Mary Jo is worried that her sixteen year old daughter Claudia will soon have sex with her boyfriend. Suzanne is upset because she is receiving phone calls threatening her pet pig. When Suzanne announces that she is going to buy a gun to protect herself and her pig, Charlene and Mary Jo try to talk her out of it. In the meantime, Julia participates as a model in a fashion show and is humiliated when her dress gets caught up in her pantyhose and she "mooned" 1200 people that were in attendance.
That evening, Julia, Charlene and Mary Jo have a "sleep over" at Charlene's apartment with Anthony stays at Suzanne's to help protect her. When Claudia is late in returning from a date, Mary Jo convinces Julia and Charlene to go with her to lover's lane to search for her daughter. Charlene, Julia and Mary Jo find themselves arrested by a police officer when they are shining a searchlight into a car.
Thankfully, Julia convinces the policeman to let them stop at Suzanne's to get bail money. When they throw a rock at Suzanne's window to get her attention, Suzanne thinks she is being attacked and shoots at them and they all end up in jail. The following day, Mary Jo explains to Claudia that she doesn't want her to have sex. Claudia says she knows that and wouldn't consider having sex until she was in college and really loved the guy. Claudia in turn thanks her mother for being so "hip" and not doing things that her friends' mothers do, like spy on them!
Additional Comments:
This episode marks the third and final appearance of Suzanne's pig, Noel, who appears much bigger and fatter than last season.
Suzanne does not just purchase a gun -- it is a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Charlene is able to convince Julia to stay the night at her apartment because Julia's bedroom has been freshly painted and smells of paint fumes.
Anthony is late getting to Suzanne's house because he had dress rehearsal for his junior college theater production about Alcatraz in the 1920's.
Classic Scenes:
After Julia returns from a fashion show in a depressed mood, the ladies relay the day's events to Anthony:
SUZANNE: Julia made a huge fool out of herself.
MARY JO: Well, you know, Anthony, how Charlene is always saying that she's not a person going down the big freeway of life with the back of her dress tucked in her pantyhose?
CHARLENE: Now Julia has gone down the freeway of life with the back of her dress tucked in her pantyhose.
ANTHONY: You mean down the ramp while she was modeling?
SUZANNE: You got it. And let me tell you -- it was stunning. I mean, I was sitting about three seats away from the mayor when all of a sudden I look up and here comes Julia down the ramp. And then she turns away from us, and there's her backside completely uncovered. People were gasping. People were falling out of their chairs. And all the time Julia just kept turning and smiling -- mooned everybody within a 600 mile radius.
JULIA: Suzanne, you know how I feel about that word.
SUZANNE: Oh, I'm sorry, but that's what they call it. Even the waiters were asking for her autograph.
JULIA: I'll never leave this house again.
CHARLENE: Julia, you have to! I just went out and bought all this snack food for tonight.
MARY JO: Yeah, and Ted's gonna have Quint, and I'm gonna come. We're gonna gave a great time and forget all of this.
JULIA: What I don't understand is, why didn't somebody tell me?
SUZANNE: What I don't understand is, where was your underwear?
JULIA: Suzanne, I told you! They asked me to only wear hose because the dress was silk and otherwise you could see a pantyline! I can't believe that all my life I've tried to create some semblance of grace and style, and now I'll be remembered as that woman.....
SUZANNE: . . . who mooned Atlanta.
CHARLENE: Suzanne! Stop saying that. Now Julia, you may not believe this now, but one of these days you'll laugh at this. I mean, stuff like this happens to everybody. I'll never forget one time I was at the lake with my brothers. This guy I had a great big crush on named Charles Crouch was there on another boat with his date, Carolyn Witherspoon -- she was always real snotty to me. Anyway, I had on my first two-piece swimsuit, and I decided to try to ski barefoot, y'know, because all my brothers could do it. The trick is you gotta get the boat going real fast. Well we were up to about 50 miles and hour, I kicked off my skis -- and fell. Next thing you know I'm sailing across the water, with Charles and Carolyn looking on. I mean, I was skipping like a quarter. And when I finally came to a rest, the top of my swimsuit was wrapped around my neck.
SUZANNE: Yeah, but you were only seen by a few people, and Julia was seen by twelve hundred.
MARY JO: Well, let me tell you something that happened to me, and I have never told this to anyone.
Y'know when Ted and I went on our honeymoon we got one of those bedrooms on the Amtrak, and the bed is right next to this huge picture window. Well, it being our honeymoon and all you can just imagine what we had on...
CHARLENE: Matching pjs?
MARY JO: No, Charlene. Anyway, we fell asleep above the covers, y'know -- me being the one who was like pressed up against the window. Because it was pitch black out we didn't realize that the shades were up until the train came to a stop at dawn right in the middle of an intersection in downtown Tucumcari, New Mexico, where we were awakened by the sound of people honking their horns and hanging out the car window yelling things like, "Hey baby looking good!! Alright!!" My face still gets hot when I just think about it.
CHARLENE: Suzanne, don't you have a most humiliating story to tell?
SUZANNE: Yes, I do. My most humiliating moment . . . . . was when Julia mooned 1200 people.
A series of events gets the ladies taken to the police station.
JULIA: Suzanne, I still cannot believe that you were dumb enough to hang out the second story of your house and fire a semi-automatic rifle into the dark Georgia night. We could all have been killed.
JULIA: If I ever get out of this mess, I am going straight to Washington and I am going to take on the gun lobbies and all those wimpy slack-jawed politicians who are terrified of 'em, and we are going to get a sane law passed in this country that makes these kind of semi-automatic rifles illegal. Because you and I and every deer hunter in America know in our hearts that these weapons are not used for hunting anything but people.
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