Ever since I was a young lad of 18, I hated being referred to as a "girl--" I know most women have to grow into maturity and what being a woman represents to them, but I think it starts with defining words. Girl is an immature person, she is not of age, she is a child. And twenty-something WOMEN are NOT girls.
It's fucking insulting.
I know that I won't be twenty-something forever, I just have a little over a year left, actually, but I hope I will continue to feel this way and fight against my baser "young people these days" urges.
Not to mention, people can be immature independent of their ages. :cough: Carrie :cough:
So, with that tone in mind. Let's begin:
The foursome are considering taking the last few weekends of a beach rental house off the hands a few friends we never see again. These friends have had a few combined canoodles and torrid affairs at the beach rental and none of them want to come back.
Miranda thinks it's slightly sad-- four thirty-something women going in on a rental share.
Charlotte thinks it's a great opportunity to enjoy one last summer together as single women before one of them gets married or has a kid.
Carrie thinks that the house is haunted with the affairs of these friends.
And Sam is too busy complaining about her twenty-something assistant (who sleeps and fucks in shifts with her twenty other friends who are also renting a house in the Hamptons) to give her opinion. When Charlotte finally bends their wills, Sam claims the late shift.
In the next scene, we see Sam's assistant, Nina, who is one of the most annoying characters we've met on the show. She's loud, and a know-it-all, and talking on the phone to one of her friends and throwing the f-bomb around. Completely unprofessional.
But I guess it's OK and to be expected, because she's twenty-something and that's just how they act. Or something. She ends up quitting on the spot because Sam deigns to ask her to do her job and stop talking on the phone with her friends. At work.
She has a real attitude problem, this one.
Sam complains to Carrie and Miranda on the way to the Hampton Jitney (a bus that New Yorkers use to go to the Hamptons) all about Nina and her selfish spoiled ways. And then she and Miranda and Carrie talk about ALL twenty-somethings like they are that way. It is fucking annoying.
What is extra fucking annoying about it, is the delineation of generations-- technically these thirty-somethings and twenty-somethings are all apart of gen-x. Which, as you may know, was the most hated generation that we've had since, well, since the term "Millennial" was invented. It's almost as if older people resent younger people. Period. because these complaints she has about Nina and twenty-somethings are identical to the criticisms lobbed at Millennials today.
Sorry, Soap boxing again.
Nothing really of note happens except for Charlotte getting cozy with a 26-year old man, and the foursome finding their way slowly to East Hampton.
They spend the first few minutes in their new digs complaining about everything-- the style of the decor, the smelly towels, the shitty sheets, the smelly house. Charlotte chimes in with how lucky they are to even be here, and Carrie says that cynicism is something that 30-somethings have that 20-somethings don't. Course Miranda is me in this situation: "I was cynical in high school."
Greg, that 26-year-old man has just knocked on the door. He wants to hang out with Charlotte, who is currently pretending to be 27.
He invites the foursome to a beach party he and his friends are throwing that night. But it is a terrible party, and someone vomits feet from where they are standing. gross. At least twenty-something girls are nice, and hold your hair for you while you puke.
Sam complains that she doesn't want to hit on these young men because they are so young, some of them don't even have chest hair yet.
I remember when I didn't get that, but now I do. OMG, I do. Chest hair is the best. :D
:DDDD
Before they have a chance to leave, a young woman comes up to Carrie, having recognized her from her column, and begs Carrie to mentor her in exchange for medial labor. It's sort of sweet, and also creepy.
Carrie decides it couldn't really do any harm, and takes Laurel up on her offer-- although no menial labor is necessary.
The next morning, Miranda has a mug of coffee and is heading out on the porch, but upon opening the door any thoughts she had of calm, cool and breezy fly away. "OK, someone puked on the deck!"
And Charlotte peeks out from the couch, and tiredly explains that a few people had too many jello shots.
"What are you 25 now?" Miranda asks.
Greg peeps from under Charlotte, saying "good morning."
"NO. Twenty-SEVEN." Charlotte says emphatically.
"Whatever."
--
Back at the City, Carrie is looking through an old album of hers filled with pictures of her young-adulthood. She is embarrassed by her lack of good fashion skills, which if you haven't been initiated let me remind you of the best of Carrie and her fashion-present:
But yes, I'm sure the stuff she wore in the late 80s was very much worse. And to be fair, I do adore a lot of her outfits.. but yowza, some of the bad stuff almost makes the good stuff seem worse, if you know what I mean.
Meanwhile, Carrie is talking about 20-somethings, asking if they should be regarded as "clueless halfwits about to have their dreams dashed and illusions shattered?"
Who are these people?!
Did your illusions shatter at 30?
Mine won't. Unless I -finally- learn like Sam and Miranda and apparently not Charlotte that relationships don't require communication and understanding to work out but -lies and mutually accepted delusions-.
UGH. These episodes are exhausting.
Writer Carrie writes "Twenty-something girls? Friend... or Foe?" Well, we all know how she feels about this already.
The Thirty-something women in this episode? Misguided... Or assholes?
Carrie takes Laurel to a book party as her first act as a Mento.
Laurel wants to talk to Carrie about her own writing. About the memoir she wants to write, since she's saving herself for marriage.
Carrie is just incredibly stunned by this revelation.
