Anyway, did you have any awkward exposition that could be used as plot-caulk to get us from point A to point B in this scene? Because Little J is so your girl. I don't feel like recapping the tortuously bad writing that gets it going, so I'll tell you the facts. Lily grew up on a little (well, huge, Alison laughs not unkindly) ranch in Montecito, CA. Blair calls Serena, and it takes about one and a half seconds to get the story of what just happened across, and Serena kisses Dan and her mom goodbye, and whispers enough words that Lily closes up like a fan, because this is how families work. Serena shoots across the sky toward Blair like a comet, and Alison offers that Lily might want to follow her. Back to the awkwardness of the scene and not the story, Lily had a horse named Rosewood. Rufus, turns out, had a song titled "Rosewood." The family myth is that this song was named after Alison's signature scent, rose and sandalwood. (As an unabashed nerd of the books, I will say that Serena's signature scent is sandalwood and patchouli; as an unabashed and devoted fan of Serena, I ask that you not hold this against her.)

Dan and Jenny wow about how the song and the horse and the perfume are all the same thing, and Alison says, deathly quiet, "I'm a fool." Rufus assures her she isn't, and everybody goes silent. "Um, raise your hand if you're over 30 and acting really weird right now," Dan finally says. Good old Dan. Lily smiles sweetly and assures Alison that she never told Rufus about her Rosewood, which is the best you could do under these circumstances, but is also an alarm call to the progeny, because why on earth would Lily tell Rufus, a man she met an hour or two ago, about her horse? And how could he have written a song about it? Given this show's tenuous relationship to time and space, I guess they could be forgiven for thinking that's somehow possible, but these are sharp kids. They quickly deduce that Lily and Rufus know each other, and that this bothers Alison, and then it's just a hop to exactly how Lily and Rufus know each other, and the guilty faces of their parents fill in the sexy blanks, and Alison leaves for a nice long bony walk, and Dan follows behind her, and Eric and Jenny -- hoping they're not brother and sister -- run away and hide elsewhere in the loft, and Lily and Rufus are all alone, and Lily cracks her fifth bottle of red. And in all these different places, there are van der Woodsens and Humphreys this close to barfing, but not in the awful way. Barfing in the funny, metaphorical way.