Previously: Jack turns the lights off and tells Jill to "proceed as usual," doubtless setting off a lengthy spell of forearm-nibbling on his part. Elispa and Mikey find their living situation fascinating, and belabor this issue with various cronies. Mr. E issues an ultimatum about Mikey -- and Elispa chooses Mikey. Undaunted by their various "issues," Barto and Ferret vow to drag the wheezing carcass of their relationship through a couple more episodes.
Jack scuttles to the door carrying a rainbow-colored duster and a bath mat. Why hello, Poor Man's Transsexual Felix Unger -- is that your pasty white abdomen I see? For the first of what promises to be numerous times in the coming hour? I need a drink. Of arsenic. And here comes Jill -- who, to ensure that the audience makes no mistake about his newfound status as a photography hobbyist, now comes permanently equipped with a camera and assorted gadgets! "Locked out again?" Jack asks smugly, returning to her anal frenzy of Venetian blind detailing, or whatever. Jack wears stiff low-rider Toughskins and one of those doily-esque, bubble-sleeved peasant blouses favored by the barmaid on the St. Pauli Girl label. Though even the St. Pauli frau had the good taste not to wear a black bra under hers. "It's the third time this week!" she needles him. Jill rattles off all the places the keys might be, then grouses about Barto not being around to let him in. Jack fusses by the window, arranging the bathmat on the windowsill. Um, what? Perhaps the script directions read, "Engage in frantic busywork, the more nonsensical the better. PS: No one's watching anyway!" Meanwhile, a look of dawning realization from the Lucille Ball School of Sit-Comical Scheming manifests itself on Jack's chisel-face. "You know, you could always leave a spare key here with me, and I can leave one with you," she says. "Purely as your neighbor -- not as your girlfriend." Jill says, "Okay," rather warily and they quibble tiresomely about the "insignificant" kind of key exchange that goes on between neighbors, as opposed to the "way more significant exchange" represented by inter-relationship key swapping. Jill contemplates leaving his key with Audrey but decides not to, based on the possibility that she might lose it. Which is an extreme likelihood, since those Lycra unitards she's forever wearing don't seem to come equipped with pockets. "I guess you're my only choice," Jill grumbles, adding, "Or Miss Petroskie in 3C -- she seems nice," which is the cue for Jack to bat at him with the duster and fall cackling into his lap. The truth about Romeo? He's out of a job.
I don't know about you, but I'm glad Nick Drake offed himself before he had to see "Pink Moon" used to shill Volkswagens. And not that I'm anti-it, but the new gold dollar commercial makes me nauseous with the infinite regress of money being branded and marketed. What are we supposed to be thinking -- "Hey, I think I'll go buy me some of that funky fresh cash the kids are talking about"?!
Cue Ferret Flashdance (tm Wendola), with a heavy dose of Midriff Mania. It's a brash suggestion, but I'd argue that the most irksome recurring character ever to darken this show's doorstep is the Ferret's aerobics instructor-cum-Jazzercise mentor. Here's a sample of her dialogue: "And one and two and three -- SHUH, DADA and fo', five, six, seven and eight oh one, HAH, and two and three and fo' -- just a riff -- and BUH, five-six, TATA and HUNH, oh one . . ." You know what I'm getting at. And she has oval wire-frame glasses that, though chosen by the costume designer to scream "Edgy Downtown Artsiness," succeed only in muttering "Bargain Bin at Lenscrafters." The dance routine -- which consists of people creeping forward with their arms up, as if propelled by the centrifugal motion of their swiveling hips -- is interrupted by the bleep of Ferret's cell phone. She scurries to answer it, defusing the consternation of the Callanetics Coach by hissing, "It's my agent!" Ferret flees to the street outside the giant plate glass window of the aptly named "Dance Studio," responding to the call with histrionic glee and much flailing of arms and legs. The class gathers to watch this strange victory dance, the instructor beaming with pride as if the ferret were her own love child from, say, a drunken tryst with a mongoose. Don't even bother -- Madonna's got the film rights. "I got the audition!" Ferret gloats to the assembled unemployed aerobicizers.
"It's a mewvie!" she tells a distracted looking Barto. "Dan says it's Flashdance meets Jerry Maguire." A shout-out to the forums? Stoosh thinks so. "And Spike Jonze is attached to direct!" Ferret adds, causing me to spit up a shot of strychnine laughing. Yes, I'm sure Jonze got right on the horn with his agent after wrapping Being John Malkovich and said, "Darius? I want my script to be a departure. I'm thinking of a feel-good song and dance flick with a mink -- no, a polecat! Anyway, some member of the weasel family in the lead role. Lots of stretching and chewing -- and torso action! The signature scene will have the weasel's agent shouting, 'Show me your tummy!' over the phone. We'll get Willis for the lead . . ." But I digress. "I don't know how Flashdance meets Jerry Maguire, but I'm proud of you, baby," Barto mumbles, obviously incapable of caring less. "I can't find my Bio-Chem notes," he trails off, shuffling papers. "Dan says they're looking for an unknown, and no one's more unknown than me, right?" Ferret persists, finding the notes and handing them to Barto with a weird, unbecoming grimace. Smitten, he says, "Look at you, you're totally gonna get this part." "Ya think?" Ferret fishes. "I knooow," he schmoozes, "and, even if you don't, I'll still hang out with ya." He smooches her giggling yap, then returns to rifling through his papers and carping about finals. "I should leave you alone," says Ferret and Barto says, "No . . . yeah. No . . . probably." "So one more year of this, huh?" Ferret asks, and he mumbles something about rotations and residency. "So we'll be able to complete a conversation in what -- a decade?" she says. "Eight years tops," Barto says, taking her pointy little chin in his hand and kissing her as he heads out the door. "Great!" Ferret enthuses. Her face darkens until Barto pops back in to say, "Congratulations," restoring the wall of teeth to its featured spot on her face.
