Ding! Guess what though, Serena's not getting off the elevator. I mean, somewhere she probably is, but not this one and not right now: it's Lily, coming home from ... emergency mid-embezzlement shopping therapy at Barney's. Never let it be said that I didn't admire Lily's priorities. Jenny awesomely accosts her, mugging her of the bags like a fake Mumbai bellhop and marching her upstairs to get a look at the zipper of some Marchesa dress Lily wore "last week." Which of course means "back before Kelly Rutherford became the most pregnant person ever to be pregnant."

People scoff at the absurd-yet-halfassed lengths they're going to to hide the pregnancy, but I love it so much. In this scene, Lily comes in through the door and talks to Jenny. But wait, she's totally pregnant! No problem, because Lily apparently just bought thirty-six bags' worth of shit from Barney's and will come in with them hanging all over her like that lady in Labyrinth with the hump made of teddy bears and quilts and clocks and whatever. Done. And next week? Oh, she'll be carrying sixteen garbage bags full of stuff for the charity drive we'll invent, or reminiscing about Orange County in a limo with a shitload of lilies in her lap, or doing deep tank mudbath therapy as a result of jailing her daughter, or sitting behind a giant butter statue commemorating Gabriel meeting Savannah and Svetlana at Butter, or having a long talk with Chuck on that one couch with every pillow and chenille throw ever sold, piled up around her like a fort.

Everybody's still in sexy action mode as they disembark the towncar for the Russian Tea Room, but Nate stops Chuck outside. I don't have many of those weird New York things, like playing Eloise or Holden Caulfield or whatever, but I do have the weird obsession with the Russian Tea Room. I'm so not a New Yorker, like if you told me actually that's a weird name for a carpeting sample warehouse I would pretend I already know that and forge ahead with my fantasies, but for some reason it clicks into that Breakfast At Tiffany's place in my head. I just want to go to there, I don't even know where it came from. I am a rube. I am totally a Sherilyn Phillips about it. For all I know that's the joke, that of course Sherilyn would want to meet Poppy there and she'd be like, "Um okay, dork." This is why I'm constantly giving my money to con men and joining cults: it's my damnable sense of the romantic and the picturesque.