At the Chase dinner table, Angela slouches with her arms crossed. "Peppermint" Patty Chase sets down a dish, then sits opposite Angela, cradling her brow in her hands, and ejaculates, "Where were you when the gun went off?" See how they brought it back to the "where were you when Kennedy was shot?" question? Subtle, no? Angela scoffs, "Mom, it wasn't anywhere near us. We barely heard it." Patty stares at her a moment, then starts angrily dishing up everyone's dinner, ranting, "We have to worry about our kids being shot in school. How did it come to this?" And this is five years before Columbine, y'all! Patty continues, "This is horrible. This is a disgrace to all of us!" "That's too much!" Danielle "Whatever" Chase protests, but she's talking about the amount of food on her plate, not Patty's melodramatic overreaction to the "shooting." "Golden" Graham Chase takes Danielle's dish away from Patty, who apologizes, then rants on, "I'm going to say it, in this meeting -- I am. I mean it. We have to draw the line somewhere. We can't just keep accepting the deterioration of blah blah blah won't somebody please think of the childrencakes." Patty stomps out to the kitchen for more food, and Angela calls after her, "The only thing shot was a bottle of soda." Patty muses that maybe she and Graham should drop Angela off in the morning, as if that could make any difference at all to what would happen between classes. Angela whines, "Dad!" and Graham gets my back, reminding Patty, "Honey, the gun was in the school; we can't be with her all day." Angela says, "We're not going to change our entire lives over this. It was one stupid gunshot. You're not dropping me at school, god! I'm not an eight-year-old." Which is apparently Whatever's cue to say something, but I don't care what that thing is.

Patty washes up after dinner as Graham puts food away. Patty suggests that they take Angela out of school and enroll her in private school. Graham quietly replies, "I wish we could afford that." Patty quavers, "Well, maybe that's not an excuse -- maybe we should just sacrifice other things!" "Like the house in Palm Beach?" Graham jokes mildly, putting his arm on her shoulder and kissing her cheek. "This is our daughter we're talking about," Patty moans. "I know," Graham says, adding that he wishes they could keep Angela and Danielle in a bubble to protect them, but if that '70s TV movie is any indication, all that would do for the Chase girls is give them really filty feet, horrible haircuts, and absolutely no sense of rhythm. And they'd still crave human contact so much that they'd go through the indignity of attending commencement in a biohazard suit that made them look like the fifth, orange, Teletubby. And they'd still end up walking out of the bubble eventually in order to ride a phallic horse with some fatuous neighbour girl. (And if all that isn't enough to convince you that you must see The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, starring a pre-Saturday Night Fever John Travolta, then I just don't know what is.) Patty says she isn't asking for a bubble (apparently she's seen the movie): "How about just a place they can live and walk to school and become grown-ups without having to worry about guns and AIDS and serial murderers. That didn't use to be exotic -- that wasn't the province of the rich. We all had that. Why can't they have that?" Graham doesn't know. Patty pouts.