Shaker Shack. Elispa walks into the kitchen in a navy-blue bellbottom pantsuit, looking like the product of an unholy union between Shaft and Judith Light. She checks the contents of various empty cereal boxes, tossing each aside and saying, "Mikey." The knuckle-scraper himself stumbles down from the Lecher Loft scratching himself. They have a terse exchange wherein she asks if he's seen her keys and he says he hasn't seen the floor since he moved in. She locates the keys and exits, just as Mikey finds her discarded banana peel and says, "Dude!"
Here's a familiar scene: Jill watches morosely as his key is copied in a hardware store, while Mikey, Arch Enemy of Commitment, recites an epic catalogue of risks he's taking in doing so. Jill protests that a key is just a key, but Mikey insists that "it's a symbol," and that "thing you know she'll be stealing your favorite sweatshirt and taking the messages off your machine, and BAM! She's got one of your drawers." Um, Mikey, if you'd been paying attention you'd know that Jack got into Jill's drawers back in February, so you're a little behind the curve. But carry on, by all means. "Once you give Jack that key," he drones, in a voice dripping with foreboding, "you're giving her an all-access pass to your entire life! And she willuse that pass, bro!" It's anyone's guess why Simon Rex parts his hair somewhere centimeters above his left ear, in a part zone heretofore utilized only by bald men attempting comb-overs. Perhaps there are some truths about Romeo best left unknown. "I'll have a pass, too," Jill says. Mikey asks what he's going to do with it and Jill gets flustered, whining, "Wait, are we talking symbolically, or for real? I'm confused here." Mikey hands him the finished key, uttering the menacing non sequitur, "You feeling me now?" Jill pouts.
Jack walks down the hall in the denim jacket and pants outfit popularized by TV's Chachi Arcola. She pauses outside her apartment to listen to the barking and braying noises emanating from within. She walks in to find Ferret talking loudly to herself. "I'm acting," Ferret explains, and Jack gives a "whatever" shrug, presumably because at no time in that sentence was her name mentioned. She excuses herself to take a shower. Ferret, woefully bereft of mini-braids, sports a lank, bi-level shag that emphasizes the Cubist deformity of her features. She asks why Jack doesn't shower at the gym, and Jack reasserts her role as the show's lovably Howard Hughesian germ freak, squealing, "Like, a jillion people shower there, I don't need some crazy foot fungus." Takes one to know one, sister. Audrey ponders Jack's banal anality, then remembers that Jill brought by a present and hands it to her. Jack's teeth come to the fore as she opens a jewelry box containing Jill's key. She shows the key to Ferret with a smile intended to be winsome, but weighing in instead at loathsome. "God, you're easy," Ferret says as Jack scurries off with the key.
Mikey wraps up some shaggy-dog story he's telling his latest conquest, opening the door of the Shaker Shack to find copious evidence of Elispa's commitment to Bad Housekeeping. His date wears a bib with no coat, though it's ostensibly New York in early March. "I thought you said you lived with a girl," says Ms. Nobody, a departure from Mikey's usual type with her non-Aryan features and mild-mammaried figure. She is, however, sporting cherry-red disco pants, stiletto mules, and a Julianna Margulies-style poodle perm. Mikey insists that his room is spotless and it's Elispa who's the slob. Hotpants asks if that's his way of trying to get her into his bedroom, and he says, "One of 'em." Wait a second, what's so special about his bedroom? I fail to understand the significance of this banter. Maybe he has board games in there. She excuses herself to primp, and Elispa walks in just as Mikey enters a brief tidying frenzy. She asks blithely if he's happened to go to the market, and when he says, "No, I don't think so," she mutters, "Of course not," and turns to leave. Mikey asks if she's planning to do the dishes and she says she'll get them tomorrow. Does anyone sense a "Roommate Forum" coming? Or perhaps a story line poached from the archives of other knee-slapping roommate comedies like Perfect Strangers? I don't. "It's like living with Johnny Depp," Mikey says. Ha? Ha.
A bulbous-nosed woman wearing a skin-tight buttercup-yellow shirt transfers pasta onto plates before answering a knock at the door. Her hair is a bedraggled mess, as is everyone's in Jack-'n'-Jillville. It's Ferret knocking, her Demoiselles d'Avignon look continuing unabated with another ruler-straight shag that makes her face look like a distended tomahawk. "Hi!" perks Pasta Girl, her nipples blatantly showing, perhaps due to an insouciant omission of undergarments. Ferret looks annoyed and asks where Barto is, then breezes in to discover the cozy dinner al dente being whipped up by old Visible-Nipples. "Did Barto cook all this?" she asks, and VN says, "No, I brought it over. We're gonna be up all night studying, so I figured he'd probably get hungry." Ferret looks squeamish and VN asks if she wants to stay, because there's plenty of food -- and visible nipples -- to go around. Ferret says she has to go to an audition and VN wishes her good luck, then muses haltingly about how much fun acting and dancing are, "especially compared to studying twelve hours a day." Ferret shuts her down with a curt "it is fun," causing VN to gnaw on her hyper-reflective lip gloss and squeak, "Barto should be home any minute, if you want to wait . . ." Ferret says, "Can't," and tells her to give Barto the message that she dropped by. The irrepressible Visible-Nipples bubbles, "It's nice to see you again, Audrey!" Ferret reciprocates unconvincingly, revealing that VN's name is actually "Annie."
