6-18 “With a Little Help from My Friends”
Guess what? I took the bar exam! Hooray! I think I probably passed but I’m prepared not to have. I find out in October and I’ll let y’all know. And that’s all I want to say about that. [Author’s update 07/23/18: Yes, I passed!]
We know that Blair took the LSAT and went to law school briefly, before she decided to buy Eastland and become its headmistress. I really really wish we could have seen Blair study for and take the bar exam, because I’ve been doing that for the past two and a half months, and misery loves company.
And once the bar exam is over, what does one look for? That’s right, drugs! And since I’ve already recapped the one where Helen Hunt[‘s character] smokes a bong, We jump to season six, where Blair has a new boyfriend who (spoiler!) is up to no good…
And I don’t mean he cheats at Battleship
It is a Sunday and Edna’s Edibles is closed. A mulleted Blair sits alone having a fantasy conversation with some Italian guy named Franco. An equally hideously coiffed Jo catches her and piles on the mockery. Also present is poor Kevin, played by the youngest Cassidy brother for barely a blink of an eye on this show.
Blair explains that she was practicing her Italian, because Nick, her new boyfriend with whom she fell in love in Italian class, is coming over. Jo, meanwhile, is going out with Kevin, who only just showed up last episode along with his father, who is Mrs. Garrett’s old boyfriend. Three episodes from now, there will be an awkward situation in which Jo and Kevin make out. Between now and then Jo goes to Atlantic City and makes out with a musician named Flyman. Jo and Kevin’s date tonight is part of a deal: Kevin goes with Jo to see Gloria Steinem speak, and Jo goes with Kevin to see a surfing movie. You go, Jo.
Peekskill must have been a big market for Gloria Steinem in the mid-80s. The girls were also going to a Gloria Steinem lecture earlier in the season. I think it was in the episode where Jo dates her professor. Once again, I have to appreciate a show that regularly has its main characters going to listen to a feminist icon.
Tootie and Mrs. Garrett come in to the shop and we’re introduced to our subplot: The freezer has gone out and the repairman won’t make a house call on Sunday, and they’ve got a bunch of cheesecakes that are supposed to be picked up tomorrow but will melt before then. They open shop in hopes of selling the cheesecakes today. Jo and Blair offer to stay to help, but Mrs. Garrett encourages them to go on with their plans for lunch and Gloria Steinem; she’ll take care of the shop along with Tootie, Natalie, and Andy.
Enter Blair’s boyfriend, Nick, the epitome of an 80s GQ sexy preppy boy. He’d have been right at home as one of the boys in Dead Poets Society. I probably had a crush on him.
Regular Facts watchers will remember that this is the actor Tom Byrd‘s second time around as Blair’s boyfriend: He played a mentally challenged boy who briefly became Blair’s love interest in season four. Now, courting Blair as a fancy college boy, he brings her a gift (Kermit the Frog bookends) and buys a cheesecake even though he hates them. All of this is to demonstrate to us that he’s a great, sensitive, caring guy. So we don’t think twice when Nick tells Blair that he has a friend coming by to drop off some class notes, and he asks her to wait on meeting Jo and Kevin for lunch until the friend gets there. Blair agrees and tells Jo they’ll meet her and Kevin at the restaurant.
We fade to Mrs. Garrett selling a cheesecake to a customer, while Blair and Nick wait in the shop for Nick’s friend. Blair is concerned that they’ll be late, and Nick asks her to wait just a few more minutes and in the mean time, why doesn’t she just speak some Italian. Flattery will get you everywhere. My boyfriend thinks it’s sexy when I speak Spanish. I don’t find Spanish sexy at all because it just reminds me of my father, but German…rowr.
The Edna’s Edibles phone rings, and it’s for Nick (no cell phones in 1985, after all). It’s his friend, Steve, and after Mrs. Garrett pitches her cheesecake sale to him, she hands the phone over. His conversation takes exactly as long as it takes Andy to explain to Mrs. Garrett that he has posted signs all over Peekskill that read “Edna’s Cheesecakes Are the Cheesiest.” That’s the kind of stunning advertising you get when you entrust your marketing to a 12-year-old, I suppose.
Nick tells Blair that Steve got hung up but will be right over. Blair quite reasonably asks why they have to wait for him when he can just leave the notes with Mrs. Garrett. Nick’s excuse is that he didn’t want to tell Blair before because she would think he was being a pushover, but it’s not just that Steve is leaving notes, he also needs to borrow some money. Blair, still oblivious, tells him he’s being a pushover and agrees to call Jo and Kevin at the restaurant and tell them they’ll all meet up at the theater instead.
