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Nancy has just told Esteban -- the Mayor of Tijuana and a boss in the Mexican drug trade -- that she's carrying his son, so he won't have her murdered for shutting down the border tunnel. Esteban takes out everybody who knows beyond two goons in a way that's hilarious, offers good drama for Mary Louise, and involves a hilarious and very subtle American Idol in-joke. Then he takes her to a Mexican doctor, where she experiences life as an object, and he makes it quite clear this is only a temporary reprieve from her death. This is only slightly more awkward than her sleepy revelation of the pregnancy to brother-in-law Andy, in the middle of his declaration of eternal love; he spends the rest of the episode in a whiny funk.
We check in with the rest of the characters through a round-robin series of calls from Rudolfo the Hot Mexican Revolutionary, who is attempting to ransom Celia after he and her daughter Quinn kidnapped her last year. Needless to say, the entire cast is heartless about her plight and hangs up on him in a variety of rude and hilarious ways. But also needless to say, she starts playing mind games on Rudolfo and Quinn immediately, eventually getting Quinn out of the tent and working the supportive revolutionary angle with Rudolfo. I wish she could stay in that tent forever, but we know he's got Southland to deal with.
Finally legal Silas pulls together a plan to grow pot in the Mexican forest, resentfully getting Doug on board. Recipe for success. Meanwhile, due to the increasing danger and general stress of having people up in her business all the time, Nancy sends drug-dealing younger son Shane to stay with her bitchface sister Jill (the highly anticipated and always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the Oakland Hills. Andy is only too happy to accompany him, because he's still grumpy about the baby. Finally alone, Nancy gets a few minutes of sunlight and happiness when an open-air flashmob dance party erupts around her, but the lurking resentment of Cesar reminds her she's got about twenty-five weeks to live.
The good: the dialogue, sharp and acidic (and occasionally sophomoric) as ever. The bad: not much, beyond recycling Sanjay's already-stale cocksucker punchlines. It's nice to see Nancy find out what those girls felt like all the months they were coming through the tunnels before she found time to have drug-induced guilt about it, and even nicer to see her admit that she loves Andy right back, just not in that way. I love the shocked lemon-sucking face Nancy summons up every single time someone finally calls her an asshole; after all, she's only had four seasons of entitlement to prepare her for it. And of course, the suburban-mom timeliness of way cool things like flashmobs is quaint and adorable -- we're looking forward to jokes about Twitter and Lindsay Lohan in Season Six -- although luckily it's brilliantly used, and returns us to Weeds at its best: bitter and bright, in equally huge amounts.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously, Nancy Botwin was installed in a maternity store that housed a tunnel from Mexico after a man named Guillermo burned her city down to keep her safe and nudged her into drug trafficking. This led to a meeting with the Mayor of the TJ and major drug boss guy Esteban Gonzales, who fell in love with her. They both made bad decisions, including an ayahuasca trip in which Nancy realized that drugs and guns weren't the only thing she was trafficking: also young girls.
Flipping out, she flipped on him and went to the DEA, where a man named Till was going crazy because Esteban's men killed his lover. Guillermo went to jail, and Nancy was discovered to be the rat. Esteban summoned her to Tijuana for judgment, on her elder son's birthday, and she played her last ace: her third son, Esteban's first.
Esteban stares at the ultrasound while his right-hand man Cesar yells that it's just Nancy stalling. She stares at her lap while Cesar bitches that she absolutely must die, and Esteban explains that things have changed. Cesar pulls out a gun and shoots the other two flunkies in the room, to keep the secret safe, and Nancy hits the deck. The only other person who knows is Sucio, but he won't talk. Esteban tells Cesar to send some flowers to the men's families, and Nancy sort of clears her throat. He offers to have Cesar take her home, and she stalls, saying she's got her car -- Cesar should have time to process the "sudden death of two work friends." Cesar protests, and she stares up at impassive Esteban.