Laurel offers to get Carrie a drink-- "A cosmopolitan. I remember, from your column!" And Carrie starts flirting with a hunky doctor man who has a cute sense of humor. By the time Laurel has come back with the cocktails, Carrie's gotten his number and invited him out to hang out at the Hamptons. She's not sure that she wants to date him at all, considering he's good on paper and she can't have that. I don't know what I expected.
At the beach that weekend, Miranda, Carrie and Sam are slathering on SPF while the 20-something women tanned like idiots. And Charlotte put on OIL.
Now, this is probably the only time in the whole episode that I agree with them. Cancer is not a joke. But to be honest, a lot of older people, think 50+ don't wear sunscreen at all, even after getting skin cancer. So.
The Hunky-good-on-paper-Doctor shows up to hang out with Carrie. She's hesitant to give him anything back. Her friends sort of seem to understand her hesitancy.
She and Hunky-good-on-paper-Doctor go for a walk and she uses her friends to keep from seeing him further. Now, I get it a little bit since she is out of town *with* her friends, and shouldn't abandon friends to hang out with new man, but she also planned to meet him there, so maybe she should hang out with him. Or else, why invite him to hang out at all?
Carrie finds Miranda starting prep work for fresh seafood and corn feast! Not enough for more than the foursome, "So Carrie, you're little groupie can't stay."
"She's here?!"
"I sent her up to your room, she was asking too many inane questions."
(the whippersnapper!)
Meanwhile Sam is lamenting the party that her own 20-something doppelganger is throwing using her stolen Rolodex.
In her room, Carrie and her groupie Laurel have a more in depth conversation about Laurel's lack of sex life and how older women have completely devalued sex:
"One summer, I read everything Jackie Collins wrote and I thought to myself 'who cares? Is this supposed to be shocking? Wagging one's pussy at every good looking stud who comes along?' Please!"
"And what exactly do you *like* about my column?"
Charlotte comes in from beaching with 26-year-old Greg, she heads to her room to change out of her itchy bathing suit. A few minutes later, she comes into Carrie's room with Laurel, asking about a tiny tick on her stomach that itches--
"That's not a tick."
"Well then what is it?"
Speaking of, Miranda is just finishing cooking up dinner, and there through the window you can see a few bed sheets fluttering down from the upstairs window.
"Well, there go our shitty sheets!" Sam says.
Charlotte runs from the house.
"Where's she going?" Miranda asks.
"To the drugstore. Charlotte really is in her twenties. She's got crabs."
In order to avoid that particular plague, Carrie meets up with her Hunky-good-on-paper-Doctor, and shares her vivid fear of pubic lice. Doctor has a good humor about it, and promises to be good when Carrie invites herself to stay the night.
Well, that's all well and good, but really, what's the alternative?
--
The next night, the foursome go down to the big party that Sam's ex-assistant is throwing. It's a Hampton's Hoedown. More like tacky tack-tack, amiright?
Charlotte confronts Greg, the 26-year-old, about the crabs. He doesn't apologize for the STD, but digs his heels in, claiming the moral high-ground since Charlotte lied about her age. "I may have given you crabs, but you deceived me. That is so much worse."
"Grow up!"
I think they both need to grow up. It isn't like he did it on purpose.
Sam decides that the party is a hit since so many people have come and that she ought to congratulate her ex-assistant. "I may need her to hire me one day." But then, as she closes in on Nina and her friends, she sees that the party hasn't gone off without a hitch and everything is going wrong!
Sam is nothing if not selfish, so she is gleeful to be around to save the day. While comforting poor Nina, she wickedly introduces her to Greg.
Carrie's doppelganger runs into her, and Laurel is so excited to see her. She offers to get her a drink, and Carrie brushes her off and walks away.
Narrator Carrie talks about how annoying and stupid the twenty-somethings are"...and then everything I so firmly believed was promptly blown to pieces."
Him.
It's Big. He's standing there, holding hands and intimately chatting with a woman in white. Carrie is absolutely stunned by the sight of him.
"Is it You?"
"Hey. What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here? What are YOU doing here?"
"I just got back this week from Paris. Carrie, this is Natasha."
Natasha's voice is simpering, and it is infuriating. Big explains that Natasha's parents are loaded and they are staying up in their beach house for the weekend. Natasha exits the scene and Big and Carrie are left with a whole lot of baggage between them.
Carrie is stunned still. She asks who Natasha is, and Big explains that he met her in Paris that she works for Ralph Lauren in Europe, and that the Paris deal fell through (I'd say it did). For some reason, Carrie asks how old Natasha is, and Big says that he doesn't know, 26 or 27 maybe, because, you know.. she's an adult and it doesn't really fucking matter.
It matters a whole lot to Carrie though, who calls her a 'teenager' in the next episode.
Like, I know she's hurt, especially by how serious his relationship with Natasha has developed so quickly, but Carrie is a total asshole to her. Carrie continually puts Natasha down in order to make herself feel better. It's like she doesn't remember how unhappy both Big and she were together. But whatever, it's cause Natasha is a child.
Carrie makes her exit to the beach, where she runs into Miranda. She tells her about Big and the new Woman in his life, and she is so wrenched by the whole thing that she starts puking in the sand. gross.
Miranda is a good friend, holds her hair and lets her let it all out while the fiesta fireworks explode in the background.
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