Natalie walks in a priest who has just lost fifteen pumpkin pies for the church bazaar to an open-hatchback accident. I would mock the idea that a hatchback could just open at random, but the same thing happened to my family and me when we were in Ireland four years ago. The back opened right up and all our luggage tumbled out onto the road. The rural Irish are an amused but cordial lot; they laughed their asses off at us as they helped these American idiots scrape our shit off the road.
Much less dramatically, the priest agrees to buy fifteen cheesecakes.
Blair and Nick, still waiting at the shop, are now playing electronic Battleship. Man, that was so cool when it first came out. It was like – it automatically tells you if you’ve hit something! And your opponent can’t cheat! And it makes noises! God, if the kids of the 80s could look into the future and see how we entertain ourselves these days, there would be riots until H.G. Wells or Doc Brown or Stewie Griffin came along with a time machine.
Enter Andy, who has been out on the streets of Peekskill with the sandwich board he made. Hey, remember what I said about 12-year-olds doing your marketing?
The situation continues to frustrate Blair. By now, they’ve missed lunch and the movie, and Blair worries about standing Jo and Kevin up entirely. Nick insists he wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t important. Blair points out how dumb this is – they can leave the money with Mrs. Garrett too. But no, Nick still has an excuse. It’s not just the money; Steve might really need to talk to someone and Nick would like to be there for him. Dumb Blair just accepts this and again gently chides Nick for being a pushover.
Protip: when a person’s excuse keeps changing, run.
Jo and Kevin return from the movie, which Jo describes:
“They went to Hawaii to surf, and then they went to Australia to surf, and then they went to Africa to surf, and then their bus broke down and they said, ‘Oh, wow.'”
Later, Jo acknowledges that in addition to “Oh, wow,” the surfers might also have said, “Groovy.” My boyfriend says that an accurate description of a surf movie would also include romance and some tunes.
As she and Kevin head to the kitchen, Jo overhears Nick on the phone asking for Steve Hartman.
Call me nuts, but I think Jo appears to be alarmed.
She goes back to the table where Blair cleans up the Battleship game, and asks if Blair knows who this friend is that Nick is waiting for. Blair knows his name, but doesn’t know him. Jo is incredulous that Nick is lending him money; Blair thinks it’s just because Jo is as concerned about Nick being taken advantage of as she is. Jo explains that this guy doesn’t need money, that he’s the campus cocaine dealer, and if there’s money changing hands between Nick and Steve Hartman, Nick’s not lending, he’s buying. No one finds it surprising that Jo knows who the campus coke dealer is. Because she knows all the criminals.
I can’t tell if Blair is supposed to appear stunned or just stupid.
When we return from commercial, the shop’s promotions have worked, as the store has become crowded. Blair continues to make excuses for Nick to Jo. She says there could be more than one Steve Hartman, and even if it is the same guy, maybe Nick doesn’t know he’s a drug dealer. Jo acknowledges the slim but nonzero possibility that this is correct, and Blair promises to verify.
Nick returns from the phone saying that Steve got hung up on some business but left a message asking Nick to wait. Jo excuses herself to change for Gloria Steinem’s lecture (I think she looks fine), leaving Blair and Nick alone.
Blair asks Nick who Steve Hartman is, and explains that Jo knows of a Steve Hartman who deals drugs on campus. “I told her it was a different guy,” she says. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
Blair keeps trying even after Nick confirms it’s the same guy – she says she understands that he’s a friend and she wants to help him out. God she’s dumb. He offers to put the truth to her delicately and she still doesn’t figure it out, asking him to forget delicate and just tell her the truth. He finally tells her in no uncertain terms that he buys cocaine from this guy. Once Blair’s denial is shattered, she gets indignant about the fact that she and her giant hair have blown the whole day waiting around for Nick to make a buy.
Once Blair finally catches on and gets pissed, she’s awesome, and her hairspray could just about kick Nick’s ass on its own. She points out the absurdity of all his excuses (“Blair, I swear, this wasn’t planned!” “Well, I admit I’m sort of a novice, but don’t you have to plan these things?”), and tears him a new one. By now they’ve moved the fight to the living room rather than the shop. Mrs. Garrett overhears them arguing and checks in to make sure everything is OK. Nick rolls off a story about how Blair’s mad because she saw him dancing with “the sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” Blair doesn’t miss a beat in pointing out how easily the lies come out of him.
