Lights up on a smallish cabaret theater. The camera stays with a martini as it is poured, placed on a tray, and delivered by a smiling waitress to a nonplused Carrie, sitting in the audience with a rapt and radiant Stanford. Carrie VOs that there are three things a New Yorker has to deal with: getting her purse stolen, "random public urination," and seeing a gay friend's boyfriend in a Broadway revue. She might have added, in a way-off-Broadway theater. Onstage, a woman belts out "All That Jazz" backed by two handsome chorus boys, one of whom is Marcus, happy to be stealing some spotlight. Stanford is bursting. "Isn't he handsome?" Carrie says snidely that she "understands the three-drink minimum." Stanford is surprised she isn't enjoying the show, and Carrie says she's more concerned with her book's review in the Times this week. Well, maybe the noise and heat might distract milady for a moment? Of course not. She and Stanford actually carry on a conversation as the song goes on -- Carrie is nervous as hell, as Times book critic Michiko Kakutani is "brilliant and really tough." Wow, how great that NY book critics get a rep. I've been reviewing books for the Philadelphia City Paper for five years now and still am unsure if anyone ever reads them. My reviews, I mean, not the books. Or even books. Stanford asks amusedly how Carrie could not be loving the performance, and Marcus executes a fab high kick as the singer belts out the last bar. Stanford says, "Isn't [Marcus] wonderful?" and Carrie excuses herself to go to the ladies' room, without even saying yes, he is.
In the red, black, and white tiled ladies', we get an arty overhead shot of ladies on the loo, panties around their ankles and reaching for TP. One woman says she wouldn't have believed the phrase "'go see your cousin Debbie's revue' would have contained such horror." Heh. They lament the utter absence of straight guys in the place, then hope the "cute pretzel guys in the Village Square Market" are good for oglin' tomorrow. One loo lady says, "Is that as sad as that just sounded?" Carrie, in the spirit of All Women Together In The Restroom Are Sisters Temporarily, says she used to think the Amish guys that made hairbrushes were hot. Dude, you want hottie Amish dudes? Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia. Get thee to the pretzel stand where they come out of the oven, hot and fresh, liberally painted with a coating of melted country butter, and handed over to you. Sooo gooood. The loo lady, instead of laughing or even nodding at Carrie's comment, looks like something crawled up her nose and died. She says, "You're Carrie Bradshaw." Carrie is all, yeah, have we met? No, Loo Lady recognizes her from her column -- and she dated Aidan right after Carrie did. Then she makes a face, a "whoo shee!" face. You know, a pursed-mouth exhale, then an one-sided extended inhale. Not a good face. A bad face. Carrie. Freaks. OUT.
At lunch the day, she tells her girlfriends all about The Face. "A face and run." She displays The Face, and Sam agrees, "That ain't good." Char tries to pass it off as a facial tic, which a lot of people have, "like Bell's palsy." Um, no, it was not. Carrie says it was a face of "ooh, you sure fucked him up good." Well, maybe you did, Carrie. Maybe you did really hurt Aidan, and he told people about it. It happens. Break-ups are hardly ever smooth. Mir says flatly, "Fuck that fucking face girl." Ha! Carrie is all, "Well!" Well, sorry, Miranda is exhausted, with the baby and all. The baby has been on a bad crying jag ("if he were thirty-five, this is when we would break up!"), and all Miranda's clothes smell like barf. Mir hasn't slept in a week or had time to do anything for herself, like get a haircut. Then Sam, in an incredible display of insensitivity, says gaily, oh, that reminds her! She needs to confirm her hair appointment. She makes a big show of calling up and confirming, right in Mir's glum, long, sad, wan face. Char says she's hired a divorce lawyer, and Mir confirms that he is in fact "tough enough to beat Bunny to a pulp." Mir and Char exit together, and Carrie asks Sam why "that face girl" is still bothering her. Sam says, "Honey, let it go. If [Sam] worried about what every little bitch in the city said, [she'd] never leave the house!" Heh. So true. Being shameless means you can't care what people say. And Sam is what now? Right.
