I know that a werewolf bar mitzvah is the day when a boy becomes a man, but what day is it called when a man becomes an old man? For me, I guess Saturday. I threw my back out last Saturday. But it was for a noble cause; I did it trying to haul my new (used) 27-inch TV up a flight of stairs in my three-story walk up. A day later I was staring at an email from my mother telling me to go here and to order it on her credit card. I'm 32.
But I persevered and now my old television, which was like watching reel footage of Mars from the reflection on a glass of milk, has been replaced by a brand used High Def-ish quality set.
So so so crystal clear can I see Pete watching a soon-to-be referenced TV movie on Lemon's couch. Lemon walks to the smell of maple syrup. She calls Tracey, and we get a split screen where Lemon is wearing glasses and Tracy is wearing Rerun's clothes from What's Happening. She reminds him to practice his Rerun dance for an upcoming sketch, but he can't concentrate because the smell of maple syrup on his block is making him horny. Weird, because he lives all the way in Jersey. Call waiting. It's Jack. Now he and Lemon share the split screen. According to my High Def-ish, he's reading the book A Republican Way of Life, and according to an Amazon search that book does not exist...either that, or it was published by Hachette. Anyway, Jack informs her of the maple syrup smell but tells her not to panic -- it's more than likely a Staten Island food manufacturing plant and not Northrax, a chemical agent that smells exactly like maple syrup and takes ten seconds to kill you. As they wait for impending death, Tracy pops back up in the now tri-screen, practicing his patented Rerun dance moves. I'm particularly giddy about the maple syrup anecdote because, as a New Yorker, I and half the city went through this very same olfactory alarm last year, as Gawker Media can attest.
Arriving home on a following day, Lemon eyes a small package in front of her apartment door: "All right, subscription shampoo!" But the package is addressed to her door neighbor, a Mr. Raheem Haddad. She knocks on his door in order to return it, and out pops one of the few things still funny about SNL, vet Fred Armissen (can you believe how awesome Boyd Tinsley's ass is?). Raheem "Fred" Dream snatches the package away from Liz.
Back in her apartment, Lemon suspects that something is amiss about their new Arab neighbor friend, but Pete doth protest, citing how Raheem repaired his toaster and showed him a back way to the airport. Lemon persists, despite not wanting to sound racist "that Pita Pocket might be a terrorist." I hate it when The New York Times deconstructs every fucking thing.
Lemon spots Raheem treating a children's playground like a military obstacle course while another Arab fellow videotapes it. "What the what," she exclaims, and when they spot her spying over at them, their faces grow grim like the one-hundred nuclear suns in the voice of the prophet. Lemon sulks away but is confronted by a series of public awareness signs that read, respectively, "If You See Something, Say Something," "If You Suspect Anything, Do Everything," and "We Don't Poison The World, Terrorists Do: a message from the Sheinhardt Wig Company."
Lemon rushes into Jack's office where he is conferring with his assistant, the very brown-skinned Jonathan. "I think my Middle Eastern neighbor is a terrorist and I don't know what to do." Jack feigns outrage at her suggestion until Jonathan exits, and then he gives Lemon the number of his guy at Homeland Security. What follows is a completely self-referential crushing of the fourth wall involving Verizon cell phones and the WGA strike. Tina takes the direct approach on-camera, asking NBC for the money. I don't really laugh, but my brain does.
Meanwhile, Pete and his buddy Raheem are going out to celebrate since Raheem has just completed some big project that he's been working on. "Soon, everyone will know the name Raheem Haddad," he seems to warn. Pete wants a high-five and Raheem reaches to hug him. After they leave, Lemon calls Jack's contact at Homeland Security.
The day Pete complains to Lemon that Raheem has gone missing, but when he accuses her, she threatens to place another phone call. He backs off. When she arrives home later, there is a package waiting for her from Raheem. It's an audition tape for The Amazing Race made by him and his brother, who jump around on it like giddy schoolgirls, screaming "we love America."
Lemon sees Raheem in the hallway of her apartment building, and he details his torture at the hands of shadowy American operatives. He has so much anger inside that now, he wants to do something "spectacular" with it. Lemon smells maple syrup, and Pete pops out with a stack of spectacular-looking waffles.
But where's Jack? Jack's in the barber's chair asking for the Ronald Reagan look when Lemon comes to thank him for talking her through the maple-syrup red-alert threatdown. He's getting his haircut for a party honoring Bob Novak and being hosted by John McCain and Jack Bauer. "I don't think he's real," spills Lemon. "I assure you, Lemon. John McCain is very real." Lemon lets out a clunker about not getting peer-pressured into invading Iran and Jack gives her a t-shirt from NBC parent company Sheinhardt Wig Company: Not "Poisioning Rivers Since 1997," it reads.
At Bob Novak's party, Jack has an encounter at the bar with a little lady who you might know from a little-bitty show called The Sopranos. Edie, or C.C., has to dance with Bill Frist, but before she takes her leave, Jack gets complimented on his hair and the sparks begin to fly. Later at the same conservative Republican Bob Novak party, Jack enraptures everyone with a piano rendition of the timeless "What The World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love)." C.C. Soprano looks on glowingly.