Finally, Nancy shakes her head and asks them to just kill her, not to do the "let's go on a drive" thing. She swallows the end of her sentence, but Esteban tells her again to go home, she has enough backbone left to cough, "Alone?" Yeah. He says he'll be in touch, and she grabs her purse, standing. She does an awkward pee-dance pirouette with the bodies, and they tell her to use the other door. "Talk to you soon," she says with a terrified smile, and he nods. "Oh, yes." Cesar is, as usual, unimpressed.
Dean and Isabelle Hodes are being adorable, playing gin rummy, when his phone rings. "Mr. Dean Hodes?" It's Rudolfo, getting all revolutionary down in Mexico, where he and Dean's absolutely broken daughter Quinn have drugged and kidnapped her mother, Celia. Quinn slaps at the mosquitoes and tries to paint her toenails. "I have your wife! You send me money!" Rudolfo wants to finance la revolución, Quinn just wants money and to fuck with Celia for packing her off to Casa Reforma, which is where she met Rudolfo -- then a mild-mannered Poli Sci teacher -- in the first place. Dean shrugs. "Yeah, she's no longer my wife?" Rudolfo spits, "Then I will kill her! She dies!" Dean tells him he's broke, so whatever. "I will kill her! I slit her neck! I smash her head!"
In the background Celia -- covered in the lunch into which she took a faceplant earlier, when the drugs kicked in -- starts to stir. "Knock yourself out. Bye bye!" He puts down his cards: gin! (This whole thing is very funny. Even funnier than when the exact same thing happened last year, where everybody fingered Celia for the grow house. Come on, guys.) Rudolfo gets very upset, and Quinn tells him Dean probably couldn't understand his "fucking lame accent." Whatever, Q-Dawg. You're looking at Kevin Alejandro in old-timey pants. That's about as good as it's going to get this week.
Up north, Isabelle asks who was on the phone. "Someone's kidnapped your mother," Dean says, and her jaw drops a little. "Seriously?" Who knows. "Another game?" She grins and settles into the game; meanwhile, Rudolfo is into autorevolutionary screeching about "workers everywhere" until Quinn clonks something at his head, then knees his crotch. Then giggles psychotically as he groans. Celia wakes up, chained to a chair, woozy and adorable: "Jesus. What the... hell's going on here?"
Nancy's at the mall, sucking on a smoothie and staring at a maternity store across the way, post-traumatic and phased out; she notices a spot on her purse, and when she rubs at it, slowly perceives that it is blood from the double homicide she just witnessed, before fleeing to the mall. It's deafening. She stares, and wipes at it, breathing slowly for a moment before standing up, tossing the napkin in the trash as she heads home.
There's a gift basket, terrifically, on the kitchen table at the Ren-Mar house. "Silas, You Are Loved. Me. Mom." They're digging into it, stoned and hungry and carefree: Silas, Andy, Doug. They are men. Andy eats the butter cookies without knowing what they mean: "So simple, yet so delicious." Silas wants to run to the forest or farmlands down south, and start a real operation. Doug pooh-poohs this idea, saying that growing in Mexico is a terrible idea. The water's full of "paraquat and Mexican sewer poop." And there are the hassles of crossing the border, etc. Andy asks about the marks around Doug's neck, and he barely pauses before fessing up about jerking off with a noose. "Nice!" Andy says.
Shane enters about six feet taller, with a haircut and an earring which Silas wastes no time in telling him is in the wrong ear. Shane wigs, but he's kidding; these are his male role models. Not that his female ones are better. Doug says they should grow in a national park and then says some words I don't understand ("Gift with purchase? Nelson Mandela!") that I assume are pot- or Doug-related, and therefore gross. Shane mentions Cleveland National Park, and Doug asks if he's on drugs: they're not in Ohio. He laughs and says the park is in San Diego County, but Doug's on a roll: "Cleveland, Pittsburgh, what's with you and the Rust Belt?"