Char meets with her attorney, who is "smart, tough, and gorgeous." This somehow takes away Char's backbone and resolve to win, and reduces her to a lip-gloss-applying, smiling, flirting airhead. See, the guy is cute, and she wants to be attractive to him, so she can't "be tough" in front of him. Hey, Char? Do you want to be like Anna Nicole? She's, um, close with her lawyer, and you know how it looks? Not good. So, caveat: Don't Date Your Lawyer. Don't Date People You Work With, or People You Work For. Luckily, Char has a way around my caveat, as the hottie lawyer has a bald, blunt, and slightly less refined partner. After Char watches him biting into, and subsequently spitting out, a loathsome blueberry bagel, Char makes him her new lawyer. She can be tough in front of this bagel-spitting guy. Good for her, sort of.
Sam takes a toke off a joint and puts it in the ashtray to her bed. Woo, Sam smokes weed! Way to know how to relax, woman. She plugs in her massive lilac AcuVibe vibrator and it sputters. Oh, snap. She bangs the head on the night stand. It still sputters. She really whacks it this time. And it still doesn't work. In a fit of pique, she tosses the thing and turns over, waving her delicately manicured fists around. Life is so unfair sometimes!
And meanwhile, over in Mir's apartment, life is really unfair. She stares dazedly at Brady through the bars of his crib. He's screaming his little lungs out. Mir looks like she's in jail. Wee baby jail. Her doorbell rings. Who is it? 4-D. Mir opens the door and apologizes for all the screaming. 4-D says it's 2:30 AM -- what the fuck, lady? Mir launches into a wee diatribe about how babies cry, and "that is what they do sometimes," and 4-D mentions that she knows this, since she has a baby too, and if Mir ever said hello in the elevator, she might know that. Oh, my.
Carrie goes to the newsstand in a voluminous nightie and gray hoodie. As. IF. Okay, I know she's preggers, but -- a nightie? We go from hot pants and bras to nighties and hoodies? What's , a pair of Earl jeans with a maternity panel and slipper-feet? Or a tee silk-screened with a bikini-clad woman's body on it, the tackiest trompe l'oeil in existence? Carrie buys a paper and carefully sidesteps a stream of pee from a public urinator, who she greets with a cheerful "good morning!" Yeah, I love to say hi to the pee people. "Hey! You look awfully big and hairless to be a doggy! Where's your leash, buster?" Just kidding -- I'd never make fun of someone who can point a part of their body and pee out of it, particularly at the moment when that's happening. Public urination is like a bar fight -- it's stupid, but it happens, and it's best not to get involved and just get the hell out of the way when you see it happening. Once back inside, Carrie reads the review to Mir over the phone. It's a rave, but Carrie gets stuck on the fact that the reviewer notes that in Carrie's literary world, "single women rule, and the men are disposable." Oh, does Carrie dispose of men? Does she does she does she? Do people think she disposes of men? Is that what the Loo Lady's face meant, that she tossed Aidan like a used paper plate? Does Steve think that Carrie did that? Could Mir say something to Steve about how she tried to protect his feelings? Mir says that if she sees Steve, she'd ask him to marry her so she could have some help. She's totally haggard after getting only an hour of sleep, and having trouble getting ready to go to work. Magda enters, singing, "Hello!" Carrie whines and cries (again, some more) until Mir snaps that maybe Carrie could call "[her] girlfriend Samantha," who probably has the time to talk about this minutiae. Magda peers around the corner and Mir shuts the bathroom door, close to tears. All she wants is for Sam to acknowledge that she's had a baby! It's so hard, and the neighbors hate her too! Mir has to go. She says congrats on the review, hangs up, and opens the door to see a baleful-looking Magda, who just walks away from her boss lady.
Carrie has the Times review open on her desk as she types. She muses that one little thing -- a face, a feeling transmitted from an ex-boyfriend -- can taint a larger thing. "Why do we believe our worst reviews?" She puts her coffee cup down on the paper, then gasps and lifts it up too late, having left a ring over her review. Hee.
Mir gets off the elevator in her building with Brady in tow. He screams. The scene in the lobby is like The Birds, but instead of birds, it's filled with silent, disapproving mothers and their silent, angelic, non-crying babies. Mir says to Brady, "Don't scream," and sidles past the mothers, opening the door for herself and her stroller without assistance and waving good-bye without looking back. Aww!
