Trista and Charlie enter the house as hugs and handshakes are exchanged. The attending crowd consists of Trista's mom, stepmother, father, and stepsister. We cut right to Roseanne (Trista's mother), who offers her first impression of Charlie: "Wow." That's creepy in a sex way, Mom. Say something else: "Tall, dark, handsome." Awww, Trista went and brought herself home a real-life film noir cliché, didn't she? Trista's stepmother, on the other hand, notes, "You're a failure of a wife and a failure of a lover, and I got your man in the end so neener neener." She doesn't actually say that, but...wha? Aren't these two people who have no earthly right getting near each other without a catfight of the most primal, Kibble-throwing variety? Maybe it's me. I'm from a broken home. Much like the home I live in now. A home with no food left because I ate twelve toasted waffles during the freakin' blizzard Monday. I couldn't even leave. Thank goodness, actually, for the impulse buy of those waffles the day before the storm, or I would have been in my apartment gnawing my own arm off in some exceedingly Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot remake-of-Alive- but-without-the- airplanes-or- the-soccer kind of way. Oh, man. Where the hell was I? Ah, yes: "The first thing I noticed about Charlie when he walked in were his eyes. His beautiful eyes." Does he have nice eyes? They always seem so obscured by the weeping willowiness of his too-bushy eyebrows. In the kitchen now, Old Mom and New Mom discuss Charlie's inherently oozing freaky-deakiness, Mom arguing, "Wow. I wish I was [sic] still thirty." Dude. No kidding. Trista feels exactly the same way sometimes.

The grilling begins early in the living room. Trista's father, He Runs With Enormous Glasses (I've forgotten his proper Christian name, so I've been forced to resort to this less conventional but no less appropriate Native American moniker) asks Charlie what kind of hours he keeps at work. Because talking work hours makes for riveting television at all times, always. Those trendsetters at the Human Resources Network will see to that, as in their new reality show Time Won't Give Me Time: A Look Behind The Scenes of Payroll Processors. And that includes the hidden footage that they didn't want you to see. Charlie continues on that his "true love" is "the stock market," which he mentions is "booming." I'm sorry, wasn't this show taped in October of 2002 and not instead during some past year that maybe contained any number of "9"s? The market sucks. Who doesn't know that? I mean, besides this unemployed "Wall Street" guy who I don't think has ever been to New York. He Runs With Enormous Glasses changes the subject to mention that it's time for dinner, and that he's going to "bring the questions." The aforementioned "questions" refer to a white porcelain bowl filled with questions the family has written down, up to and including the obvious "Why'd you let that new tramp wife of yours come ruin our dinner?" which I'm sure will be read in conjunction with its follow-up question, "Maybe if you hadn't have been so frigid all those years I wouldn't have needed to step out on you." Those two. Always fighting. And that last one wasn't even a sentence.