Nancy enters just as Silas is calling her room and Shane's fighting him on it. Andy, who realized recently that he is in love with Nancy -- once Doug explained it to him -- flips out on them about how, if she is dead, they're going to cover the whole thing in plastic. He shrieks that they are animals; they try Rock Paper Scissors. Nancy finally strolls in, rolling her eyes and apologizing for her temporary survival. Andy does a little dance, giggly and squirmy and happy she's okay, and then quietly whispers an explanation for the marks on Doug's neck. Being appalled at him is like a luxury these days.
morning, the phone rings. Nancy answers it from bed, sleepily. "I have your friend!" She's woozy and exhausted, asking what the hell he's talking about. "Celia Hodes! I chop off her ear!" She doesn't even open her eyes as he asks for forty thousand dollars: "How van Gogh... It's too early for this. We're really not friends." He desperately marks her down to thirty as Nancy's hanging up. She barely closes her eyes before Andy comes in, acting squirrely.
"Nance, I got a plan: We should flee. That's my plan, fleeing." She smiles at him. It's the Mexican Mafia. There's actually nowhere to go. But he doesn't want to just sit there: "You finked! And they know it! They're playing with you! You're a cat toy, and they're cats! Mexican cats. Gatos!" She laughs at him, and begs for sleep. He kneels at the side of the bed, speaking tenderly now. "We're going to Denmark." She's grinning, sleepy. "They won't find us in Copenhagen!" He explains that it's wonderful there: "Wonderful, wonderful. AndIloveyou."
She sighs his name, puts her hand tenderly on his chin. He smiles, and inside his pointy little head the violins swell to an almost unbearably aching, sweet finish. "I'm pregnant," she says, and he swallows his smile. "And I need to sleep." She looks into his eyes and he stares, wiggly and embarrassed and hurt. There was a whole story right then, and she broke it. They were going to be on the run and in love, and she fucked it up. He laughs and stands up, heading for the door. "Andy? Wait, what." Nothing. He smiles at her and feels retarded; he's a million miles away. She sighs. Great. He vanishes and the phone rings again; she stares murderously at it and finall
y answers. It's Cesar, with an address and a time.
Shane's selling drugs at the school library while those terrible girls look on; he's got a book in his hands. "Get to the anal rape scene yet?" The gothier one hisses at her. "Thanks for ruining it for me!" OMG these girls are so real. "Don't worry, there's two," the skankier one says, but they spot a teacher coming and grab hands, running away together. Maybe forever. A hot ginger teacher sticks his head through the shelf at Shane and asks if he's reading the book. "Did you actually read The Kite Runner before you assigned it?" The teacher assures Shane he thought they could handle it. Especially Shane, little multitasker that he is.
"Shane. I have twenty-three papers to grade tonight. They're all on Anne Frank. Do you know how depressing that is?" Shane agrees that he picks some really sad books. "Which is why I need some pot. Plus you people can't write for shit, that's even sadder." Shane asks if that shouldn't be "more sad," stalling for time, and the teacher threatens him with confiscation. "What would we find?" Shane hands him a baggie: "A cure for depression?" I don't care how cute you are, buying weed from a freshman, much less your own student, is weak sauce. I swear Shane has the worst effing luck with teachers.
Sanjay: is a gay homosexual queer. Till tries to get more information out of him about the tunnel, but Sanjay's too faggy to be of help. Then there's a call from Mexico, which excites Till until he finds Rudolfo on the other end, asking for Celia's ransom money, and tells him to fuck himself. He hangs up, and Sanjay proceeds to be gay some more. I'd tell you more, but that's actually the whole joke.
Silas pulls out the map of the forest: six hour hike, no roads. Andy is out of it, hugging laundry and freaking out about love and babies and all that mess. Doug's phone rings -- "Who? Celia? That cunt can lick my balls. Tell her I said hi!" -- and he hangs up, begging Silas to be included in this. Not only because he's apparently "good at" whatever he thinks is going to be happening, but also because he's bored and lonely for chat now that Andy's gone catatonic. Silas gets a management headache.