Carrie and Sam are lunching at City Bakery, home of the "best brownies in New York," supposedly. Quite a title to hold. I always loved The Cupping Room in SoHo for hot chocolate. Carrie offers to buy Sam a brownie if she'll listen to her about Mir. "Would it kill us to be a little more supportive?" No. Sam says that Brady sounds like "an asshole." Carrie says you can't call a baby an asshole. Hee. She tells Sam to stop by tomorrow, and Sam says she's booked; she's returning a vibrator, and she has her hair appointment. It's her life, dammit! What, is she supposed to "turn into some Norman Rockwell painting" just because people have babies? Carrie says it isn't "people," it's Miranda, and she's "sinking." Sam says, "So Miranda's like Venice?" Heh. Kind of. More like Prague. Flooded, and if she doesn't get help fast, she'll be lost forever. Carrie sees a co-worker from Vogue, Julia, answering the question, "Does Carrie still work at Vogue?" Yes, she "runs in once a month," so she does write something, maybe about purses and shoes, who really knows, it doesn't matter, one half hour a week cannot possibly contain all the information in a person's life, let alone four. Meanwhile, co-worker Julia says she's "chained to the hem of Anna Wintour." I can think of worse places to be. And I love Andre Leon Talley so much. Just then, Loo Lady steps up to meet Julia for lunch. Oh, hi! Sam says hello, and Loo Lady, a.k.a. Nina, says hello again. Julia is all, how do you know Nina? Nina says she'll tell her over lunch. Oh, I get it -- Nina's a bitch! That's like throwing it in Carrie's face: "I'm going to talk about you!" Great, now everyone at Vogue will know she crushed Aidan's heart. And also Saturday Night Live -- Loo Lady Nina is the talent booker for the show. Wow, for a simple carpenter, Aidan sure dates the high-achieving ladies! Who's , Hillary Clinton? She's a New Yorker. Technically. Carrie decides she needs a brownie of her own.
Sam strides into The Sharper Image (across from Bergdorf Goodman, hello) to return her AcuVibe vibrator. She has on a great white suit. Chaiken? Tom Ford? Chloe? I can't tell. It's very nice. She goes straight up to a poker-faced male clerk and says she wants to return this "vibrator." He says flatly that the Sharper Image doesn't sell vibrators. Oh no? Sam bought this one here six months ago. She bought that neck massager here six months ago, he says not-so-gently. What's wrong with it now? "It failed to get [her] off." Maybe, says the clerk, Sam "wore it out." The unflappable Sam says, "It wouldn't be the first one, honey!" He tells her to just pick a new one out and take it to the register. Sam strolls over to the "massager" display and says to the two women browsing that the clerk seems "in desperate need of a neck massage." They smile, a little knowingly, a little shyly. One holds up a massager and Sam pooh-poohs it, saying, "Too many bells and whistles." Another one "works against you." One is okay, "if you mount it." And another "will burn your clit off." "Even with underwear?" "Even with ski pants." The women love Sam's ability to frankly share her expertise. Me too! But only at The Sharper Image could that happen. Having a conversation at a sex shop would be annoying. And of course, there's always the internet to buy sex toys. It's called Good Vibrations; look it up.
Mir's apartment. Brady is crying, again, some more. Wow, someone get that baby an Emmy for Best Lungs. Of course, we never see Miranda picking Brady up, probably because she's gotten her ears screamed into too many times. And, you know, the baby has to be crying for the scene. There's a knock on the door -- it's 4-D again, Kendall. She's brought an oscillating chair, which is "a little controversial," but helps in these kinds of situations. They strap Brady in and throw the switch, and kaboom. Brady gently vibrates and stops crying. Hooray! Kendall asks why Mir didn't know about the chair -- don't her girlfriends have babies? No. "Then you're screwed! If they don't have kids, they don't have a clue." How true!
Sam knocks on the door. Mir opens it and asks what she's doing there. Well, she's giving up her hair appointment, that's what. Mir is thrilled, grabs her coat, and dashes out, poking her head back in to say, "The numbers are on the fridge, and don't call boys." And don't take the baby out of the chair. Whatever you do! The chair is all-powerful! Sam strides over to Brady and says he doesn't look so bad. Then the chair stops. And Brady starts to cry. Uh oh.
Carrie, in yet another stank nightie, is watching TV and eating cherries. She tunes in to SNL, then blanches when she sees Nina's name in the credits. She calls Sam to kvetch, who is of course at her wit's end with Brady. She was nice, and "now [she's] being punished." Brady's "problem is that he's an asshole. Maybe Charlotte has time to talk, [she] has a screaming baby on her hands!"