Jack walks down the hall of Twenty-something Terrace, wearing a lace-festooned floral slip-dress under a gray Perry Como cardigan. She knocks on Jill's door, then puts an ear to it before heeding the Manual of Sit-Comical Hijinks and letting herself in with her key. The Clarinet Of Incipient 'Splaining To Do makes itself known as she enters and sits on Jill's bed -- ostensibly intending to drop off her own key with a cutesy note. Jill's headboard is an Art Deco woodcarving of the Chrysler building that looks capable of impaling anyone who leans on it. Jack puts the key in the box, then rifles through her purse for a pen and paper. But it's the darnedest thing -- the pen doesn't work, so she has to open a drawer in the bedside table to look for one . . . and it just happens to be the drawer where Jill's journal is kept! Of all the -- but Jack fondles the other knick-knacks in the drawer before closing it and starting her note, which she doesn't finish, because she's too busy fishing Jill's diary out of its drawer and reading it, with accompanying hyperbolic eyebrow gymnastics! Jill's voice helpfully reads along, accompanied by the Ragtime Noodlings Of Trespassed Privacy: "July 30, 1993: It was the most amazing sex I've ever had. Becky's so open! I can't imagine ever feeling this free with anyone else. Except maybe Antonio Banderas, but he doesn't return my calls!" Oops, it segued into Ivan Sergei's diary at the end there. "The most . . . amazing sex . . ." Jack whispers, circumflexing her eyebrows as Barto barges in to catch that varmint red-handed! Jack swallows guiltily and says, "Hi!" but Barto's not buying it. He's clearly read Jill's diary enough times to recognize it on sight. "Barto, please don't tell him, it was an accident," Jack sputters, putting the journal back in the drawer. "An accident," says Barto, his voice dripping with righteous sarcasm. "I'm begging you," she whimpers. Barto fixes her with a THC-laced glare and says, "You know about the code, don't you? Buddies over babes?" How could she not know about it, it's needlepointed into samplers on every wall of the Bachelor Barn -- right to the samplers reading, "We're all gay!" "Couldn't you overlook the code? Just once?" Jack whispers plaintively to Barto's impassive face. "Look, it will never happen again," she blathers, claiming not to have actually read anything and promising to forget everything she didn't read. "I just skimmed," she fibs, "It was just -- more of a skim -- please?" Barto cocks his head inscrutably and Jack slumps with resignation.
So Harry Hamlin, who never even made it as a B-list movie star, will now play one on TV. How meta. Is it just me, or does he look cryogenically preserved?
Jack putters mournfully around Mikey and Elispa's trashed apartment, commiserating with Mikey about how bad it is. They discuss the profile of a "closet slob" -- someone who cleans up just before company comes over, so "no one ever knows the truth about her." Wow, kind of like Romeo! "I guess you don't really know someone until you live with them," Jack concludes, spurring Mikey to ask about Ferret. "Drinks a lot of tea; picks things up with her toes," Jack says. While I ponder that unsavory image, Jack launches into some turbo-anality about making a chore list for division of labor. Lots of references to grout and "dust-busting," all leading up to Jack suddenly blurting, "Can I ask you something about sex?" Which is greeted with an impish Mikey face and the statement, "Are you gonna take notes?" Ha? Nah.
"Well it's like he's a human garbage dithpothal," gripes Elispa. "Ugh -- and the combinations!" "I know, he's got a different take on food," Jill says, fussing with some kind of tripod to reassert his newfound identity as the late-blooming male Annie Leibovitz. "How can anyone enjoy M&M's dipped in hummus?" Elispa babbles. "It's like an insult to the entire Mediterranean culture." Actually, the Mediterranean Board of Public Relations is so pleased with the breakout success of Melina Kanakaredes that they wouldn't care if Mikey ate the shroud of Turin with salsa. But that's neither here nor there. "I'm sure Mikey didn't mean to insult all the Mediterraneans," Jill says, adjusting yet another complicated lighting implement -- because, like all jobless photography dilettantes, he has cash to burn on state-of-the-art equipment. Jill urges her to express her disgruntlement to Mikey, but Elispa insists that crying over spilled food is too petty. "Buy food he won't like," Jill suggests. "Health food stuff, like soy milk, bean curd, wheat grass!" "Then we'll both starve to death," quips Elispa. Jill strikes an "I am a camera" pose and Elispa suddenly appears framed by the lens. "So is Audrey paying you for these headshots?" she asks. Jill admits that they haven't actually talked money yet, and Elispa says, "Isn't it nice that we can be so honest with our friends?" Jill pokes his head up like a Whack-a-Mole and the thing we see is a series of black and white shots of Elispa mugging heinously.