Andy's phone rings. "Yeah, I know Celia. ...Well, we're all gonna die. Life is cheap. People die, and people have babies every day. What's with that, women in their forties having babies? What? No, I'm not paying a ransom. Hello?" He puts his head back down on the pile of towels he's got his arms around. "Rude." Silas stares down at him, the only adult on this entire show for the second season running: "Andy. Who's having a baby."
Celia's horrified: they've gotten to the Z's in her phone, and nobody's even slightly interested in her fate. Rudolfo asks if she has a Facebook, some friends there, and she spits. "Clearly, that would be a waste of time!" Rudolfo laughs. She asks him what they say, when he calls, and he says mostly they mention the bad economy and say they haven't talked to her in a while, but to say hi. "You're just trying to be nice. Everybody hates me." He nods and sits. "Very much."
Rudolfo rubs at the scratches Quinn's put on the side of his face, and Celia jumps at the chance to connect and/or play mindgames, asking if he's put Neosporin or something on there. He swears he's okay, and she jumps in there with both hands, both feet, and all the Pop Psych 101 she can muster. "Why do you let her do that to you. She's abusive! Roberto, you do not have to take this." He reminds her, again, that his name is Rudolfo, and she gamely carries on. "And how often does she hit you, Rudolfo?" He starts into some battered shit about how she doesn't mean to hurt him, he just makes her mad sometimes, which is funny when it's a guy saying it -- I guess? -- but honestly not very funny no matter who's saying it, and of course Quinn comes in screaming before he's finished a sentence.
Rudolfo explains to Quinn how nobody's going to be paying the ransom, and Quinn... It's like her hair is on fire, or snakes. I don't know how she does it. "Fuck it! We'll kill her and sell her organs! Okay! Let's go have sex!" Rudolfo grins and nods at Celia, who shakes her head in disgust.
Me too. There was a time not so long ago that I would have put some thought into this, about how Celia's sins are not only coming back in the narrative but also in all the connections between herself and her daughter, the parallels between Dean and Rudolfo and their abusive SOs, the whole student/teacher thing mirroring Nancy's relationships with her betters in the drug trade, the S&M that seems to be encroaching all the time on this show for no real reason, the full-circle nature of Celia's tiny little addiction cycle, but you know what? These people are fucking cartoons. The jokes are lame, or mean, or both, and there's not any subtext to get to: Celia's a fucking crazy bitch, everybody on the show hates her and it's hilarious, same joke ten times, Quinn's a fucking crazy bitch because Celia's a fucking crazy bitch, Rudolfo is a pussy who wouldn't know praxis if it fucked him in his revolutionary ass, and this show is chock-full of fascinating characters played by awesome actors who may or may not be called upon to do anything interesting ever again. Call me week, because remember when Celia was an interesting, complex person? Remember the Coke bottles? "I have cancer"? That was a long fucking time ago. On the other hand, I just remembered that the rest of this episode is golden, so I should shut my gob.
The doctor's office is white and buzzy and silent and hard. Nancy doesn't look so good, on the table. Esteban finally comes in with the doctors, talking about who knows what. No subtitles. They discuss her baby, and her body; a nurse shoves a thermometer in her mouth and wraps a cuff around her arm. She understands nothing; words jump out but they don't mean anything. Imagine coming through the tunnel, your first day in America. What it would feel like, the moment you realize you're just another one of those little boxes. To be filled. To be just a body, and not the person inside.
Esteban asks Cesar's opinion about something, and he gives it; Nancy stares. The doctor talks to the nurse; Nancy stares. Finally she begs them to tell her what's going on, but they don't. Esteban hands her forms for a procedure she doesn't recognize, because her last pregnancy was Shane, and Shane's in high school now. She stands up, beyond frustrated, still thinking she has choices. Esteban shoots Cesar a look, and he ushers them out: they call her Sra. Gonzales, and she shivers. She tells Esteban she feels like she's been abducted by aliens and is now in their craft, being probed. "You have no idea, do you?" he asks, shoving her down onto the table a second time.
