Ready to go back in time to Season Two? Let's, then. Ah, the old credits, which I love, 'cause I'm an old fool from the old school. Hiya, Chrysler Building! You sure are pretty. Hello, World Trade Towers! Aww. You guys are great. God, we miss you. Cha, cha cha, cha cha. Cha, cha cha, cha cha. SJP stalks the street, glowing like a lamppost that just got laid. Then, oh no, splashy bus! Cha cha cha!
Lights up on a beautiful NYC skyline, all lit up, at night. Carrie VOs that there are certain rare occurrences which we should all celebrate, including and not limited to eclipses and "getting that second latte for free." But she means right at the moment now, in a salsa club, where all four girlfriends are single at the same time, and getting down on the dance floor with each other and having a hell of a time. Yeah. Savor the flavor of single fun, ladies. Being single rules. All you need is sex, and it's so easy to get! With or without batteries! The four friends dance wildly and Sam gets the eye from a handsome man seated at a table. Olé, indeed.
At the bar, the girls toast to themselves, "without men," and toss back shots of tequila. Char squinches up her face and says brattily, "If [she] end[s] up old and alone, it's all [their] fault." Because toasts, like birthday wishes, are heard by God and followed out to the letter. Samantha says that they are all in fact alone, and even when they have guys, are still alone. I guess she means metaphysically. I can dig it. Sam flies solo. She's a loner, baby. Sam goes on to say that Char "shouldn't expect a man to fill [her] up, except when, you know." I think everyone knows. Everyone who knows how boys are different from girls knows. The hot guy that was eyeing Sam steps up and asks her for a dance. She charmingly turns him down, stating that tonight is "for the girls." He offers his card, a winning smile, and a promise of fun. She smiles and takes the card. After he splits, Miranda offers her congrats to Sam, not dumping her friends for a man. In the same breath, Carrie is all wanting to leave, since she has a photo shoot in the morning. New York magazine is profiling twenty "fabulous" and single people in their thirties, and the reason Carrie got picked over Samantha is that Stanford's b.f. is the photo editor. Nepotism can be annoying, no? The gals convince Carrie to stay for one more drink and a dance before she heads to bed.
Many, many drinks and whirling dance sequences later, Carrie heads home. At dawn. She decides to "avoid looking like [she's] been up all night by staying up all morning." She sips coffee and perches on her bed, reading the paper; then we get a jump cut to her passed out on the paper, which gets stuck to her face. She was drooling, you see. In her sleep. On the newspaper. The phone rings: it's Stanford, mightily pissed off. Carrie's forty minutes late. She grabs the receiver and says she'll be there in twenty. Ooh, she is in so much trouble.
Carrie rushes into the studio, looking trashed and haggard, in one of those unfortunate loosely-knitted poncho things that made a fashion comeback in spite of being far uglier than just about anything else worn in the 1970s. She says to Stanford that she couldn't get a cab. He asked if one dragged her to the shoot as she held onto the bumper. Maybe she was splashed by a bus, too? Well, she was. We all saw it, in the credits. Stanford introduces her to his b.f., who snaps that Carrie is "about a fucking month late!" Carrie says, "Jesus," but hushed. She leaps in front of the cameras, and the wry, bespectacled photographer starts snapping. Carrie asks if these are test shots, and for coffee, and make-up, and does the photographer mind if she smokes? The photographer says she doesn't mind if Carrie "shoots up." Wow. Cool! Carrie smokes and squints and says she usually doesn't hold people up, but she was "out late last night, and it's [her] personal belief that [she] lapsed into a coma." She smiles, but no one present laughs. Stanford brings her a coffee, then hisses that it's decaf. Carrie grimaces, and the camera flashes.