Ferret sits brunching with her smarmy agent, who oozes, "Believe it, gorgeous, ya made it!" She asks about the competition and the agent, with immobile features and no inflection, says, "Two, and you're ten times better than both of them," then hisses, "I'm telling you, Audrey, this is only the beginning. You're going to have a major career!" Ferret fishes for flattery, asking how he knows, and the expressionless agent -- whose face is clearly no stranger to the business end of a Botox needle -- says, "You have a quality, and people are going to see that," adding, "You're gonna be huge, and I'm gonna take you there." Ever susceptible to her own hype, the Ferret giggles toothsomely and says, "Okay!"
"How you feeling, Zane?" asks Harry Shearer, whose career must have taken a dizzying nosedive for him to be doing a generic walk-on as Barto's advisor. Barto says he's tired and the advisor starts talking about how much better Barto's grades are. "That's a good thing, right?" Barto asks. "Well, it is if you're putting yourself in the running for the research fellowship at Duke," says Dr. Shearer, instigating a tiresome exchange wherein Barto professes ignorance of the Duke residency and Shearer offers to get it for him if he aces his finals. "Gotcha," Barto says. "And don't say, 'Gotcha,' says Shearer, in lovable old curmudgeon mode. Barto starts nodding off in his chair due to the righteous weed he clearly wake-and-baked with before his breakfast meeting. Shearer says, "Still here?" and he beats a hasty retreat.
Horror of horrors, it's Jack in a frilly negligee topped by a feathery crimson bolero jacket. I'll try to make this as painless as possible. Jill is lying on the bed reading gay porn and looks nonplussed by her come-hither getup. She kicks off her chunky, open-toed mules and Jill asks, "What's going on?" "I want you to close your eyes," Jack wheezes, advancing on the bed, "and imagine." "Imagine what?" Jill asks as she straddles him. "Just imagine -- we're in church," she says. "What?" Jill says. "Wait, I wrote it all down," she says. "We're in church, and it's almost empty. Almost, but not quite. And I take you behind a pew." Unless that "almost, but not quite" was a reference to an apse filled with members of 'NSync, I don't think Jack will find any takers for this fantasy in Jill's body. She palpates his face and says, "I'm gonna rock your world like it's never been rocked before." She starts ingesting his earlobe and he says, "I don't know what I did to deserve this, but I'm very grateful!"
"Duke, huh? That's in North Carolina, right?" Mikey asks, following Barto down a street twinkling with the perennial ManNOTtan X-mas lights. "Madison said he would personally recommend me, isn't that amazing?" Barto says. Mikey asks if this means Barto will be breaking up with Audrey, since three months is a long time to spend apart. "In dog years, maybe, but as an actual human couple I think we would still recognize each other afterward, yes." There's just one problem with that reasoning, and it lies in the "actual human" part -- but if Barto has yet to learn that denial ain't just a river in Egypt, who am I to tell him to get some Tampax and get on with his life? Mikey and Barto browse at what may be the most unrealistic magazine stand ever cobbled together for a throwaway scene on a doomed teledrama. "Besides, maybe she'd go to North Carolina with me," Barto mumbles. "It's the summer, she's not doing a show right now . . . it'd be like a vacation for her." They walk off, taking their magazines without paying -- because in ManNOTtan, stores run on the honor system.
All of a sudden: Times Square. And I'm sure Randi Mayem Singer thinks s/he's trumped me and manimal with this sudden location turnabout. But to her I say this: the only people who actually go to Times Square are tourists fresh off the plane from L.A.. Undaunted by this fact, Ferret and Elispa stroll idly past the neon Virgin Records billboard in two of the most unflattering hats I have ever seen. "Everything's starting to fall into place," Ferret says. "What, does that surprise you?" Elispa asks, in her maroon cloche hat and walrus hide topcoat. Ferret explains that everything's been so hard for so long that she's grown to expect "that kind of grind." Yes, the grueling days of glorified aerobics and languid stretching must come to a close. Who's been paying Ferret's rent all this time anyway, the SPCA? "You detherve this, Audrey," Elispa exhorts. Ferret grimaces amiably in a navy blue watch cap that emphasizes the freakish tininess of her head. "Barto must be flipping out though," Elispa adds. "If you do get this, you'll probably be in L.A. for a few months. You're probably gonna be gone a lot." The Ferret waxes Stanislavskian, saying, "It's part of the job." She shrugs and bobbles her little pin head. "Maybe Barto can come with me to L.A. -- if I get the part," she says. "It'd be fun, he'd have a great time -- it'd be like a vacation!" Elispa evinces congratulatory joviality -- mixed with a certain cautionary reticence.
