By Wing Chun
Radio station. Patrick does some cloying clowning about Marin "coming out of retirement" so that she can exposit that she's been off from her show for a week working on her book. Once she's settled in with her cans on, she gets her first call: James wants to go out with this girl he works with at the cannery, but she asked him out before he could ask her, and he turned her down and now doesn't know what to do. Marin chaffs him for his retrograde attitude, reminding her male listeners that it's the twenty-first century, and reverting to her old car analogy by saying that if guys aren't going to drive, they have to let women take the wheel, or they won't get anywhere. She ends with the obligatory episode-defining thesis question: "Does it really upset the balance of a relationship if you let a woman take charge?" Seems to me like every relationship in Elmo would have to be dictated by the woman, given that all the women in town could fit in a mini-van with seatbelts to spare.
Speaking of a woman in charge: Jane's back in Elmo, ball-breaking her way up the sidewalk, muttering under her breath at the men moving too slowly for her. Marin manages to stop Jane when she blows right past Marin. They hug, and Marin asks why she's there: "Did someone die?" "Someone's career almost did," says Jane smugly, "but it's breathing now!" Jane holds up the magazine in her hand, and Marin gasps that it's The New Yorker: "You travelled four thousand miles just to bring me decent reading material? You'd better have In Touch, too." Jane says she flew all that way because she read Marin's first book chapter, and that it's Marin's best work yet: "I'm not the only one who thinks so." She flips open the magazine, revealing that, however implausibly, Marin's chapter's been published in the issue. Marin's shocked to see it, and gasps that it was just a first draft, and wasn't even polished. Jane says that her first draft was good enough for publication (also implausible, though I guess Jane could have edited it). Marin is still freaking out to be in The New Yorker, something she's always wanted, and Jane says that Marin had better thank her now, because she won't have time later given the nine publishers she's scheduled to meet with week. Okay, I really hate to keep harping on this, but if Jane were Marin's editor, she wouldn't be introducing her to publishers, because Jane would work for a publisher. I just don't understand why they don't call Jane Marin's agent when everything she does -- including placing excerpts in magazines -- is agent's work, but ANYWAY, Marin is gobsmacked to have attracted so much interest, and leans against a telephone pole to look more closely at the story, reading, "'The ...Menaissance'?" Jane crows that she came up with the title during an oxygen facial. Marin doesn't know what the hell it means, and Jane explains, "It's the return of the real man. A movement! Forget metrosexuals -- think retrosexuals. Women want a real man, and that's what you wrote about!" Marin shrugs that she didn't write about a movement, and then freaks out as she remembers that the first chapter of her book was all about Jack, and that she didn't even change his name yet. Jane doesn't care, and says he'll just be thrilled for Marin when he finds out she's been published in The New Yorker: "That's if he ever sees it. This is Elmo. Who here possibly reads The New Yorker?" Marin lets out a little Mean Girls giggle, because now that she's in The New Yorker, she's back to thinking of Elmo as a crappy little backwater burg that's beneath her station instead of the new home she loves. Shut up, Marin.
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