Nick continues, pointing out that since they’ve been seeing each other almost every day for the past three months (timeline!), Blair should know who he is. He has a good point, but it’s not one that’s easily accepted by the misled party. I tried that when my folks found out I’d been smoking pot because I got hospitalized for pneumonia when I was 17. I argued that if they didn’t know before, then it clearly wasn’t affecting me in a way that should be cause for concern, so they needn’t worry about it. It’s a sound argument, really, but somehow my folks didn’t see it that way, and neither does Blair. She says she knows who she thought he was.
It’s a tough call, really. I certainly don’t subscribe to the “drugs are bad, mmmkay?” line of thinking. I don’t think that finding out that someone “does drugs” immediately maligns their entire character. But there are some drugs of much greater concern than others. I don’t worry about stoners. I worry about meth and opiate users. Coke is somewhere in the middle. I’ve known casual coke users, so I don’t necessarily worry that it’s going to eat their lives, but I’ve never liked being around people who are on coke. They’re too twitchy or something. I don’t know. I’ve never really had friends who do that much coke.
But this episode aired in the heart of the “Just Say No” days, and Blair is certainly not going to have any of this. Nick diatribes that he has to get by on four hours of sleep a night to maintain a 3.5 GPA, he has football and varsity track, he has student government and the school newspaper, and he’s got Blair to take care of. Sounds like someone is a bit overextended. It’s also a sign of the times: the NCAA didn’t start drug testing until 1986, the year after this episode aired.
The issue isn’t necessarily that Nick does coke. One problem is that Nick is willing to bleed an entire day waiting for his dealer to show up (What’s up with this dealer anyway? Is Peekskill so dry that this dealer can jerk his clients around like this and they’ll still come running?). Another problem is that he lied, repeatedly, to Blair about the reason for the wait. It’s also clear that the buy is more important than anything else to him, evidenced by how he leaps up mid-“status of our relationship” conversation to grab the phone when Andy tells him that he has a call.
Mrs. Garrett, along with Natalie, Tootie and Andy celebrate the sale of the last cheesecake and the closing of the shop for the day. Jo returns to the shop and I have no idea why she changed, since she looks exactly the same as she did before. She asks Blair what’s up, and she learns that Nick is outside, still looking for the dealer.
Kevin enters the shop with Nick and makes some stupid anti-feminist jokes, and I’m reminded that I stopped shaving before it was trendy. He clarifies that he’s excited about the talk since he found out that Gloria Steinem was a Playboy bunny. Jo sends the poor dolt to wait outside so she can help poor stupid Blair figure out how to deal with this Nick thing.
And thus Jo exposes the biggest problem of all: having set up the buy in Mrs. Garrett’s shop, Nick is exposing Mrs. Garrett to potential criminal liability for the deal taking place on her property (and we know that Jo knows about crime). That’s the thing that pisses me off. It’s fine for people to do stupid, risky things, but dragging in innocent third parties is unacceptable. This is why I recently lost my cool when I was at a party involving alcohol openly being served to minors. I told the owner of the house that if he insisted on this stupidity, fine, but those of us who aren’t interested in being arrested when the cops show up should have been warned ahead of time so we could get the hell out.
Nick takes exception to being characterized as a villain, and Jo smacks down that he’s not a villain; he’s just like a dozen guys she grew up with, thinking they can mess around and it’ll never catch up to them. She leaves out the part about it being sad and pathetic. While Nick insists he’s not like those guys nodding off on street corners, Jo continues the PSA by pointing out where the money goes. Nick continues to rationalize, and Jo takes off, suggesting that Blair meet them if she gets tired of waiting.
Jo may have failed at intimidating Nick, but in comes Mrs. Garrett, and that’s a face that’s hard to deceive. She gratefully accepts Blair’s offer to close up the shop, and comments admiringly that despite his friend’s problem with punctuality, Nick sure is loyal.
That would have sent me into a spiral of guilt, but I guess Nick wasn’t raised Catholic. Instead, he starts acting like…a guy on coke. He begs Blair to wait five more minutes, and he addresses Blair’s concern about Mrs. Garrett’s liability with a ridiculous charade about how they won’t get caught.
Blair has had enough; when Nick says it’s just a little buy that doesn’t mean anything, Blair sarcastically marvels that they’ve been waiting eight hours for something that doesn’t mean anything. Over Nick’s protests, she tells him that she’s closing the shop. She gives him one last chance to decide to go with her to Gloria Steinem’s lecture, or anywhere else that isn’t sitting there waiting for the dealer.
But no, Nick says he can’t tonight. Blair locks up the shop, leaving Nick to pace outside until Steve comes. We never know if he does.
God, that was a depressing episode. I didn’t remember it being quite so bleak. Here are some adorable sleeping hamsters with a tiny teddy bear to make you feel better.
