Hi, everyone! Welcome back to my Real World recaps, a job I can get back to now that my other MBTV duties are on hiatus for the summer. Shout-out to my new doctor, who'll be prescribing me the drugs necessary to keep me awake for the non-activities of the London cast. Not everyone can get a prescription for pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, but when I told Dr. Rabinowitz that I had to recap the London season of The Real World, he whipped his pen out right then and there.
Attention Deficit Syndrome Manor. The gang is doing dishes in the kitchen and wondering where Jay is -- something I've been doing since the third episode. Kat responds that Jay is at the Theater. Mike calls Jay the "theater ma-a-a-an." Mike, since your house nickname could have been "Cream on a Cracker," "Ugly Lazy Retard Virgin," or "Spooge Hair" -- if I'd lived in that house, anyway -- maybe you shouldn't be quite so enthusiastic about nicknames.
Judging by the b-roll of London's theater district they're showing us, Jay is indeed at the theater. And furthermore, he obviously feels the need to explain in a voice-over why he's at the theater alone: it's so he can evaluate, as a writer, the plays he sees. Hey, Jay? We've met your housemates. If you want to get out of that house, no explanations are necessary. None.
While they lie in bed, Jay pours his heart out to Mike. He's got writer's block. His first play was easy to write because he didn't know anything. They show a clip from Jay's first national-award-winning play. Jay -- looking even younger than he does now -- is delivering a monologue about how his bed hasn't seen much more than "a one-man show." Everyone in the Oregon audience guffaws at this "bawdy" humor. I go shower with anti-bacterial soap. Then, to add to the embarrassment of Jay's not being able to write, it appears that Mike has fallen asleep while Jay is trying to talk to him. Dude, you want to be a playwright and you put Mike to sleep? That is not promising. Learn some storytelling skills.
"Playwrights and musicians, they don't have to get up at 9:00 in the morning or go punch a clock or whatever," Jay voice-overs while wandering around the house in the middle of the night, raiding the fridge and playing pool. Yeah, Jay -- writers stay up late because they have bartending or waitering jobs, or they're writing. You're not doing any of that, so shut up. The other housemates are concerned. While Jay sleeps on the couch, Jacinda and Lars discuss Jay's complete lack of initiative. Jacinda, in an interview, goes on to explain that if Jay wrote and produced a play back home, he should be able to do the same thing here. Hey, Jacinda? If you could go out on "cah-stings" in Paris, you should be able to do the same thing here. Or do you have model's block?
Jay explains in an interview that he's still adjusting to London, and hasn't been able to throw himself into writing anything yet. The housemates give him a "Slacker of the Week" award, and commemorate it with a certificate stuck to the fridge. I imagine that's a big hint for him to get off his butt and start doing something. As if Jay's flatmates are doing anything worth watching on basic cable. Couldn't someone have sex with someone? Please?
Actually, Jay isn't "Slacker of the Week," as he points out in an interview. He tries to rationalize that his roommates don't, in fact, think he's a lazy piece of shit. He's actually "Co-Slacker of the Week," an honor he shares with Neil. At the breakfast table, Neil complains that he shouldn't be in the same league as Jay, since Jay has been rollerskating and playing pool while Neil has been "pushing back the frontiers of music." Neil, let me explain "frontier" to you. You don't push a frontier back or forwards. The frontier is that place that you've never been. You don't push it; you push its boundaries. But then, I'm the product of an American public education, not an Oxford graduate student. What would I know about correct usage of the English language? And dude, how does it feel to be named co-slacker of the week when one of your roommates is Mike?
Neil shows Lars a poster for one of his performances. "It's a bloke who's been attacked by a machete," says Neil, explaining the photo on the poster, which depicts a bloody hand. "Oooh! Tasty!" says Lars. Hi, Foreshadowing! So then Neil gives an interview in which he explains that he needs money to keep his musical interests going, and wouldn't it be nice if fans of his music could support him and keep him comfortable? But he doesn't want to sell out. Hmmm. He wants to make lots of money but doesn't want to sell out. Yeah, Neil, I know what that dilemma is all about. I myself would love to consider myself a vegan and still eat veal parm sandwiches every day, but I hear that's impossible. I found a solution, though: it's called self-delusional behavior. Look into it. Oh wait, it appears you already have. And I have to wonder why they're even going there with Neil right now when in just a few minutes, he's going to have his tongue bitten off by some drunk guy. Like, what do Neil's money issues have to do with his almost losing a body part? Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here.
So then Jay voice-overs some more rationalization about slacking while we see him buying a ticket to something from some ticket window. I would assume it's a play, but then he brags to Sharon when he gets home that he's the first person in London to get tickets to see Blues Traveler. Sharon's all, "It was meant to be!" Like, whatever that's supposed to mean. I guess when something happens, it was in fact meant to be in some metaphysical way. Therefore you could say "it was meant to be" when Mike got out of bed this afternoon and took a dump because it did, in fact, happen. Where were you with your "meant to be" then, Sharon? Huh? Just another example of something Sharon has to say in order to spoil a perfectly good silence. "It was meant to be!" Like, whatever, Sharon.
The One Where Something Actually Happens
Apparently, Blues Traveler is this major important thing to Jay, because while he was getting ready to do his play, he'd go drive in the hills to think about things and he'd play a CD of theirs. So he wrote a letter to John Popper, the lead singer, and told him all about his play. We don't know whether John Popper wrote back, but I can't imagine that a busy successful rock star like John Popper could resist answering that letter. I mean, it's about Jay's play! So Jay's excited and can't wait to go to the concert.
Okay, Neil's performing. Meaning that his band plays stuff while he screams sporadically into the mike. Okay, I'm a pop-music freak, so I may not be qualified to say that Neil's music sucks, but it does. Unless Neil is intentionally trying to sound like someone who is bored working as a bogeyman in a haunted house.
"I quite like being on stage," says Neil in an interview. "And it shows." Then they show Neil introducing his song which is about "a thirty-foot worm that entered my anus." Ooh! How Punk! I guess this also answers my question about what exactly is up Neil's ass. Some drunk guy in the audience starts giving Neil a hard time. Jacinda and Kat, in their respective interviews, give a running narration of what happened later. Apparently, there were these two drunk people who had wandered into the club. "They weren't really there for the show," says Kat, amazed that anyone could not be there for the spectacular groundbreaking musical talents of Neil. Neil starts interacting with the couple as part of the show; one of the guys keeps sticking his tongue in Neil's face, so Neil grabs him and kisses him. 'Cause, you know, kissing a guy when you're a straight dude is so underground and progressive. "All of sudden there was a tumble and a smack to the ground," says Jacinda. "No one knew what had happened. There was blood everywhere." An ambulance arrives and Neil is taken to the hospital so that they can sew part of his tongue back on. Back home, Jacinda acts out the whole thing for all of the grossed-out flatmates; actually, she does a really good job of recreating the scene (since apparently the camerapeople missed getting it on film so we could actually see what happened). I'm starting to think that ultimately I'd be hanging with Jacinda if I ever had to live in this particular RW house. She and I would sit around smoking pot and I'd just listen to her stories -- like the one about the modeling contract in Japan that didn't go quite the way she'd planned, if you know what I mean. The phone rings; Jacinda picks it up and someone (a doctor?) tells her that Neil is being kept in the hospital overnight. "It looks really bad," Jacinda tells the other flatmates.