Mir walks in the door with a nice, shorter 'do. Sam says everything was fine, and "the chair broke, but shit happens." Mir panics briefly. "The chair broke?!" Yeah, but Sam fixed it. By putting the AcuVibe in the chair with Brady. Oh, man. Alexa Judge, you are my hero. I love your stuff. Brady sits to the giant vibe, smiling and drooling. Mir looks at the scene, narrows her eyes, and says, "That better be brand new."
Char sits in a lawyer's office somewhere, negotiating with Bunny and Bunny's lawyer, her own less-gorgeous lawyer at her side. She won't settle for Trey's stupid coin collection; she wants the apartment. Trey gave it to her, after all. Bunny makes a nasty little speech about how Char made a vow before God, swearing to stay with Trey until death parted them, "not until the road got rocky." Char looks faintly guilty and fully uncomfortable. Bunny continues, "When I think of the heartache and shame you've caused my poor boy...." Wow, this is laid on more thickly than En-Cor lasagna. Bunny sure knows how to twist a knife. I can see she's concerned about her son, but, um, where is her son? Do mothers often step in to help manage divorce proceedings? There's a knock on the door -- telegram! From none other than Trey. Someone already pointed out on the boards that Trey sent a telegram instead of calling or faxing or appearing in person so they could work in this bit: "Charlotte was a wonderful wife, stop. She did nothing wrong, stop. Give her everything she wants, stop. Seriously, mother...stop." Heh. It's a good bit. The only reason why I didn't give this episode an "A" is because no one got laid. Other than that, it's perfect. Bunny extends a clawed hand, asking wordlessly to examine the telegram. It sticks. Char gets her apartment, and tells Bunny she's sorry, for everything. Bunny just sails out, her nose in the air. Well, fine. And hooray, Char got the apartment! Sweet.
Carrie sits on her stoop with Steve. He asks if he wanted to see her to tell her to stop calling Miranda so much. Oh, no. Carrie was thinking of herself. Again. She wants to know how Aidan feels about her. Steve bursts out with, "Oh, jeez, NO. You're not going to try to get back together with him again, are you?" No, she just wants to know how Aidan feels about her. Does he hate her? Steve rapidly bounces a basketball against the stoop until she asks him to stop. He says Aidan is fine...NOW. NOW, he's okay. But BEFORE…oh, man. "Back then he couldn't get out of bed for like, a month? I brought him chicken wings. He lost his ability to open up and trust women." And who told him that? Nina. Loo Lady. She had a little insight on the situation. Some one-sided insight, but whatever.
Carrie and Stanford are walking in the farmer's market. Carrie is ranting about how "one bad review can cancel out all good word of mouth," and how Nina is "yip-yapping" that Carrie is a heartbreaker "all over town." Wow, I'm amazed that this hasn't happened to Carrie before. She wants to tell Nina her side of the story, but fast. Be sure to include the lovely details like wearing his ring on a chain, and cheating on him with your ex, and seeking out other (gay) male friends to escort you places, not. Stanford asks Carrie what she thinks of Marcus. Carrie says, "Nice!" And yip-yaps on about Aidan and how relationships are complicated until Stanny yells, "STOP!" He's tired of hearing about Aidan all the livelong day, and for the last two years. Can't Carrie pull her head out of her ass long enough to compliment him on his sweet, wonderful boyfriend for one goddamn minute? And sincerely, and not in passing, and not only when asked? Seriously. Carrie says she likes that Marcus makes him happy. Was that so hard? But then things start centering about Carrie once again, as Nina the Loo Lady walks right toward them. Carrie shrinks and gets all small. Nina says brightly, "Carrie! One more time and you are officially stalking me!" Wow, she's mean. Heather Graham introduces herself, and Stanford says he loves her. Nina introduces Carrie, and Heather makes the whoo-shee face again. Oh, ouch. Carrie, still feeling and looking small, asks to speak to Nina privately. Stanford offers to buy Heather a pretzel, and they're off. Carrie says she thinks Nina thinks she may know something about her relationship with Aidan. BUT. "Break-ups are not necessarily symptomatic of what a couple had together." And she would never intentionally do anything to hurt Aidan. Nina opens her eyes wide, blinks, and says "okay," but you can tell she doesn't believe her. Carrie says, "So. Bye." And walks away, VO-ing that "it's the reviews you give yourself that matter." So true. Stanford rejoins her, and chatters on about how he told Heather Graham that you can get the best pretzels in Bavaria. Aw.