Fran's house. Tony happily tells her the news about the track, and she's thrilled. As a reward, she pulls out something she's been meaning to show him, and it turns out to be a monogrammed handkerchief in a fancy wooden box. "Check out the initials," she orders, and Tony flips out when he sees that they spell out "JFK." He tells her about the captain's hat he bought back in Season 1, and Fran points out that her lipstick is still blotted on the hankie. Tony feels compelled to smell the thing for some reason (ew!), and while he's still sniffing, Fran announces that she and JFK once "had a little thing." And she does mean little. Rimshot! "March of '61," she explains. "Right before the Bay of Pigs." She tells the story, which involves her and a friend ending up at a party in the Presidential Suite at some hotel along with a bunch of celebrities: Peter Lawford, Sinatra, and -- wait for it -- Jackie Gleason. Heh. "I'm looking around," she continues, "And I glance across the room, and suddenly, I am locking eyes with John. Fitzgerald. Kennedy." He latched right onto her, and by the end of the night he was using an incredibly cheesy pick-up line involving national security and Fran's Russian-made fur coat. Oy. Why is Presidential sex always so tacky? Tony wants to hear all the juicy details, and Fran is reluctantly forced to admit that it was just a one-night thing, and that JFK blew her off the only other time she tried to get together with him. "He had something special, though," she reminisces. "That was something your mother never understood. When you're married to a powerful man, you'd damn well better make him feel powerful." Hmm. Maybe that's why I never married. Fran goes on to tell him that she once saw a picture of Livia on New Year's Eve, and his mother "looked like a refugee." But totally a statuesque one, I'm sure. Tony makes excuses to leave early at this point, and a lot of people in the forums have speculated that her insulting Livia like that must have pissed him off. I think it's something else, though. After all, the very next time we see him, he's busy fucking Valentina, so I think it's safe to assume that all that JFK talk got him horny for a "classy" mistress of his own. And besides, if Tony really was pissed, would he have handed Fran a big wad of cash like that on the way out the door? He tells her to get her phone turned back on and her rent paid up, and she strokes his face and chest in a more-than-mildly inappropriate way. "Your dad would be so proud," she sniffs. "He raised a real gentleman." Hmm. I think the JFK story got Fran a little hot, as well.
The Executive Game. Tim is playing with Chris, Wide Guy, Random Dude #1 ("The Car Wash King"), and Random Dude #2 (the...uh, "Sausage King of Chicago"), while Tony and Larry Barese watch from the sidelines. Wide Guy manages to win the hand, but the real action comes when Random Dude #1 starts asking Tim some TV questions: "So when you write on TV, what do they have, like one guy who writes the words for Dylan McDermott, and one guy who writes for Nicholson's girlfriend?" Heh. We should try doing a recap like that someday. Of course, this does sort of point out the big problem with the long hiatuses this show takes, because Dylan McDermott isn't even on that show anymore, and Terrence Winter has got to be kicking himself that he missed out on an easy Shatner joke here. You know, I think it's a little bit ironic that they're using this character to get in digs at all the crappy, poorly-written, poorly-executed shows on network TV, and yet director Steve Buscemi can't even get the eye-lines right in this scene. Random Dude #1 keeps looking off into an empty corner in all his close-ups. Oops. Christopher announces that he's calling it a night, but Tim decides to stay and keep playing, because he's been "getting killed." Oh, Timmy. You have no idea. The Sausage King starts to deal the next hand, and the Eagle-Eyed Forum Posters have correctly noted that he's dealing from the bottom of the deck. And I was totally going to put a huge paragraph here about how I love the obsessive attention to even the tiniest details of subtext that this show consistently demonstrates, but then they fucked up the eye-lines and I'm getting close to deadline anyway. So, sorry.