It's the day. Post-coital Jack thanks C.C. for a wonderful night of accident-prone sex on a wheeled ottoman. He turns on the television (television on!) to find the same C.C., his C.C., on a talking-heads news program. C.C. is actually Celeste Cunningham, a Democratic Congresswoman from Vermont, who is protesting the Sheinhardt Wig Company and their dumping of gallons of orange dye into a local Vermont river, turning them all into orange-skinned victims of big business. In the bathroom, C.C. spots Jack's Sheinhardt t-shirt, and the two hastily agree never to see one another again.
That only works, however, if they don't have some kind of cell phone mix-up, which they do. Jack agrees to meet her at the freight elevator. They do, and an argument ensues over the welfare of those little orange kids. Jack asks what happened to C.C. to make her that way; Edie Falco delivers pitch-perfectly my favorite line of the night: "In 1998 I got shot in the face by my neighbor's dog."
A Jack Russell shot C.C. in the face, forcing her to sue the dog and go under the knife for six reconstructive surgeries. But now she's much better-looking, and they even made a Lifetime original about her ordeal called A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World. It's a very SNL joke, but we do get treated to the other non-Armissen or -Arnett funny SNL cast member, Kristen Wiig. She plays the role of C.C. in the Lifetime original with deadpan bemusement. Back to present, where Jack says a whoreish thing to C.C., who slaps him, kisses him, slaps him, kisses him again. Tracy lurks in the halls, bearing witness to the whole thing, and wants to help Jack with his troubles of the heart.
In his bed, in silk pajamas, Jack watches C.C.'s Lifetime original. Wiig delivers a stirring monologue to the dog that accidentally shot her in the face and Jack, sipping his Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy, is thoroughly moved. Jack asks Tracy to help get him to the Clinton offices in Harlem, since he has to go incognito and no cabs will take him.
Once there, Jack stands outside C.C.'s office window on 125th Street with Tracy serving as his Cyrano. As he pleads for her to give them another shot at love, Tracy offers some seductive advice: "Tell her that you want your privates and her privates to do a high-five. Tell her that she got some Tig Ole Bitties like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Tell her you want her to donate her body to science and you science. Tell her, Jack!"
Jack and C.C. reconcile. They'll ignore their differences until the sex goes bad, and then they have sex in Bill Clinton's office. Hawt.
The third and least exceptional plot surrounds Kenneth. Kenneth hands Jack his freshly dry-cleaned suit, but it's missing the pants. Despite Jack's forgiveness, Kenneth vows to pay him back for it. "They cost $2,500 dollars," informs Jack.
Later Kenneth, wearing a Sheinhardt t-shirt, stands in the hallway looking troubled when Tracy walks by looking, for a split-second, exactly like Jay-Z. Tracy discerns the situation and comes up with a solution: "When I lose something, I yell real loud until I find it... Pants! Pants!! Pants!!! Pants!!!!" Grizz and Dot Com come running over with Sean John pants, eager to please, but this, to great regret, does not help end Kenneth's plight.
Upon hearing about Kenneth's desperate situation, Frank agrees to help him by offering him money to eat a bottle of ketchup. Then by scaring Lutz in an extra creepy-looking orangutan mask as he sleeps in the office. Lutz wakes up frightened and beats Kenneth with a golf club. I don't know about you guys, but this subplot has had too few returns for me. Where's Jenna? Finally, Kenneth earns enough to buy a replacement pair of Jack's pants, which it turns out Jack has several more pairs of in his closet. Ba-dum-bump.
Away with that, and please escort in the best lines of the night:
Jack's 30 Rock solid proof of our intent to evolve
"I get my haircut every two days. After all your hair is your head suit."
It just so happens that I own it on DVD. It's right to my "Worst Basketball Player In Indiana" trophy.
Lemon to Pete: "You know me. I never make assumptions about race. Remember? I asked that black guy if he had seen Sideways?"
Edie shows her chops
Jack: "I'll have a white rum, with a diet ginger-ale and a splash of lime."
C.C.: "Wow. I never would have pegged you for a University of Tennessee sorority girl."
Activate!
Grizz: "Did you retrace your steps?"
Dot Com: "Or go back to the dry cleaners?"
Kenneth, exasperated: "Yes, obvious twins."
Easy to hate freedom to
[A Doors song plays]
Lemon: "Nice ringtone, Jack."
Jack: "It's not my ringtone. I hate that San Francisco sound."
Donaghy longs to filibust that
C.C.: "I got all the way to Harlem when I heard Vagner coming from my phone."
Jack: "'Vagner'?"
C.C.: "I'm working out of the Clinton offices for a few weeks. I'm helping Hillary retool her universal health care platform."
Jack: "God I want to kiss you on the mouth to stop you from saying such ridiculous things."
A different shade of black, called statutory
Jack: "We're just on opposite sides of a feud."
Tracy: "Oh, I get it. Romeo and Juliet. Capulets and Romulans...I'm Black, she's White. I'm Black, she's light-skinned Black. I'm Black, she's seventeen."
And the Daytime Emmy goes to...Kristen Wiig!
[After being shot by the dog]
"I'm going to get into politics."
Raheeem "Fred" Dream
"America's government shocked my nuts."
Once more for clarification
C.C.: "In 1998 I got shot in the face by my neighbor's dog."
Jack: "C.C., I'm so...wait, what?"