Larry stoops to his lowest level yet in ignoring the feelings of his loyal assistant, slandering his dermatologist, implying that his best friend Jeff has had an affair, and then getting into a cupboard war.
Larry David gets everything he had coming to him in last night’s July 31 episode. First, he makes the big mistake of dating the comely hostess Heidi at his favorite lunchtime restaurant, which is five minutes from his office.
Bad idea, his good friend Richard warns him — “I sh*t where I ate all over Beverly Hills and I’m down to four restaurants.”
It’s completely obvious that Larry’s new love affair is in trouble when he shows off Heidi’s text to Jeff and points out the annoying smiley face that she signs off with.
Later, in the midst of a make out session with Heidi, Larry can’t help himself from bringing it up. “Very cute text,” he tells her, “but be careful with the smiley face.”
Heidi appears to take the diss in stride, but digs her doomed relationship hole deeper when she asks to borrow cash from Larry to go to the farmer’s market the next morning. The problem is she never goes to the farmer’s market and doesn’t offer to pay “cheapskate” Larry back.
Meanwhile, Larry has a much bigger problem. His loyal and efficient assistant has been away for weeks, nursing her dying father in the hospital. Larry tells Jeff he’s in an un-winnable bind. He can’t fire his assistant under the circumstances, but his office life is a disaster and disaster of disasters. A new tenant, “Big dog,” played to the max by Harry Hamilton, on his floor has taken over two of the three shared cabinets in the shared kitchen.
Larry does what only Larry would have the balls to do, and calls his assistant at her dying father’s side. When he tells her about the cabinet invasion, she admonishes him — “Larry, you never give up a cabinet,” and agrees to come back to work the next day to put everything right.
Naturally, his assistant gets the phone call that her dad has died on the one day she comes back to work.
Larry’s way of comforting his assistant and her mother, brilliantly played by Jo Anne Worley, is to tell them at the funeral: “The bedside is a little overrated!”
As if Larry’s comments aren’t rude enough, his forehead is a walking sign of disrespect. When he broke up with Heidi after embarrassing her over the unpaid $60, he asked her to put sunscreen on his head. What he didn’t realize was that she applied it so it would leave him with a smiley face symbol.
Larry isn’t embarrassed by his forehead but he is embarrassed when his dermatologist finds out at the funeral that Larry has lied and blamed him for being 45 minutes late for a lunch with his friend Richard.
Richard has spread the word, due to Larry, that the dermatologist has become a thoughtless jerk, prompting scores of his high-profile clients, including the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing, who does a cameo, to quit him.
The dermatologist forces Larry to the side of the road confronts him, making them both miss the burial, which is very much noticed.
But that’s not all. Larry gets into a full-fledged shouting and food-throwing match with Big Dog over the kitchen cabinets, his assistant’s mother comes to work to fill in for her daughter as a way to manage her grief and Larry wants to fire her daughter.
But the piece de resistance of the episode is that Larry has implied that Jeff may be having an affair in order to get out of a dinner invitation with his friend “Stu,” who engages in too much “cheek to cheek” contact when he hugs hello. Stu’s wife then, of course, tells Jeff’s wife Susie that he’s cheating and Susie, like a bat out of hell, comes tearing into the office and begins smacking Jeff as he’s comforting Larry’s assistant’s mother. Got that!
Finally, Larry, who is determined to be the “Edmund Hillary of sh***ing where you eat” goes back to his favorite restaurant, despite the nasty breakup with Heidi.
Well, let’s just say he got his just desserts! All in all, this rates with Palestinian chicken as my favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm episode ever. It’s a brilliant season so far– don’t you think so?
