Plot
The show starts in church. During Reverend Lovejoy's sermon, Maggie is caught scratching herself with a hymnal. Marge takes away the book, discouraged also by the fact that Homer is flossing his teeth with the bookmark string. Marge takes Maggie to the AME Church to see Dr. Hibbert, who diagnoses Maggie with chicken pox. Later at home, Maggie is given oven mitts to prevent her scratching; she cannot resist scratching herself and finds other objects with which to do so. Inspired by Flanders' suggestion of purposely exposing the boys to the chicken pox, Homer invites all the neighborhood kids over to the Simpson house for a "pox party" (at $15 a pop). He ends up catching it himself, by drinking from Maggie's milk bottle, having no childhood immunity ending up scratching himself with Bart and Lisa. One good thing comes of it, though: After having a few custom Margaritas, Milhouse's parents reconcile.
Milhouse feels neglected because his parents are not fawning over him as they once did, both competing for his love. Milhouse schemes to break up his parents again, and enlists both Bart and a plot borrowed from The O.C. The boys leave a bra conspicuously located in Kirk's bed—unfortunately, it has Marge's name on its tag. Luann thinks Marge is having an affair with her husband, and soon she has Homer questioning his wife's fidelity. An argument ensues, and Bart realizes he may have split up his own parents instead of Milhouse's.
Bart schemes to reunite them by pretending to fall off a cliff into a river, using a dummy—but, thanks to Milhouse breaking his glasses after hitting a tree, Bart ends up really taking the plunge. Homer leaps into the rapids and rescues Bart, and through a little trust, Marge saves them both from going over the falls. The Simpsons reconcile, once safely on the river bank. Milhouse, thinking Bart fell past the waterfall, attempts to commit suicide by jumping over the edge. The episode ends with Milhouse's fate unresolved.
Read more about this topic: Milhouse Of Sand And Fog
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I want to make
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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