She nods, tries to be conciliatory. Tries to remember loving him, and being loved. She says that yes, it's his baby, and she understands if he wants to know all about it, if he needs proof. But they should make an appointment with a doctor in Ren-Mar, who speaks English and addresses her like she's a human being. They can even have lunch together, afterward. How about that?
Esteban shoves her down, hard, pushes her up the table; he shoves her feet roughly into the stirrups. "How about that? How about: You are Lazarus, risen from the dead." She's not getting it and he's getting tired of her not getting it. He runs his hands across her womb; it's not the touch of love. The love has left the room. She will lay on the table and submit to the probes and prove to him that there is a baby, that it is male, and that it is his. And if she wants to go home, in the midst of these very clear requirements, then Cesar will take her.
Nancy smiles; she finally gets it. This is not a reprieve, she's just become a different kind of problem, that will be solved in a different way. He searches her face, and she finally lies back; she's a tiger in a cage. She's full of grace. A box to be filled: it's not a trump card, it's the opposite. It makes her less human, not more. Not to him, n
ot anymore. This decision was made before the baby; this decision was made the day she met with Till. She was in a whole new world and she didn't even know it; she still dressed up for him and hoped for the best. She still loved him, she was still attracted to him. He's letting her go; he's already let her go, and she looked right past it. She lies on the table and waits for them, and cries.
Speaking of humiliation, Rudolfo leads Celia back into the tent, having taken her out for a bathroom break. "You're supposed to wipe front to back! If I get some infection..." He ties her back up while Quinn scowls; she opens up to her daughter, in a way. "Enough is enough," she says: Quinn's proven her point, she's angry. Celia must make amends, for her many mistakes. She still has no idea how to do that, or what it means; she has no idea it's basically impossible, after Casa Reforma and the fifteen years of abuse that led there. Her idea of amends, her proposal, is to charge ("and worry about it later!") a week at a spa. Quinn is amused. She left spa treatments a few miles back. Celia's actually serious: she wants Quinn to forget "all this silliness," and go have some rehydrating facials: "You look a little dry there, honey."
Quinn gives some weird, shitty dramatic laugh and brings the laptop around to show her mother a very intense picture of that guy in the bathtub of ice that is burned into your head and mine. "They're gonna saw you open, Mom." They'll slice out Celia's corneas, kidneys, lungs. Not the liver, considering her past, but they'll take the rest and put it in coolers and sell it on the black market, and Quinn will net $100,000 easy, and toast her mother's memory from the deck of her beach house. Celia shakes her head sadly. "Oh, honey," (beat) "You can't buy a beach house for 100K." Heh. Quinn's not listening: she wants to be there when they take out her heart, to prove she has one. To be just a body, not the woman inside it.
"I survived cancer and rehab for this?" She asks for a drink, then; Rudolfo jerks to his feet. "You had cancer?" Quinn screams at him not to start empathizing, but that's not the point: "You had chemo?" Chemo, radiation... Celia stays on topic, asking for more of those roofies they used on her, if nothing else is available. Rudolfo slows down, to explain the black market to Quinn: they won't take her organs, all irradiated and poisoned this way. "And a double mastectomy!" she says triumphantly, pointing at her daughter.
And I guess this, I really do like, because there's always been a sort of rat-poison saccharine thing with Celia, where her strength is her toxicity in just this way: the things that have happened to her, that have warped her, have always been what protected her. I have terrible allergies in Austin, because we love the earth here; in Houston, where the air is hot and dead and full of particulates, I never had a single sneeze, because there was nothing alive there to kick the histamines up. I loved it in the city. So I guess this is the same thing as the Coke bottles, in a way: her hail of frogs was diet soda, but no less desperate or mythic, for all that. And although all of Ren-Mar couldn't be less interested in saving her body, the bad guys are no more interested in selling it for parts. Jail, rehab, that scary crackhead that got fucked with a mannequin leg: when the world ends, it's going to be Celia Hodes and the cockroaches. And that is power, my friend: Bitch never missed the bear, and she never will.