A weekend morning, which, as Carrie helpfully VOs, is something single people have to themselves. She, Miranda, and Charlotte walk briskly around the reservoir in the park -- Carrie maybe not so briskly. Char complains that they aren't walking fast enough to burn anything off, and Car suggests that they gossip to get their heart rates up. Ooh, yeah. Gossiping is totally a sport. And if you get some good hard laughter in there, well, you're working your abs, too. Gossip beats walking, anyway. A cute guy jogs past, then backs up and says hi to Mir. He's training for the marathon. Mir says hi back, but not so enthusiastically. He says she's got his number, so she should call, then jogs off. The guy? An "ophthalmologist [Mir] once faked orgasms with." Carrie officially calls a smoke break, and they pull off the runner's track and park it in the grass. Carrie lights up as Mir recounts the two times she faked it with the guy, once because "it was never gonna happen," and the second time because she faked it the first time. Char is all, what's wrong with faking? Her WASPy philosophy advocates the fake-out, because "orgasms don't send you Valentine's Day cards or hold your hand in the movies." Carrie deadpans that her orgasms do. Dude, mine? Make the bed. I'm kidding. I'm the only one that ever makes the bed. But my orgasms do walk the dog sometimes. Char says sunnily that faking it beats spending the night alone. Mir is all kinds of baffled. "These are [her] options?" Char says a moment of "ooh, ooh," isn't any greater than the moment when the guy you slept with pours you a cup of coffee in the morning. She jogs off bouncily, the chipper, orgasm-sacrificing bitch. Mir leans in to Car and says she'd take an orgasm over a coffee any day. Carrie says she could go either way. Heh.
Carrie, having smoked all her butts during her workout, stops to get more. And there it is at the newsstand. "It" being New York magazine, and "it" also being her face on the cover, looking quite awful. Oy, it's bad. She's captured while smoking and squinting. Eyes bagged and saggy. Face creased and gray. Mole? Huge. And right out there. She grabs her smokes and flees the scene.
Coffee shop pow-wow. Carrie is hiding under a hat, ranting about the unfairness of being in an article called "Single and Fabulous?" when she was promised a story more along the lines of "Single and Fabulous!" "That question mark is hostile!" Hee. And, she's quitting smoking. Sam says Car is "single, fabulous, and fucked." Car says not after that article, she won't be. Char wonders if they can sue. Mir asks, "For what, mispunctuation?" Hee! Char reads a snippet aloud: "Single was fun at twenty, but one might ask these women how much fun staying out at clubs all night will be at forty?" Oh, I so take umbrage with this fictitious article. First of all, if this article isn't judging men as harshly as it's judging women, it can fuck right off. Second of all, Madonna? Is forty-two. And yes, she has a family and is a yoga nerd and all that, but she can still rock a party. Therefore, so can anyone else if they want to. The median age in this country is thirty-five, which means that there are just as many people older than that as there are younger. Are people supposed to stop going out all night if they want because they've accumulated a certain number of birthday candles? Of course not. Mir says, "Fuck you, exclamation point." And that "every so often, articles like this surface as a cautionary tale to scare young women into getting married." Well, that's a media conspiracy theory if I ever heard one. I can just see it: A newsroom. Editors, wearing green eyeshades, with their shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow (ink stains, you see), sit around plotting how to scare women into marrying this month. "What'll it be. Sexshul diseases, Walker? Maybe a story about how men lie, again?" "NO, Percy. Let's profile the most hedonistic broads other broads look up to, then blow up one aspect of their lifestyle as a chilling portrait of what can go wrong if you don't settle down." "Love it! Let's go get drunk at the whorehouse across the street." This portrayal of What Really Happens In A Story Meeting was brought to you by me. The girls declare the article "a piece of trash" and high-five each other, but Carrie can see on their faces that "[her] question mark leapt off the page and onto each of them."
One week later, Mir fakes more orgasms with the ophthalmologist, Sam dances with the salsa club guy, and Char? Gets into it with the actor who lives door and serves as her handyman, just when he was about to take a job on a Christian soap opera in Salt Lake City.
