Plot
Jerry is excited to finally be dating a woman named Lois (Renee Props). However, Jerry is stunned when he finds out that Lois works for Duncan Meyer, his old rival from high school. Elaine's complaints about her Chinese food delivery cause her to be blacklisted from Hop Sing's. George notes to Elaine that Ned, her new boyfriend, has a copy of the Daily Worker, which prompts suspicion of Ned being a communist. George is intrigued by one of the personal ads, which remarks, "Appearance is not important." Jerry recounts his rivalry with Duncan: in a track race in ninth grade, Jerry had gotten an inadvertent head start that nobody noticed and won. Though he was praised for his seemingly amazing speed, only Duncan suspected something was amiss.
Lois quizzes Jerry about cheating in the race; Jerry defends his win, and Lois believes him. Ned admits to Elaine he is a communist. George announces he contacted a girl from The Daily Worker. Kramer gets ready for his new job as Santa Claus at Coleman's department store, with Mickey as his elf. Lois arranges lunch at Monk's with her, Jerry, and Duncan, and Jerry knows that the subject of the race will come up. George agrees to turn up at the coffee shop, pretend he has not seen Jerry since high school, and back up his winning story.
At Yankee Stadium, George receives a call from Natalie, his personal ad girl from The Daily Worker. George's secretary, Ada, overhears the conversation and suspects George of having communist sympathies. At Coleman's, Ned gets Kramer interested in communist practices. At Monk's, while Duncan is protesting the race, George turns up, pretending he has not seen Jerry in years, and backs Jerry's story (while also lying about the accomplishments of his own life). Duncan still doesn't believe it, and Lois suggests that the two of them just race each other again, but Jerry refuses ("I choose not to run"). Nonetheless, Duncan starts to call up everyone from high school to come out for the race, and Jerry gets worried the legend will die.
Kramer is taken by Ned's communist literature, but Mickey thinks it's a bad idea. Elaine is reluctant to order dinner from Hop Sing's after her fight with the delivery man, but Ned insists, as his father spent much of his time at the restaurant after being blacklisted. At Coleman's, Kramer (as Santa) is accused by a kid of spreading communist propaganda; Kramer and Mickey are subsequently fired. Elaine places her Chinese food order under Ned's name, but the delivery man uncovers her ruse and blacklists Ned from the restaurant, too. Jerry refuses to participate in the race, until he learns that Duncan will fire Lois unless he agrees to run. The rumor that George is a communist spreads to Steinbrenner, who is delighted: with a communist working for the Yankees, they can be able to hire Cuban baseball players for the team.
On the street, Jerry and Duncan are lined up to race again. Duncan smugly asides to Lois that if he loses, he'll give her a two-week Hawaiian vacation. As the race is about to begin, Kramer's car backfires; Jerry mistakes that for the starting pistol, giving him another head start. To the strains of the Superman theme, Jerry wins the race. A week later, in Cuba, George meets with Fidel Castro, who lets him recruit any players and invites him to a luxurious dinner due to his supposed communist leanings. However, Castro (very much like Steinbrenner) begins to ramble on about trivialities and George is forced to listen to him while quietly exiting.
Read more about this topic: The Race (Seinfeld)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“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.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“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)