Quinn attacks her mother dreadfully, knocking her chair backward and kicking at her like a soccer ball, and eventually Rudolfo is horrified enough that he shoves Quinn down and tells her to get out of the tent and his life. "You are a mean person!" She takes this in stride, bouncing immediately after a lunge at Rudolofo and a last little chuckle at his cringing away. "Have fun together!" The second she's gone, of course, he collapses weeping and Celia -- still tied to the chair and on her back, still covered in spaghetti or whatever -- rolls her eyes. "Oh, good Christ."
"My eyes! My eyes!" Doug screams, playing with some kid toys, and Silas tells him if he doesn't help pack everything up, he can't come with. Doug whines predictably about this and that, and Shane comes in worrying about Andy, who's stress-baking a million loaves of banana bread. Doug spills the beans about the baby, and Shane's shocked and confused. "Knocked up, Private! Baby on board! Muffin in the muff! Argh!" scream the soldiers in his hands; Silas yells at him for telling Shane about the baby, and Doug's like, "What! I didn't knock her up!" Shane's pretty much horrified, but I mean, let he who furiously masturbates to a picture of his own mother cast the first stone or whatever.
Nancy comes in sniffing, trying to tease Andy back into being on her team, making a show of how he's not talking to her by talking directly to him about the banana bread. He's like, "Pregnant woman have heightened senses or whatever," and she points out that he's talking to her. "Well, I've been thinking. Just because you've been a slutty irresponsible slutty slut who had unprotected sex with a Mexican gangster doesn't mean we can't be friends, right?" Hated that wordy word word tic the first season, still hate it five years later. It's not even funny, no matter what profanities or pointlessly gross words you toss in there. "Wanna lick the spatula?"
Nancy Botwin, because it is what she does, immediately admits she needs him to do her a favor. His face falls, because of course she's only making up to him so he'll do something to make it easier in the latest grave she's dug for herself, because that's this entire show, and there's no Conrad now to pick up the slack. Favor in question: take Shane to stay with her oft-mentioned/never-seen sister in the Oakland Hills. "Jill Price-Gray-With-A-Hyphen?" he asks. "Bitchface?" She nods: lesser of two evils. He says he'll check his schedule, which means yes, and she maneuvers around him in the kitchen, back on the same team.
"I love you too, you know," she says, voice just doofy enough to convey that she totally gets the whole thing, is sorry about the baby, is even sorrier about the way things happen, will never love him that way, but depends on him more than any man she's ever shared her home or her kids with, and that's something. "Yeah, but not in the good way," he says, voice just pissy enough to convey his thanks.
Shane comes in yelling, demanding confirmation, and Nancy yells at Andy for blowing up her spot: "You've got a big mouth!" He shrugs. "You've got a big baby." Shane is appalled because she's so old, and Silas straight-up asks when the abortion is happening. She tells them she's having the baby, and Andy fills in the blanks: not only are they getting a new sibling, but the baby's also the key to keeping their mom's Mexican boyfriend from murdering all of them. "At least until she pops, and then we flee to Denmark." Silas is really grossed out by all of this, even invoking Judah. Of course, Nancy's way beyond that now, and turns to Shane to inform him about his trip to visit Aunt Jill.
"FUCK," Shane explains, "THAT."
Silas complains that Andy can't take Shane to Berkeley because he's going to the forest, and Nancy refers to Silas's business venture as a "camping trip," which causes him to go ballistic, and Shane's still wigging, so Nancy's like, "Fuck it, take them both to Jill's." Things get complex and Shane and Silas end up on the floor beating the shit out each other about who's a grownup and in charge of himself and who's a kid. Silas offers the theory that "one pube" does not a grownup make, and it's on. "I'm baking here!" Andy yells as Nancy screams at him to break it up, and "I gotta check the bread!" Shane, in the middle of the fray, informs Silas that he is possessed of "an afro down there," and Silas responds, rationally, that said afro must be "surrounding [Shane's] pussy," which is an amazing conversation to hear two people have, all things considered.
