers. "I'm the only one that's not married or in a serious relationship so I kind of end up looking like a loser." "Which you are," Claire deadpans with an amusing "sad but true" facial expression. Ted has a proposal: "How about I go with you to your thing and you come with me to mine?...We'll take my car." Claire sort of chuckles and glances around, and tries not to be too freaked out by the fact that Kirsten is watching this rather interestedly from her desk. Can Kirsten hear them? Who can tell? In any case, Claire agrees. Ted walks off with another cookie, and Claire sits there grinning at how well that went.
Don't get used to things going well, though, because the partner meeting at Fisher & Diaz is about to start. Well, actually, Rico comes in and acts all pissy about the brothers starting without him, and Nate says he was just reading David's proposal while they waited for Rico. "Proposal?" Rico asks. "What proposal?" David says that now that it's the end of the corporate year, they should talk about reinvesting in the company rather than taking their traditional bonuses. Rico agrees. David says they should buy a crematory. Rico disagrees. Strongly. He complains, "People who want their loved ones cremated are people who don't want to spend money. There's no money to be made in cremation." And he gives David the proposal back without reading it. David says they save on overhead if they own their own, but Rico points out the $340,000 mortgage. "Here's another number to think about: 35%. Do you know what that number is?" The brothers don't. Rico says it's the percentage of their clientele that was Latino last year. "You know why it was so high?" Nate: "I'm not saying anything. I've already been called a racist once this week." Hey, it's already Thursday. Rico says it's because the name Diaz was added to their sign. "That's why we have all this extra money, because I'm bringing in the Latino community." And screwing them with their pants on, he doesn't add. "And there's no way I'm voting that we get a crematory," he finishes. David asks what Rico wants, then. Rico wants, for starters, another Spanish-speaking employee. Nate rolls his eyes, like I'm working on it, okay? Rico starts to talk about Latino community outreach, but David cuts him off to say they need to think about their future. "I don't think it's the future of Fisher & Diaz," he says. Rico takes it personally, even though David just tookcare to refer to the funeral home by its name, which, as Rico just got done pointing out, includes his own. "Oh, I get it," he says. "The Fisher boys are ganging up because you're afraid of losing a little control, huh?" Nate jumps in: "Wait, don't include me in this." David looks at Nate like, Why the hell not?
Ruth appears to have taken Claire's advice about going to a salon. Except she missed the part about how they don't live on the prairie, because apparently Ruth thinks there's only one hair salon in all of L.A. Now, I have to admit that I didn't see all of Los Angeles when I was there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that when it comes to hair salons, the entertainment capital of the world might have at least…at minimum…four? And yet Ruth has returned to the one where Ed Begley, Jr. as Hiram the Hairdresser plies his tonsorial trade. "I'm here to see you," she smiles. Wow, Ruth must really hate being alone.