Jack pesters Jill about how good their recent bout of sex was, still dressed like an ambulatory feather duster. "You want me to grade it?" Jill scoffs. "Okay, sure: on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, what would you say?" she asks. Jill looks befuddled and Jack says, "Okay, fine. Would you say it was -- the best sex you could ever imagine having?" Jill asks what's going on, and she says something to the effect that she wants to up her averages. "Because you want to do this professionally someday?" Jill asks. Jack alludes to great sex Jill might hypothetically have had before her. "Leave Barto out of this!" Jill says. Or maybe he said, "What's that supposed to mean?" -- I was putting the final touches on the noose at the time. "It means who the hell was Becky and what did she do to make you feel so much more friggin' free than you ever were before?" She executes several 360-degree circuits with her eyes during the utterance of the words "friggin' free." One thing leads to another and she admits that she "skimmed" his journal while looking for a pen. "I snooped," Jack simpers, trotting out the ever-popular baby whisper in recognition of the magnitude of her crime. "I didn't mean to," she says, as Jill drags his scrawny torso out of bed and starts preparing to retreat to the Bachelor Barn. "So this is what you do with my key?" he whines. "I tried not to," she says and he says snidely, "At least you tried." "It was only for a second!" she protests. "You went through my stuff, Jack." "I was out of line," she admits, and they trade more scintillating dialogue until he storms out. "Does this mean I don't make you feel free?" Jack screeches as the door closes behind him.
I'm sorry, but "You've got it together with Kotex" just doesn't have the same mesmeric ring to it as "Girl, get some Tampax and get on with your life."
Irrepressible shutterbug that he is, Jill scans a sheet of prints as Barto prepares to leave. "Library?" Jill asks. "Audrey, then library," says Barto, still hearkening to the "everybody in khakis" mandate laid down in winter of '98. Jill smirks and starts fondling his zoom lens. Jack comes in just as Barto's leaving and they share a charged moment. "He knows," she whispers and Barto expresses relief. "I was gonna tell him," he mumbles. "You know -- the code." Jack wears a flower-embroidered cardigan that looks like the top to a pair of Lanz of Salzburg pajamas. She sets down a hatbox in front of Jill and takes its lid off. Jill looks bemused as she says, "There it is, my entire life. All my deepest, most private thoughts -- notes my girlfriends and I passed in class, love letters from first boyfriends, everything that's ever happened to me." Um, including medical charts from that clinic in Stockholm? "I want you to take it and I want you to go through all of it," she says. More blather is exchanged and Jill starts removing tchotchkes from the stupid box.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Statue of Liberty. They don't kid around when they decide to shoot in New York! But just for one second, let's ponder the likelihood of any New York resident wandering through Times Square and Ellis Island within a twenty-four-hour period. What do you think the odds are we'll be seeing Grand Central Station before this is all over? Manimal? Stoosh? Is anyone listening? Barto and Ferret sit hunched on a bench while raptors circle ravenously, apparently having learned from the E! Channel that these actors' careers are dead in the water. "This is what I call quality time," Barto whimpers. They talk about Ferret's pending audition and Barto's "grueling" exam. Barto says he has to get his notes to Annie, spurring Ferret to ask if she's, like, his only study buddy. Barto explains that she's the only person he trades notes with because she gets them back on time. Ferret looks pensive in her pinhead-accentuating watch cap and orange overcoat. Barto asks if she's jealous and Ferret says, "No, but you do spend a lot of time together and it's only obvious she likes you." "And I like you, what's your point?" Barto asks. "Nothing," says Ferret, the Ferret-playing actress doing a rather deft job of communicating suppressed anxiety. She excuses herself to go practice her lines and wishes Barto luck. She leaves him sitting alone on the bench, staring pensively at Lady Liberty. But just then Ed Koch and Woody Allen float by on the Empire State Building and invite him to a Mets game, so he cheers up.
Mikey officiously posts a list of chores, then starts foraging in the cupboards for Elispa's snack items. He opens up some condiment or other and starts devouring it as Elispa walks in with a look of revulsion on her face. Mikey, wearing a shirt that says, "Geese," spits out what looks like mayonnaise and says, "Ack, what is this crap?" Elispa pours a teaspoon of orange juice into a glass and shakes the empty container, staring at Mikey with murderous rage. She puts the glass down without washing it and Mikey makes a noise of disgruntlement. "We need to have the thing, the thing: what did you call it?" she barks. "It's called 'forum,'" Mikey says. A shout-out to this forum? Stoosh thinks so. "I'm calling it: right here, right now. Forum, baby!" says spunky Elispa, whose anger is rendered all the more menacing by the fact that she is wearing candy-stripe jammies. "Good," Mikey says. Because I have some issues to discuss myself." "What could you pothibly have to dithcuth with me?" Elispa protests. Whoa, sister: say it, don't spray it. "How 'bout the fact that you don't understand the concept of a sponge?" Mikey says. Elispa shrieks, "Oh, I understand the conthept of thponge! It's what you do every day when you eat all my food!" Mikey contends that having a couple spoonfuls of Elispa's tofu ice cream "hardly compares to trashing [the] apartment on a daily basis." "What, is that why you wanted to live with a girl, so everything would be all clean and pretty?" Elispa aggresses. "I wasn't trying to live with a girl," Mikey squeals. "I don't even consider you to be a girl!" Does that mean she falls into the "buddies" sector in the "buddies over babes" rule? Moreover, is this gender inscrutability what made her attractive to Jill? "Oh!" says Elispa, gesticulating histrionically. "You know what? This forum is over!" "Fine with me!" Mikey says, slamming some can against the counter to "bang the gavel." "That was a nice effect," he reassures himself, as Elispa beats a hasty retreat.
