Well, I was wrong. I thought that Carolyn was capable of being something other than a complete wuss and idiot about her mother, and (I repeat, I'll shout it from the hilltops) I was wrong. She is given access to the basement room that, she believes, holds the key to Jason's hold over her mother, and she barely even looks at it, and apologizes profusely to her mother. She really does not want to know the truth; she's just kidding herself. Oh, well, she's not much more than twenty years old, and she's had an upbringing that would make anybody neurotic on the subject of his or her mother. Understood. I don't have to like her for it. And no wonder Elizabeth can't stand the thought of telling Carolyn the truth! She knows her daughter well.
Jason played his part very well today - became Liz's friend for a little bit, and softened her up enough so that she could announce the Marvellous Marriage to come.
What is the shirt business in the basement that I read about? Something that shows that the shirts in the trunk came straight from Ohrbach's and were going straight back? I didn't see any price tags or packaging, and the cardboard stiffening in the shirts didn't mean a thing. My father's shirts used to be sent out to the cleaners, and they came back with cardboard in them, which was removed and saved for us kids to play with. Shirt cardboard - I remember it well. So, was there something else about those shirts?
I hadn't noticed, when I watched this period before, how neatly the writers managed the switches between plots - no tied-to-the-railroad-tracks cliffhangers for the day before a switch, just a startling announcement that can be mulled over. "Liz, you'll have to marry me." "I'm not Josette, I'm Maggie!" "Listen up, everybody, Jason and I are going to be married." I'm starting to like the in-and-outness of the Jason plot. It really makes sense to leave it on the back burner for a while, so everybody can have time to stew themselves up to a fever pitch, instead of everything going lickety-split for no good reason.