Andy puts down the hot batch of loaves from the oven and Nancy grabs one immediately in order to smash it onto the floor and call attention to herself, but of course it sizzles her flesh and she drops it onto the floor weakly, running to the sink in total pain. Andy gets awesome: "My beautiful loaf! You ruin everything you touch!" Meanwhile, Silas has kicked Shane pretty much across the room and he finally runs away, just as Doug comes moseying into this chaos with his thumb up his ass, all "Nance! You're back!"
Later she's bandaging her fingers on the couch near the front door; Silas stomps in, drops some pot things in Doug's lap and stomps out the door with all manner of camping and growing equipment. "Be careful, okay? Bringing sunscreen?" She knows how gross and lame it sounds coming out, but she's desperate. Doug follows him with a sympathetic shrug, and Shane comes scowling downstairs, with an identical stormcloud over his head. She says some random crap to him too, and is brutally rebuffed. Frankly at this point I don't know why she's even trying. Once you've won the Worst Parent Ever award, I say stick with what works. At worst you'll end up in eight separate coolers on the black market. Even Andy barely looks at her, following up after poor Shane, and then she's alone, suddenly. It's so silent you can hear the seagulls.
Later, tired of the house, Nancy heads out to do some shopping. She sits in an outdoor plaza, reading the label on her prenatals and sucking down another smoothie. She is anonymous, but not alone. A squawk and then a song, on the PA speakers; a man starts to dance, and then there are two, and then there are eight. I'd been talking a lot about flashmobs with my friend Karen, in the weeks leading up to the premiere. There have been good ones lately. I like the "Single Ladies" one in London best; Karen sent me one from Antwerp with a song from Sound Of Music. I don't mind when it's marketing, but Karen's was the best because, as she pointed out, there wasn't any subtext or irony or social commentary. Just people dancing, to remind everybody that joy is possible, in fact imminently possible; that in fact it's happening right now. That it's possible to start over again.
Even if you set the dodgy artschool intentions aside, I can't say I know anybody who's been at ground zero of something like that. You better believe I would access all available technology if I were: twittering and taking pictures and video and texting everybody I ever met. That shit is like seeing a unicorn. That's the opposite of blood on your purse. My favorite part of any musical flashmob video -- and I can't be alone in this because it happens every time -- is when something amazing happens, about two-thirds of the way through usually, and the whole crowd gasps at once. Everybody randomly there for no particular reason, all of a sudden breathing in at the same moment, because they are seeing the very same amazing thing.
Nancy has forced the desertion of all her men, by hook or by crook, and she's all alone, right. Just a lonely body. And then inevitably, especially if you're Nancy Botwin, God reaches down and plinks you on the head and says, "You idiot, look around." And for one second, she's in the middle of a manmade magical moment, and nobody's making demands or calling her a slutty slut or Lazarus, or threatening to kill her, or offering death as her only option, or treating her like a little box. The young guy to her explains what's going on and she asks why it's happening. "Because it's cool!" She grins.
"I know one thing," the song says: "That I love you." The strangers all around the periphery grin at each other, because they're special. It's sunny and they were just shopping, just sitting alone or together, and all of a sudden, this reminder. That's what the dance mobs are for: a reminder. Because it's cool. She is grateful, in the sun. They do the Kid 'N Play, they waltz. A lawyer kneels for his business-suit dancing partner. They whirl in the sun, and strangers grin at each other across the dance, amazed by beauty.
They put their arms in the air and the crowd geeks out and everybody squeals and everybody breathes in at the same moment. And there's no blood on her purse at all. And her hand doesn't hurt at all.
And then it's over, and everyone applauds, and the dancers disperse. They go back to being just people, and everyone is touched by this. For the rest of the day, they'll be kissed by that. Plinked in the head.
She looks around the crowd in the last moments of their ecstasy, looking for just one more face, one more stranger's smile she can catch and say, "We were here. We did this, we were here for this, together." Just to catch their eye and smile, in the last fading glow of the moment, like a sunset: "I love you. Remember."
Across the plaza, she sees Cesar, watching from the palms, and her hand begins to ache again.