Props and sugar plums to Wing Chun, Key Grip, and especially Sars, who let me do this episode.
A whispery non-Angela voice-over prays:
Angel of God, a guardian dear,
To whom God's Love entrusts me here,
And with this day give and serve, to life,
to guard, to hold, and to guide, amen
as Rickie Vasquez stumbles and falls on his hands and knees in the snow. He's all beat up and crying. He crouches over the snow and spits out a mouthful of blood as red as holly berries. It's kind of not a festive thing, though. He pulls himself up, still crying, and staggers around the middle of a crowded sidewalk as the citizens of Don't-Give-A-Shitsville push by around him. Merry Stinkin' Christmas. Rickie shuffles off down a dark alleyway. The camera pans over to show a girl with a guitar sitting on the curb, watching him go. The girl is dressed in a raggedy coat and looks an awful lot like Juliana Hatfield. Wow, I knew solo careers could be hard, but I had no idea. She turns away and begins playing chords to "Silent Night." The notes fade out to the sound of wind blowing
We're at Minute 00:45. Are you choking back tears yet? I am. Jeez.
"Silent Night" fades in again, this time as piano chords. At the Chase house, Angela sits at the piano, casually plinking the keys with one hand. Tasteful holiday knickknacks abound. Patty don't go for that flocked crap. Danielle complains that she's not getting a bike for Christmas. "It's not fair! Angela got a new bike when she was eleven." "What do you do? Keep, like, a running tally of everything we bought for Angela?" asks Graham. "Well, yeah," says Danielle. She keeps it in a special Excel spreadsheet and occasionally migrates data from her FileMaker Pro log of "Things Angela Didn't Get Grounded For," which is in turn cross-indexed with the microfilm copies of Angela's diary.
Patty frets about getting a Christmas card from some people who she'd dropped from the list (a huge breach of Pattyquette); Danielle's radar picks up on the fact that Angela has new boots; Graham walks around with a string of lights in that classic let's-walk-around-clumsily-with-a-string-of-lights-to-signify-the-freneticness-of-the-holiday-season way. Angela just sits there. "How come we never go to church?" she asks. Everyone stops talking. "Uhhhhwell," says Graham. Patty starts saying, "Well, you know, in the last few years you girls, um -- haven't shown much enthusiasm" "So, do you believe in God?" asks Angela. More silence. Patty and Graham do tag-team hemming and hawing about believing in God without going to church, Graham being raised Catholic, blah blah. "We have certain, uh, certain differences," stammers Patty. "Which -- which doesn't mean that we don't --" Danielle stomps up from behind them and interrupts. "Do we have to keep talking about religion? It's Christmas."
So-Called Angels
“ Sharon looks exasperated. Her enormous hair bow suddenly wilts. ”
Cut to a music classroom, where the So-Called High School Multicultural Joy Choir sings "Away in a Manger." It's an unusually schmaltzy little moment for MSCL, but then again, it's Christmas. Out in the hallway, Rayanne and Angela walk by. "People really get swept up in this Christmas thing, huh?" says Rayanne. She's sporting a huge, pointy purple knit cap with a little pom-pom on top that makes her look for all the world like a demented sock monkey. Angela suddenly notices Rickie approaching them. "Oh my God!" she says. He's got a bruised eye. He says he's fine; he was running to catch the bus and slipped on some ice, and it was so embarrassing, blah blah. Angela and Rayanne just stare at him a moment. "So you landed on your face or something?" Angela asks. "Oh, I don't know -- how am I supposed to know?" says Rickie, distractedly. "Does anybody have quarters? I need to get a candy bar before sosh." (I guess the word would be "soc," since he means "social studies." But that just doesn't look right. ["Sociology? But would a high school offer a sociology class? I've always wondered about that." -- Sars]) Rayanne gives Rickie some change. Angela keeps staring at him, and Rickie gives her a nervous look before he hurries off. Angela pulls Rayanne aside and asks her if she thinks it's true that Rickie fell. "Sure, probablyI don't know," says Rayanne, shiftily. "See, Rickie has this, like, tendency to get beat up, and he doesn't always love talking about it," she explains.
