Liz still faces the three weddings in one day, and while she took the advice of all those moms who were in the offices last week to lower her standards, she's still without a date.
Jack, for about the fourth week in a row, is still dithering over whether to pick the demure CNBC anchor Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks), descended from cool Swedish people from the valley, or hometown Boston gal Nancy Donovan (Julianne Moore), a red haired, hot tempered nut descended from Irish bog people. His indecision is annoying me and trying my patience with this normally funny show.
Tracy is also dithering and fidgeting with his EGOT necklace that he got some episodes ago. It's either do a script evoking his harsh South Bronx neighborhood -- and something like the bleak reality of the movie Precious -- or film motion capture scenes for Garfield 3: Feline Groovy. That movie has a clever title because, well, cats have grooves. Dot Com urges Tracy to do the urban film, so he can get the Oscar represented by the "O" in EGOT, but Tracy's life between 1975 and 1982 is a total blank, a massive bloc of repressed memories.
Liz tells Jenna she will get out her "Gentleman Rolodex" of former lovers and search for a date, now that her standards are not sky high. Seeking out an ex would be like "sexual time travel," much like Jenna says depicted in that famous Cinemax softcore movie, that is the title of this episode.
So Liz goes searching for a plus one. She finds Beeper King Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters) working on some kind of tinfoil covered box in a park. A kid named Jose pops out, and Dennis shoves him back inside. He tells Liz the boy is from a program that matches children to troubled adults, and that he is making a balloon that this time will really have a child inside when he launches it. He invites Liz to join him and become a "millionaire." Needless to say, Liz is appalled and counters that Dennis isn't working a scientific research facility but a public park named after bad tempered NBA player Ron Artest.
Her next visit is to Don Draper--er, Drew Baird (Jon Hamm), the Dumbest Doctor on Planet Earth. She is shocked to see he has massive pirate hooks instead of hands. He also trashes half his apartment with those lethal prosthetics. Drew says he lost one hand to a helicopter rotor in a Doctors Without Borders trip as he landed in Zimbabwe, to a guy he mistook for a former coach. The other was a casualty of playing with fireworks with his friends. He begs her to give him a chance, because he's in line for a hand transplant from a strangler on death row.
As she leaves, Drew manages to touch her tenderly with one of those hooks, and it's hot from warming it in the oven. "Who's dumb now?" he says.
Avery is still mad at Jack over Nancy. He promises he will try to figure things out during the weekend. As she exits in an elevator, the other one opens and
discharges a gleeful Nancy in an unexpected arrival.At Jack's house, he tells Nancy he relaxes to John Philip Sousa marches and quickly cues one up with a remote. Nancy pops out in scarlet lingerie, ready to seduce him. Love to the rhythm of brass and drums!
Liz meets Jenna at Cerie's rehearsal dinner and complains, "I've been through every guy! There's no one left!"
"You sound like me at the Olympic village," Jenna says.
Giving up, she says, "So I go to Floyd's wedding alone. Maybe I'll just lean into it and bring a cat in a stroller."
The white English Wesley Snipes (Michael Sheen) pops up yet again and is very delighted to see her. He bobs and weaves crazily. "Quit doing that! You look idiotic!" Liz says.
"Of course I do," Wes says. "Excellent pantomime is supposed to look idiotic."
He says that he lost his job a couple days earlier and has a little bit of a residency program. He doesn't want to go back to England and can't deal with the 2012 London Olympics being chaotic, because the English just can't control the people as the Chinese government did at the opening ceremonies in Beijing. He agrees to go to the weddings with Liz, even though she hates him.
Wes says they're just like Ross and Rebecca in the English show Chums and goofily starts to sing the theme song to her: "I'll be here always, while the rains fall..."
Back at Jack's place, Nancy is content about making love with Jack and considers it a big step in their relationship.
Jack disagrees. "Sex is not a big deal right now. How can doing something animals do be a big deal? I mean, worms can do it with any other worm." [That is true about the annelids, or segmented worms, but many nematodes, the unsegmented worms, are only male or female. Your biology trivia of the day.]
For Nancy is was a very big deal, as Jack and her ex were the only two men she ever slept with. She confesses to the "sins" of going out with friends and dancing with a guy, and allowing a man to touch her hips early on a Sunday, the day set aside for the Lord. Catholic guilt is messing with her, she says.
Jack denies it messes with him, but then he stabs himself in the thigh with a fork over his perceived iniquities.
Kevin and Dot Com take Tracy to a copy shop in the South Bronx at 157th Street and "Lieutenant Uhura Avenue." It looks nothing like his old home in the projects, except for a hidden stairwell scrawled in graffiti. Suddenly Tracy starts to bawl and remember his awful childhood, when he slept in a dog bed stuffed with wigs and used a ribcage for a basketball hoop, and where he saw a prostitute stab a clown. And a guy with dreads electrocuted his pet fish.
Dot Com urges Tracy to use this agony to do the urban film, but he is still determined to make the Garfield movie. Later at the studio where he is rehearsing Feline Groovy, he's wearing a custom tailored green motion capture suit and starts to rant at the boy playing Nermal the kitten. On his own Tracy decides playing a cat who sleeps all the time and eats lasagna is just not right when he remembers that he saw a homeless guy cook a Hot Pocket over the third rail of the G Train.
Wes takes Liz to the church where Floyd is getting married. She says has to go to the front of the church because she is doing a reading, and Wes says maybe she'll find a date there. Liz finds the other reader, Mike, a bland looking single attorney with a great "head shape," but who is like all those other bizarros she meets. He's a "plushie," a guy who likes to dress up as a mascot and have orgies with other mascots at hotels and state parks, and they call sex "yiffing."
While Liz is reading out of 1 Corinthians 13, the classic chapter about love, Jack tells Nancy about Avery. She becomes as angry as Avery was last week. Jack texts Liz to stall the wedding Mass, so she tries to make "unscheduled" readings while Jack tries to keep Nancy from leaving.
Nothing she finds is right, as she reads about Onan laying with his brother's wife and spilling his semen on the ground (Genesis 38:9). Or Zipporah taking a flint and cutting off her son's foreskin (Exodus 4:25). And finally, "for he has sold us and indeed has devoured our money" (Genesis 31:15).
To be continued...
In the end credits, we learn of some of the other horrors Tracy witnesses as a child. A hooker ate a tire! A pack of wild dogs took over a Wendy's and successfully ran it! A baby gave another baby a tattoo, and they were both very drunk! His home in projects was named after Zachary Taylor, whom history acknowledges as the worst president ever!
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