Ferret does a line reading at the aptly named "Casting Company," to the strains of some latter-day Abba/Fleetwood Mac hybrid. Mustachioed producers pass around her stringy-haired headshot and watch, riveted, as she gnaws her way through a scene. She has on her Vishnu sand sculpture shirt and a suede jacketlet over a Lycra midi-skirt: a winning combination if ever there was one. Cut to a room full of pseudo-students -- including Barto and Annie -- completing a multiple-choice test, as I'm sure all exams are in med school. Annie sneaks surreptitious glances at Barto as he darkens circles in a charismatic fashion. Meanwhile, Ferret walks through the throngs of people waiting to audition with a smug expression on her face. She waits to turn a corner before lapsing into self-congratulation, hissing, "Yesss," and pumping her hand in the air. Back in school, the instructor collects the exams and Barto's face assumes a cryptic, self-satisfied expression.
Jill sits buried in Jack's juvenilia, unconscious with boredom. Jack knocks and bustles in to quiz Jill on his reaction to her belles lettres. He mentions that he liked one picture where she's wearing an Oreo bikini as a child. Jack insists they were Hydrox, which I suppose is the cookie-bikini way of implying that one has a D-cup. Jill says he didn't read the whole diary, but he "got the gist." Jack takes this as a slight on her escapades and an indication that he finds her life boring. Jill protests that it just "wasn't that juicy a read. I'm sure it was fun to live," he adds. Jack runs the speed trial of facial gymnastics she's known for, asking if he read various highlights -- like the part where she "had sex in the back of Craig Arosella's car!" "The car was parked in a garage," Jill says. Which reminds me -- I'm going to sit in the garage for a spell with the engine on. If I'm back in ten minutes, shoot me. "It's not like you were on a crowded subway or something," Jill remarks. Jack persists, asking if he remembers reading about the time when she jumped in a swimming pool with all her clothes on -- in front of people! "Two people, your best friends, no clothes removed," Jill objects. Jack insists that was the intention, and that denim is way heavy when wet! Here Amanda Peet demonstrates the cutesy, mugging qualities that made L.A. Times Magazine call her a "whiplash beauty," causing me to recoil so suddenly in disgust that I sustain severe trauma to my spinal column. "You are so cute," Jill enthuses, and Jack gets all menacing, saying, "Don't call me cute." Jill says, "Wha?" as Jack gathers her belongings. "It just so happens that I am a very dangerous kind of person," she says, gesturing frantically with a wilted corsage and knocking stuff over on her way out. "I can be edgy," she vows, pausing at the door. Could this be the "comedy stealth bomb" the Daily News was talking about? If so, it's so stealthy it snuck right by me.
Elispa and Mikey at @Bar, downplaying their roommate antagonism over a couple of frosty lagers. "Some of this is me dealing with the whole Jonathan thing," lisps Elispa, "I don't deal well with the whole breakup thing." "You deal with it a lot better than I deal with it," flatters Mikey. "You don't deal with it," hardy-hars Elispa, to which Mikey responds, "Exactly." Mikey produces a draft of a personal ad he just supposedly placed in The Voice, which asks for "a cool, non-stealing person who'll do housekeeping for forty-five bucks a week." Elispa reminds him that no one will take a job that pays $45 a week. I guess that was a set-up for Mikey's climactic joke, which is: "There's a lot of desperate people in the city -- trust me, I serve 'em drinks!" Elispa's all "cheers" to that and they clink glasses.
Barto knocks on Ferret's door while she bustles around wearing a chenille bathrobe festooned with rubber duckies. "Are you decent?" Barto asks, then says, "Damn," when he sees her fuzzy get-up. They kiss soulfully, then ask each other about the audition and exam. It's revealed that both will find out the results "in a few days." Ferret says that she'll be in L.A. for a few months if she gets the part, but she was hoping Barto could "come with." Barto, whose hair in this scene has the approximate consistency of dryer lint, ripostes that he was "kinda hopin' [she'd] come with [him]." "Where are you going?" Ferret says, in a tone expressing incredulity that Barto could mobilize to do anything in his perpetually stoned condition. Barto reveals that he's cultivating a research fellowship in North Carolina. Things get ugly, with lots of back and forth about Barto springing the research fellowship on Ferret, and Ferret's new fast track to stardom. "Barto," she intones gravely, "if I move to L.A because I'm getting work as a professional actress, that's not a bad thing." "It is if I wind up taking a residency in Boston," Barto grumps. Ferret asks what he wants from her, and Barto says he wants her to look at her life, then at his life, then decide whether she can see "our life." For one thing, they'll have to add a sky dome to the Habitrail. And a much bigger salt lick. "Not right now," Ferret admits. Barto expresses indignation at the fact that "someone's gonna have to compromise down the line, and [Ferret] assumed it would be him." "You assumed it was gonna be me," says the Machiavellian minx. "I assumed it would be both of us," Barto mopes. "So tell me how that works, Barto," Ferret says. "Really, tell me how that works." Barto looks brutalized as Ferret flounces off to the shower.
That new Pringles commercial is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. So scary that it's forced me into the arms of Ruffles.
