Trista & Ryan's Wedding, Part 2

Episode Report Card
Djb: B- | Grade It Now!
Lamb, Meet Slaughter

Back at the party, Ryan wonders exactly how this weekend will go. It turns out, he reminds us, that bachelor parties have a tendency to be "a little over the edge," blazing new narrative turf though neglecting a nation's familiarity with the cinematic canon of a young Adrian Zmed. Whatever the legacy of these famed affairs, though, Ryan promises us that he's not going to get at all crazy, and that all he wants to do is "hang out with [his] friends." With strippers. And booze. In tears.

Again, if there had been some drunken, casual, maybe even extramarital hookup of someone from the boy's side and someone from the girl's side, I could rationalize a few dozen extraneous shots of everyone hanging out and performing an "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"-length rendition of "Getting to Know You." But hell be it to that subplot, because we still haven't gotten up to a few innocent dancers making all the boys cry. But wait! Here's something: there's a little boy -- no wait, girl, GIRL -- in a strapless red dress, sitting alone in the middle of all this LOOK-MA-I'M-ON-TV mayhem, looking downtrodden and used to feeling downtrodden. Who could this mysterious mystery girl be? Wait, wait, don't worry...Trista is more than happy to explain: "I'm actually not sure what's going on with Jackie." Though Trista wants this so-called "Jackie" to be included in everything, she realizes, "I think she probably feels a little out of place." And what does this Jackie think about all of this? "I feel like I don't fit in here. Because I'm younger. I don't have children. I'm not married. I don't have, like, a steady career." And, I mean, I don't want to split the excess hairs that seem to be sprouting from Jackie's chinny-chin-chin, but I don't think we've met one person there who possesses all of those qualities (married, children, steady career) except for My Two Dads and maybe one of the producers. Who is this Jackie? Why does she have such a complex? What soul-sucking life force could have had such a formative effect on this girl's delicate ego and psyche that left her such a husk of how acclimated people normally enter into social interaction? Won't you tell me what? And then, according to the subtitle under her name, Jackie is finally identified: "Trista's sister." Ah.

Jackie is not ugly. But say what you will about Trista (though some of you will respond to that with "What I say about Trista is that she's hideous"), I maintain that, objectively and conventionally, Trista is rather comely. Jackie, on the other hand, with her short-cropped hair and glasses, fits more plainly into the category of looks that makes my mother shake her head mournfully and opine with all intended subtext and some hearty tsk-ing, "Not a pretty girl." Her hair is parted on the right and swooped over with a certain amount of product that still can't control the flyaways, and her glasses are the identical pair to the ones I wore for many, many years until they broke in my hand during a visit to Wing and Glark's going on three years ago and I was forced into the present. ["Man, that was a good trip. Except for the part where you broke your glasses and suffered a blinding migraine by having to watch The Contender half-blind." -- Wing Chun] Jackie is me in ninth grade. A little bit, Jackie is all of us in ninth grade. It is why she is pitied, like a mirror onto our own dorkiness that we always wished someone would be nice to. But it is also why she is ignored, like a skeleton we've jammed into our closets along with our shoelace-less white Keds and our NKOTB pencil holders. Sorry, Jackie. We're not trying to be bullies. It's just that we had enough of you back when we actually were you.






Get the most of your experience.
Share the Snark!




The Latest Activity On TwOP