Episode Report Card Djb: C | 3 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Sixty-Seven Weddings And Nine Funerals
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 10 | Aired on 08.21.2004
Bride Of FrankenDeadGuy sits in The Room Where People Are Sad, telling Nate and Rico, "I want a lot of flowers. I mean it. A lot. I don't want it to look like, y'know, like I didn't care, because I do. More than they'll ever know." Pause for where the dialogue should have been cut, and then the rueful postscript: "More than anyone." A young blonde girl sits next to Bride Of FrankenDeadGuy, clearly one of her daughters, as her mother continues on that she wants to find a kind of flower I can't spell and neither can my closed captioning, unless the word is spelled with three boxes and an accent grave. I think it's "umurawi," and it's "halfway between tulips and roses except that they have no thorns and they're usually purple or white." A steel-toed boot and a green thumb! What man in his right mind would drink himself to death to get away from this? Rico tells her that she can say a few words during the service if she'd like, and she stares off into space and speaks in a squeakier voice, "Hi. I'm Suzanne Wething. Some of you may have seen me kicking Rob in the parking lot at Jen's wedding. Naturally, he was already dead from alcohol poisoning, so you can all stop looking at me like that." Rico and Nate just look off into space while the little girl stares down at the floor. Awkward. Bride Of FrankenDeadGuy tells them all, "It's no secret. Paige knows. Your sisters know, don't they?" The girl I'll guess is Paige mutters, "Uh-huh." Bride Of FrankenDeadGuy looks back at Rico and lets him in on a little secret, phrased in the form of a Lifetime Movie: "Daddy was a drunk."
Why does the universe keep making me go to weddings? We join David "Homo Neuroticus" Fisher and Keith "And Tenille" Charles, walking though what I'll just call Fortunoff, David clutching a wedding registry in hand and announcing, "Waterford W-Collection Eleven-Inch Spire Stem Vase." Insert joke about gay men and eleven inches and I'll meet you on the other side of this sentence as soon as you're done high-fiving your frat brothers. Keith observes that "Terry doesn't fuck around." Of course he doesn't. Because all gay men are perfect. David suggests, "Maybe we should get married," and Keith observes, "So people can go on vase-buying errands for us?" Take it from someone with as deep a sense of wedding fatigue as you can possible imagine, Keith. The answer to that question is yes. The only other reason is for health insurance or if you're in a wacky '80s sitcom standing at the altar next to someone named "Dora." But David still has romantic notions of married life, and he counters that he wants to get married "so we can say all of those 'forever's and 'no matter what's." Keith says that they're already in each other's wills and that they basically are married, "even if the law refuses to recognize it. Then again, I refuse to recognize most of the Bush administration, so I guess it all evens out." And, okay. Clearly I have never agreed with a sentiment more strongly than I agree with everything -- except for the "most," which I would replace with "all" -- that Keith just said. But it was delivered in such a ham-handed, thuddingly unsubtle fashion that it's like David printed out the wedding registry on the back of the last six months of Graydon Carter's editor's letter. They suck. We know. Now let the moment breathe.