Elispa and Mikey gaze expectantly at a man who looks like a cross between Johnny Rotten and an extra on the Leprechauns mini-series. "So, you got any cleaning experience?" Mikey asks. "I took a shower on Tuesday," he says, as they make uproarious "ruh-roh" faces. it's a redhead whose cleavage is concealed by a duster. "We're a naked maid service -- or just topless if you prefer!" Mikey is predictably elated, but Elispa says, "We'll let ya know." The candidate is a large Slavic woman droning about getting thrown off the East German swimming team. "It was not my forte: they made me take those pills," she says, and we're to understand that this is funny because she's ungainly and has a wacky Colonel Klink accent. "Your carpet is filthy," she says slyly, and Mikey and Elispa glance bemusedly at each other, thinking, I suppose, what a gas it is to not be old, fat, bipolar or from an impoverished Eastern European city. is SNL's Chris Kattan, tricked out to look like Andy Dick. His character is concerned about the number of windows -- for "when they come." And I don't know about you, but this particular stereotype of an urban paranoid schizophrenic just never gets old for me.
Jill walks into the Bachelor Barn and finds a note from Jack on the primary kitchen island. What do you know, she wants to meet him at Grand Central Station! The camera glances lingeringly at the Chrysler building as it makes its way down Grand Central's facade to the smirking maw of Amanda Peet. Jill sprints toward her and asks where they're going, and it turns out Jack's hatched a kooky scheme where they're going to have sex on a Queens-bound train. Naturally, Jack has compulsively planned these impromptu monkeyshines, finding out that there's ten minutes of tunnel time -- so if they're certain to be having sex when the train hits the tunnel, they may not get arrested! What could be sexier than that -- except maybe the logic section of the GRE? "Even if we do get arrested, who cares," burbles the impetuous Liver-Lips, "because I'll have a wild and crazy entry in my journal!" "You don't have to do this," Jill says -- but I'd go even further, saying, for the love of all that is human, you MUST NOT DO THIS. "And if this doesn't take Becky Hart out of the running in the 'feeling free' department then I say we just find that girl and have a ménage a trios!" Jack brays. It's an Olympian task to recreate the loathsomeness of this moment but, as this show's reluctant Boswell, I must try. The split second Jack says "trois," which she pronounces "twa," she unfurls her top lip from her unsightly chompers and starts neighing in falsetto like a birthing mule. She then jiggles her shoulders, face twitching in a strange rictus of self adoration. Naturally, Jill finds this beguiling. "I love you," he simpers and she says, "I know you love me, but you're not going to love me for very long if you don't stop thinking of me as some fuddy-duddy." Fuddy-duddy? Wild and crazy? Clearly Jack's been channeling Barney Fife again. Or Mr. C. Or any other number of authority figures cast in Ron Howard vehicles. "Your diary, my journal, Becky Hart, it's in the past -- who cares?" says Jill, echoing the thoughts of the viewing audience (with special emphasis on manimal and myself) regarding the entire season of this show. "But I'm not wild and crazy!" Jack reiterates. It would seem that the dialogue is now being generated by a parrot with voice recognition software. "You ran out of your own wedding and drove to New York to start a whole new life. You then broke up with this incredibly stable guy to get on a horse with me -- come to think of it, I've gotta keep my eye on you," Jill says. Jack, pleased with this flattering portrait of herself, morphs into some teeth on stilts and says, "Thanks." Jill asks if they can still have sex on the train and Jack starts backing sinuously toward the door before breaking into braying guffaws as Jill grabs her. But they don't make much headway, because they run into Rudy Giuliani in the lobby, sharing a big apple with Spike Lee and Central Park.
Annie and Barto edge toward the board where their grades are posted. The board is swarmed with extras doing their best to look academically anxious. "Oh, I bombed, I know it," Annie says, and Barto says, "I'm sure you did fine," administering a brief, patronizing shoulder fondle. She checks the board and turns around with a predictable look of giddy astonishment. "I told ya," Barto says, shoving her aside and edging to the board. He has an abrupt spastic fit, wherein he pumps his arms in the air and shrieks, "YES!" four or five times before turning to the repulsed crowd and saying, "Hi. Good stuff. Moving on." Annie looks smitten with his egomaniacal outburst. They stagger down the halls in the throes of manic self-congratulation, stopping to embrace and say, "We did it!" Barto decides to call Audrey and scurries to a payphone, leaving Annie to fiddle with her matted hair, looking crestfallen. "Hi, it's me. Pick it up," he says stridently into the phone -- and I don't know about Ferret, but this kind of asinine imperative is precisely the reason why I screen my calls at all times. The expected response fails to come and Barto looks offended and slams down the phone. I guess in his world it's a violation of dating etiquette for someone not to be home at all times, on the off chance he might call to gloat about his academic triumphs. "She's not home?" asks Annie, manifesting false concern. "I guess not," says Doofus, with a Christ-like look of infinite -- but nobly borne -- suffering. Annie suggests they celebrate and Barto hesitates for a split second before heartily agreeing. She looks elated, as would anyone anticipating an evening of face time with a smug, perpetually congested stoner.
