Plot
Melissa and Lee have been seeing each other since Lee painted the interior of Melissa's home. Melissa is nervous about introducing him to her friends because of the several year gap in their ages. Lee is beginning to get upset about not meeting her friends. Hope (Mel Harris) and Michael (Ken Olin) invite the couple for dinner. Melissa accepts, thinking it will be just the four of them. However, all of her friends are there and meet Lee. Melissa has flights of imagination at the party, envisioning her friends gossiping about her with Lee and Lee becoming ever more immature, to the point of imagining him in a baby's bib. She begins to distance herself from Lee, using work as an excuse. Eventually she invites Lee for dinner and contemplates breaking up with him. Lee pre-empts her and breaks up with her first. After several days, Melissa stops by the condominium that Lee is painting. She gives him a set of keys to her place and expresses her concerns about their relationship but tells him that whatever happens, she loves him. Lee tells her that he loves her too and, as she is about to leave, accepts her keys.
Also in this episode, Russell, an artist, is preparing for his first solo gallery show. He meets Peter at the advertising agency that is designing the catalog for the show. They get together at Russell's for dinner and end up sleeping together. In the days following, Russell hesitates to call Peter. Melissa asks him why, and Russell says that (because of the AIDS epidemic), this is a bad time to start forming attachments. Melissa convinces him that there's never a "right time" to start forming attachments. Russell drops off a copy of the catalog for Peter and invites him to the opening.
Read more about this topic: Strangers (thirtysomething)
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“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)