Carrie, in a gray sleeveless Rolling Stones t-shirt, types away, pondering if the fear of being alone means women fake a lot more than cup size, orgasms, and fur. Like, relationships. The question of the week is: Is faking it better than being alone?
The usual montage of people answering flashes by. One woman says her husband "likes thin, blonde WASPy types, so, now [she is]!" Yikes. Talk about making a positive change...except for the positive part. One guy says his wife is "an idiot," and "every day with her is like a trip to Idiot Island." He won't tell her how he feels, because he's scared she'll leave him.
Carrie is holed up in her apartment, refusing to leave while that magazine is on the newsstands. God, dramatic much? There's 52 weeks in a year; you've got only seven days of torture. Of course, she has to milk it. She and Mir and Sam are killing time watching soaps. A soap opera guy climbs on top of a soap opera gal, and she starts moaning sharply, but in a good way, like she's enjoying herself. Mir says that this is why guys are so clueless when it comes to women's orgasms. Because men get sex tips from soap operas? Really? Wow. Mir says, "What's the big mystery, it's [her] vagina, not the Sphinx!" Hee. Sam says if she had a son, she'd teach him all about the vagina. And I'm sure he'd stick his fingers in his ears and yell, "LA LA LA LA LA," just like Jack Osbourne did the other week. I'm still recovering from the time my mom told me making love was a beautiful thing. Kids just don't want to hear that from their parents! It's healthier than repression, sure, but still. Ew. Sam says she has a date with the salsa club guy, and from the way he dances, she's certain she won't have to fake anything. Way to rub it in, Sam.
Sam and her club guy dance. He asks if she likes the Hamptons. No. Sam loves the Hamptons. He says he has another salsa club out there, and they can go, together, and check it out. He uses the word "we," which makes Sam get all misty and reverent.
Wham, they're undressing each other. "WE" can cook lobsters, "WE" can sail a boat. Whatever "WE" want. Sam listens, and lets the guy do her.
Morning. Sam calls Carrie to rub in the fact that she'll be spending the summer in the Hamptons with her new man. Carrie, who was sleeping, asks if it isn't a little early. Sam says all the best summer places get snatched up about now. Carrie meant early in the relationship. Sam says that "WE" are spending the summer in the Hamptons, and by "we" she means herself and Carrie. Good girl.
Mir is getting the high hard one from the ophthalmologist. She smiles up at him nicely, but isn't moaning and groaning. In other words, she's done faking. He pumps away, asking that she "come with" him, but no dice. It ain't happening. Not for all the tea in China. It won't help if you ask more than once, ophthalmologist guy. He finishes, rolls off, and asks if everything is all right. Sure. She just didn't come. Not then, or any of the other times. He asks if she has a "physical problem." Oh, boy. Mir says that a woman's anatomy is more complicated, and does he know how the clitoris works? Or where the clitoris is? Because it's about two inches away from where he thinks it is. But Mir is willing to show him a thing or two.
Carrie visits Char and her actor/handyman/substitute boyfriend. They're going fix-it crazy. And he's not going to Salt Lake City after all. He goes off to get a volt meter, and Char starts babbling about how she got all these feelings for him after he said he was going to leave, and what if he was the one, and oh, he's so masculine and can fix things! Carrie listens, blows a bubble with her gum, and points out that you don't get in a relationship with a guy because he can caulk a tub. Char is all, yeah you do!
Carrie plods home, still hiding under her hat, and stops to buy smokes. She muses a la VO if maybe she's the one faking it, and that being single is really a crock. She takes her smokes and change from the newsstand guy, who looks at her with great, inscrutable eyes. He flicks his glance to the still-present New York magazine, then back to her. Carrie VOs that she sees pity, but I just see a guy dealing with another one of his annoying customers, who happens to be on the cover of a weekly magazine. Carrie decides to go out to perk herself up/get drunk, since it's been a while.