Elispa lounges in a cardigan the color of St. Joseph's Children's Aspirin. Mikey hunches forward, oxymoronically -- and moronically -- assuming the posture of Rodin's Thinker. "What was I thinking?" he groans. "You can't find a normal person for $45 a week!" "It was a noble effort," Elispa says, just as there's yet another knock on the door in lovely buzzerless, doorbell-free, no need to lock up downtown ManNOTtan. Mikey goes to answer it and it turns out to be Belinda, that lovable recurring character who stole our hearts with her penchant for skintight psychedelic costumes and cutesy, brain-dead dialogue. Mikey looks nonplussed until she tells him she's there to answer the ad. Elispa comes over, spurring Belinda to babble, "Oh my God! Could it get any more co-inky-dinky than this?" She tells them she's short on cash and "really [enjoys] working with Windex!" Thankfully, the camera pans out so we can see the full derangement of her current costume: a blue paisley shirt with a giant golf collar over turquoise and black leopard print leggings! Please, let her stay! Elispa, echoing my sentiments, dismisses Belinda momentarily and starts pleading with Mikey to hire her. Mikey evinces heretofore non-evident moral scruples, saying, "I fired her. And then I dumped her. Now I'm gonna make her my maid? That's not right!" "She's comfortable with it." Elispa insists. "Totally comfortable," says the irrepressible fashion criminal from beyond the front door. "I think we should do it," Elispa wheedles. "We know her, we trust her, we like her!" "That's so sweet!" Belinda squeals. "Well, she is resilient," Mikey says, to which Belinda exults, "Yes!" "Okay, now she's scaring me," says the Lisp, and they rush to the door to share a clinch of joyous communion, during which we get a view of Belinda's purse: a mini-lunchbox painted with yellow, orange and black flames. It looks like a big square candy corn, and I thank the gods of television for reintroducing Belinda -- and her bitchin' accessories -- to the dreary subplot of Mikey and Elispa's furtive courtship.
Ferret, in pleather and pigtails, walks listlessly down the street toward the Habitrail Hideout. Her smarmy agent leaps out of a cab and strides toward her. "Wait, I'm not ready," she says. "There are two possibilities: A, I didn't get the part and you came all the way over cause you wanted to let me down in person, or B, I did get the part and you wanted to come all the way over cause you wanted to see the look on my face when you told me." Smarmy Agent Man gives his best cryptic expression and Ferret says, "Oh God." She pinches her needle nose, her face extra-pointy with dismay. "It's B," he says. Ferret leaps into Smarmy's arms. "Oh my God I really got it? I got the part?" she shrieks. Smarm launches into his limited litany of agentisms: "You got it, gorgeous! I knew you would. And this is just the beginning." Ferret sits on her stoop, her pants hiking up to reveal the fact that she's wearing unbecoming Beatle boots with no socks. "Trust me," El Smarmo adds, gripping her spindly leg with his big, hammy paw. Ferret looks at his hand, then up at him. "I gotta go find Barto, because he's not gonna believe this," she says haltingly. "Thank you," she says, bonking him in the head with her bag as she brushes past him into Twenty-something Towers. "Dan" rolls his eyes as he remembers the first principle of Smarmy Agentism: Casting Couch before casting. D'oh!
Jill opens the door to find Jack, in a scoop-necked Navajo blanket sewn into a heinous pleated sweater-shirt. She holds up his key and says, "I don't deserve this." "What?" Jill snorts, taking the key. "I never should have snooped around in your stuff," she drones. "And even though I tried to make up for it by giving you my stuff --" "It wasn't exactly the same thing," Jill concludes. "So I don't deserve your key -- not yet, anyway," she says, "and I want to earn your trust back." This exchange is fraught with all kinds of enchanted expressions on Jill's part and ghastly smiles, whimsical pauses and eyebrow-jittering earnestness on Jack's part. "And maybe, when you're comfortable or if you're comfortable, you'll give it to me again," she says. Jill walks past in a blue oxford shirt the size of a topsail. He scrapes the key on the wall as if pondering her insipid speech, then gives it back to her. Eliciting the expected gum-baring grin and a cloying, "Reeeally?" Jill shrugs and says he packed all his personal stuff in storage. Jack giggles toothsomely and, in some perverse manifestation of puppy love, starts sniffing Jill's hand. Thankfully, Ferret stumbles in before we're subjected to a lengthy display of hand fetishism. "See that, you don't even need a key to get in here," Jill says -- and if that isn't a shout-out to our forums, then Stoosh isn't the only one in them. Ferret asks where Barto is and Jill says he went to the @Bar. Ferret runs out and suddenly Jill's on Jack like back hair on Barto. The door opens again and Ferret clears her throat and whispers, "I got the part." Jack emits a dog whistle shriek, causing Jill to double over in pain. "That's okay, I got another eardrum," he says. Amanda Peet flaps her gaping maw about, baring the billboard of teeth that is her calling card as a thespian. "She got it!" she squeals, to which Jill answers, "Wha?"
Ferret walks into @Bar as the Gritty Funk Song Of Dashed Hopes blares on the soundtrack. The Crème-de-Cassis makers of America must have had a hand in keeping this show on the air, because everyone in the bar is drinking kir. Including Annie -- a.k.a. Visible Nipples -- who sits giggling across from Barto. He toasts himself in full view of Ferret, whose look of happy recognition changes to a mask of wounded sexual jealousy. Behind her, the door of @Bar opens and Jimmy Breslin strolls in and sits at a table. "There are a thousand stories in the naked city," he says, "and even if this were one of them, it wouldn't be worth hearing."
week: They break down the sets and Simon Rex goes to Skinemax with his hat in his hand. I wake up on suicide watch at Bellevue, realizing it was all just a terrible dream.
To all my friends . . .