Andy tools around in a green Jeep, driving around the grounds and offering us the audio guide tour. Please keep your arms and legs inside your own tax bracket at all times: "This is a gorgeous piece of property. Five hundred and fifty acres of grapes, a couple hundred acres of farmland, and this is a very rural place." Fact, spurious fact, grievous generalization. To complete the pattern, we'll need "out-and-out lie," if you can come up with one: "Our family has basically set our roots here." Since 1972. Fine. I guess we'll just have to settle for "eye-rolling overstatement," then.
"I'm staying at one of the guest houses on the Firestone Ranch," we learn from Jen, who we discover walking from room to Stickley-adorned room, perhaps looking for a mislaid copy of the shooting script to The Princess Diaries so she'll have some context to all this freakin' weirdness. She continues, "I've visited boyfriends at their jobs before, but..." Awww. "At their jobs." You mean you haven't stopped by many woodland estates while visiting boyfriends toiling away at the Account Executive game? She continues, "It's bigger than anything I've ever seen," and we're treated to a cruel bit of visual irony, as L'il Andy approaches the front door to her guest house on the word "bigger" and the remaining audience members mutter, "And bigger than anything you'll ever see again, sister." She deems the whole experience "a little intimidating to me at first." The knock of opportunism on the front door of the guesthouse interrupts her musings, and Jen and Andy hug as he enters the house. He tells us in an interview, "Every time I think about Jen, I just get a big smile on my face." Careful there, Stewart Chandler; such excessive displays of uncontextualized emotion can occasion a chaperoned trip Eastward faster than you can say, "I think chains and solitary confinement are the bee's knees."













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