Somewhere else, Puck puts the moves on the "recently-divorced and excruciatingly lonely" Eleanor Dusenberry -- and that's her self-deprecating self-description, by the way -- but she quite firmly shoots him down. Puck reacts to this by shouting, "Screw you, and screw McKinley! I'm outta here, forever!" after which he quite naturally segues into a fantasy-sequence rendition of Alice Cooper's seemingly deathless adolescent classic, "School's Out," and it's hard to believe this song is already forty years old. The most interesting bit of the whole thing that follows occurs when Puck roars out onto the football field atop a dinky little orange motocross bike (which: Keep reaching for those stars, Puck!) to hop up on an equally small platform, where he performs the bulk of the number amidst a writhing gaggle of lewdly gyrating Cheerios, all of whom sport Mr. Cooper's signature smeared eye makeup. Unfortunately, the editing's so choppy that we never get a really good sense of the choreography involved -- though it feels like it's meant to be boundary-pushing and raunchy, what with all of those still-growing boobs jiggling all over the fifty-yard line and everything -- and this randomly-broken visual rhythm ends up seriously deflating what should have been one of tonight's signature moments. Poor Puck. He finally gets his very own character-defining moment to shine, and they fuck it all up for him in post. Sigh.

In any event, the fantasy ends with Puck slamming back to reality in the middle of the choir room, where the children respond to his performance with little more than a series of blank, befuddled stares. Poor, misunderstood Puck flees into this evening's first commercial break amid a cloud of deeply embarrassed gloom. Awwwwwwww.

"I realize this room is America's number-one destination for cheap, sappy moralizing," White Sue begins when we return from the break, "but your insensitive behavior is about to subject you to a whole new level of preachiness." She had me, and then she lost me. White Sue, Black Sue and John Goodman have arrived in the choir room to commence with the hectoring of Sandbags, Hat Rack, Asian Horror Movie, Little Oprah and Rojo Caliente for their earlier remarks regarding John Goodman's black eye, and since I sure as hell don't need this show to tell me over and over again that Wife Beating Is A Very Bad Thing, I'll be cutting to the point: "Ladies," White Sue eventually announces, "the American Songbook is chock-full of songs making light of men hitting women." And we'll be letting that bold assertion slide, because I have neither the strength nor the time to challenge it here. "Since the only way to get anything into your thick, dopey heads is to force you to sing about it," White Sue continues, "for this week's assignment, I want you to turn those songs into songs of empowerment that say, 'You lay a hand on me? It's over!'" The children mope. Meanwhile, Coach Beiste looks on rather bleakly, which of course means her Cooter's been smacking her around, and I seriously don't know how I'm going to make it through the rest of this shitty storyline alive.