Stanford grabs a tartini off a tray and offers one to Carrie. Cranberry-flavored vodka, you see. She's all, a new drink after four days? No, cranberry vodka is a fucking Sea Breeze. Not new. Well, maybe the "-ini" makes it new. No, just annoying. She sees Stanford's b.f. and says she hates him. Stanford says he hates him too, and he's sorry about the cover. Carrie says that "week you'll have a coke-dealing slumlord on the cover and [she'll] be history." Seriously. The b.f. screeches, "You are FABULOUS," and splits. Carrie hisses to Stanford that this b.f. will have to be jettisoned, and Stanford says not likely: they just scored a summer share. Carrie is cheesed.
Sam is waiting at a table in a lovely restaurant for her salsa club guy. Twenty minutes go by, and she calls her machine. A waiter pops by and asks is she's alone. No, she isn't. Though, quite literally and not metaphysically, she is. She asks for a red wine.
A few pans and wipes later, Sam is sitting with her white fur coat around her shoulders, utterly dejected. She now knows that her club guy is one that "lies about the future in order to get what he wants in the present." She knocks over the dregs of her wine and gasps. The waiter helpfully wipes it up. Sam, totally embarrassed, starts to cry, and asks for the bathroom. When she comes out, the waiter is there. He listens to her gentle sobs about how she got taken in by some guy's lines, again. She needed to be a "we." The waiter offers assistance, his shoulder, and to accompany her home, because "if [he] takes [her] home, [she's] not alone." Sam can't do it, deciding that being alone is better than faking it. She does press some bills into the waiter's hand, though. Classy.
And the exact opposite of class is the party going on downtown, where Carrie's letting her hair all the way down. She laughs at something some guy says, spills her drink on his pants, then tries to wipe it off. He excuses himself, and she hollers after him, "Fuck YOU! Exclamation point!" Stanford takes her glass and says it's time to go home. She says it's early. He says it's 2 AM on a Tuesday. I would have said, "Well, it's early somewhere." Carrie wants to stay and meet cute guys. Stanford says everyone at the party "is gay, gay, gay." Seconds after he leaves, she puts a cigarette between her lips, and a man approaches to light it for her. Kaboom. Just what Carrie wanted. A non-gay-gay-gay guy who's also a smoker.
Mir is winding up her Clitoris for Dummies tutorial session with the ophthalmologist. Her clinical approach has turned sex "into a naked eye exam," Carrie VOs. Mir is on top, facing away from him, so he can't see her face as she grimaces and squinches her nose up as he pumps away and asks if she's close. She isn't close. And "is more complicated than a jet engine." This guy will never get her off. So, she fakes it for him. To make him feel good for trying. Isn't that what she was doing before? But now it's okay. Because a lesson was learned. Or something. And when she blows him off this time, he'll not mind so much. Or at all. Unlike before. Mmm-hmm.
Carrie continues to canoodle with her downtown smoker guy. He's all, "Wanna go for a ride in my Porsche?" She does.
He stops at the newsstand for smokes. After he asks if she wants anything, she grabs his face and kisses him like she's sucking a lemon. He's all, I'll be right back. She flips down the mirror and looks okay, but feels great. She's still desirable! She won't end up alone! Then, he slaps the magazine cover with her face on it onto the windshield and her world comes crashing down for the tenth time that night. She realizes in VO format that if she fucks this guy, it'll be to "validate her life" -- unlike all those other times when it was about getting her rocks off, I hope. She says she has to go, girl, and walks right on out of his convertible Porsche. Good for her. If she still needs to get her rocks off, she has batteries for that.
Char and her actor/fix-it guy are on the same page: he's going to take the job in Salt Lake City, and she can't fake intimacy. Carrie's VO says, "It was a perfectly timed double-fake." The saxophone blows sultrily. Hee.
Mir blows off her naked eye doctor. Sam tosses a drink in her salsa club guy's face. Char learns that you can hire a guy to fix things around the house, and Carrie "gets recycled" and has a glass of wine -- alone. All by herself. "No faking."