Rayanne shrugs and bops off down the hall in that bouncy, manic Animal-From-The Muppet Show walk of hers. She passes Sharon Cherski putting up a flyer on a bulletin board. Rayanne reads the flyer: "Teen Help Line?" Sharon perks up: "Yeah! What about it?" "I don't know," says Rayanne. "Justmaking depressed people talk to someone like you? Couldn't that, like, push them over the edge?" Sharon shoots death rays from her eyes and smiles. "Over the edge. That's like, your address, right?" Rayanne resorts to the old tried-and-true Fakey Laugh-Squeal Of One Who Lacks An Appropriate Comeback For The Occasion. She grabs Sharon's flyers and scatters them and skips off. Angela, who's been passively watching the whole thing from a few yards away, glances over at Sharon uncomfortably, as if to say, "I'd bend over to help you pick those up but I don't have a spine at the moment." She slouches off.
One of the flyers gets caught under Brian Krakow's shoe. Sharon spots him moping down the hall and hands him some flyers. "So we're set, right? Christmas Eve? You and I, representing Liberty High at the Teen Help Line?" Brian hauls out his Bag O' Awkward Pauses (tm Key Grip) as he starts to explain he'd rather not. Sharon gets on his case: "Krakow! You signed up." "SoUNsign me," whines Brian. Sharon looks exasperated. Her enormous hair bow suddenly wilts.
Evening at la Casa de Chase. "You will not believe what Bernice and Bob Krakow did," Patty tells Graham. The story is they skipped town to go on a cruise. We don't know much about Brian's parents, but they don't really seem like Love Boat types. Maybe there's a Latent Boat. Anyway, Mrs. Krakow phoned Patty to ask her to look in on Brian. Graham reasons that "Brian's a level-headed kid. He probably likes having the place to himself." "For Christmas?" says Patty. "Well, the Krakows are Jewish, aren't they?" says Graham. "I mean, didn't Hanukkah already happen, or something?" They open the front door to leave. Patty calls out jokingly that they're going out "to purchase a few lumps of coal." Joke, my ass. We know Patty. Bet she ordered a family pack o' coal at Restoration Hardware.
Outside, Graham asks her what she wants for Christmas. She wants him to come to church on Christmas Eve. Graham balks. He says church isn't for him. Patty confesses that she wants church to be part of their daughter's lives. Graham still gets all dodgy. Probably he's trying to think of the best way to shift the Christmas hint discussion from "church" to "Victoria's Secret stuff."
Angela is taking out the trash and freaks out when she sees someone hiding behind a tree. It's Rickie. "I'm sorry, Idid I scare you?" Angela stares at him a moment. "No I just" The wind whistles. Rickie smiles nervously. "Come in," says Angela. Rickie explains, "Uh, I was at, uh -- Brian'sso I just thought, you know, I'd stop by" He follows Angela inside and rambles a little about how at Rayanne's house that day, Amber's boyfriend Rusty was really unfriendly. "So you went from Rayanne's to Brian's?" says Angela, sensing that Something's Up. "Yeah," says Rickie. "I just realizedAmber and Rusty -- they must like earth tones." I love how the writers made up this "Rusty" character just so Rickie could make that little non-sequitur remark to avoid answering the question. ["I think we actually hear about Rusty in 'Other People's Mothers' also." -- Sars] Danielle pipes up, "Isn't it kind of late at night to, like, drop by?" "Danielle!" says Angela. Rickie gets embarrassed and says that Danielle's right and he should go. He stops and looks around. "Your house smells, like, amazing." Angela figures out that Rickie's hungry and leads him into the kitchen. Danielle stares after them, capturing it all on Resentment Cam.
Rickie digs into a plate of leftovers and says he "must have forgotten to eat lunch today or something." Just then Patty and Graham come home. "Who tracked all these wet footprints in the hall?" she yells out. Hi, Patty. We love you too. She comes into the kitchen. "Oh, Rickie's here" she says. "Graham, uh, look -- Rickie's here." She says it in a tone that means, "Oh, look, there's an ambiguously gendered half-Negro boy with a black eye in my kitchen."