I Can't Believe It Myself, A Defense of Britney Spears

Leave Britney Spears Alone. These are four words I never thought I’d say, not because I have any dislike of Britney Spears, but because I have absolutely no opinion of Britney Spears. I don’t particularly like her music, I’m not inspired by her fashion sense, and I can’t see any reason why she is always in the news. Nevertheless, when I sat down at my computer today and saw the headline “Britney Nearly Drops Baby in Front of Paparazzi,” I must admit that I clicked on it to take a look, to see if she had gone the way of Michael Jackson and dangled the poor little guy out the window. It turns out she was leaving a hotel, when she NOT ONLY STUMBLED, but also BENT LOW and KNOCKED THE BABY’S HAT OFF (yes, the baby’s hat, not the baby’s head). Other important details of this incident: she was carrying a GLASS and her pants were TOO LONG. Apparently she has also let him fall out of the high chair and misused his car seat.

If, after her short reign as a mother, that is the best the press can come up with, she is doing pretty well. I stumble carrying my kids all the time and I’ve never been a headline on Yahoo news. If the paparazzi decided to follow me around, they could have come up with the following headlines just today:

“First Grader Heads to Bus Stop Alone and Reeking of Alcohol! After School, Dejectedly Walks Home From Bus Stop Alone!”

“Feebleminded Mother Forgets Pre-School End of Year Picnic; Arrives Late and Touches Hot Dog Roll with Hand!” and

“Distracted Mother Rushes Bleeding Toddler Inside After Trampoline Accident!”

Yes, today was a banner morning. Fifteen seconds before the bus came, Aislinn was rooting around in a low cabinet in the kitchen for reasons that have still not been explained to me since she had eaten breakfast and her lunch was made. She somehow knocked over and broke a 1.5 liter bottle of wine that was sitting on the floor in a designated beverage holding area near the washing machine (That is the truly puzzling part, since it was sitting on the floor, all it did was tip over, and yet the bottom smashed, leading me to believe that the Australians may be cutting corners when it comes to the glass they are using in their wine bottles). Since Lauren and Marty were up and around, I couldn’t leave the mess in the kitchen to take her to the bus stop without risking one of them coming in to the kitchen. In the best case scenario they would come in to see what had happened and end up with their feet covered in wine. In the worst case scenario they would try to be helpful and clean it up, leading of course to cuts, lacerations, and puddles of blood. So I helped Aislinn on with her back pack, wished her luck on her spelling test, and sent her down the block to the bus stop.

Once I got the wine cleaned up and the other two dressed and out the door, Lauren informed me “Today is the big part-day preschool picnic!” I had seen exactly one notice about the picnic posted in the room, but since I am usually chasing Marty around while I’m there, I’d never had a chance to note the date. I foolishly assumed that the end of preschool picnic would take place near the end of preschool. One of Lauren’s teachers told me “No, that’s why I’ve been saying everyday ‘Don’t forget the end of school picnic on the 26th! Don’t forget the 26th!’” To which I replied “Today is not the 26th.” Then she said “Oh, you’re right, I must be thinking about something else that’s going on that day.” So, I took a moment to determine whether I was going to be the mean mommy who didn’t show up, or if I was going to dump my plans for my precious free time and put in an appearance at the picnic. Of course I went.

At the picnic I was helping to get the plates ready for the kids, and I began putting hot dog buns on plates with my clean but uncovered hands. For some reason, the food service gloves were at the playground, but they rushed a pair over to me so that I would not infect the kiddies (who had just come from a public restroom to sit down outdoors at public picnic tables). (Note: In my own defense, I have been through a lot of health and safety training at previous jobs, and I have never observed untrained people using food service gloves properly. Today was no exception.)

After school Lauren and Marty wanted to go on the trampoline, so I took my book and a chair and sat in the sun while they jumped around. While I was absorbed in the tale of Robert Moses building the Triborough Bridge in New York, Marty knocked his face into the back of Lauren’s head. When I heard the crying and looked up, Lauren was frantically trying to quiet him so that we would not have to leave the trampoline, but he was bleeding so we all went inside. In the hullabaloo, I missed the school bus going by the house and the next thing I knew, Aislinn was coming through the door (and actually, she wasn't looking dejected because she felt very mature walking down the block by herself).

And there you have it. If I was famous, people would be calling child protective services and removing children from my home. Since I am not famous, people seem to understand that this was just a typical day in the life of a typical mom. And that’s just today. Here are some other headlines from my past six years:

“Mother Tosses Baby into Kitchen Light Fixture at Family Gathering!!”

“Mother Completes Clean Sweep as She Inadvertently Pushes Third and Final Child Off a Swing!!!”

“Thuds and Crying Emanate from Local House Where Parents Refuse to Stop Leaving Babies Unattended on Furniture!!”

“Attempting to Get Child’s Attention, Mother Takes Daughter Out at the Ankles!!”

“Trouble in Paradise? Mother Takes Off Engagement Ring, Claims It is Gouging the Babies!!”

“Negligent Mother Let’s Child Jump into Pool and Slip Through Her Hands!!!”

“Is It a Cry For Help? Inattentive Mother Slams Explorer Tailgate on Her Own Head!

I could go on and on (that is, I could if I hadn’t hit my head so hard with the tailgate). If you’ve got short people in the house, particularly the type who are determined to get around and explore, chances are they are going to get hurt and chances are, some of the time, it is going to be your fault. What can you do? Hover? I read recently in Newsweek that hovering is bad, but besides the psychological damage it can do to your kid, it’s really boring.

There are four kinds of people who can claim that they have never made a mistake as a parent: liars; people without children; senile people; and amnesiacs. However, being a member of any of those groups disqualifies you from harshly judging people who are parents. For everyone who is not a member of those groups, if you have a kid, you have made mistakes, big and small on a daily basis, so all this mommy-sniping should stop. I admit I like the superior feeling I get when parents in the neighborhood say completely ridiculous things to their children, or tolerate bad behavior from them. But then I have to remind myself that very few people raise serial killers or other serious criminals, so although parents might inadvertently be encouraging their kids to be annoying in the short term, chances are that overall they are doing enough to turn them into functioning citizens.

So here is what I think about poor Britney: at least she seems to want to spend time with her son. If she left the baby at home, the headlines would scream “Pregnant Britney Out on the Town, What About the Baby??!!!” or “Moving On?? Britney Leaves Son at Home to Focus on Second Baby!!!” Since she takes him everywhere, like every other mother in the world, people want to find something wrong with that. Since she is not sufficiently brooding and aloof for a celebrity, the paparazzi must think she is someone they can topple. Since she is too cheerful and too friendly, people think she is just like them but with more money, so they want to see her brought down and put in her place.

I feel bad for her, and if she doesn’t want to hole up in a compound somewhere, why should she? I have three suggestions for her. First, for goodness sakes, with the money you are making, get yourself a driver and have one of those professional car seat installers come out and put a seat in every car for you. If I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is turn in my driver’s license and let somebody else cart me around. Second, get your son one of those hats with a chin strap so it won’t fall off when you stumble in front of the paparazzi. Finally, stop recording songs with names like “Oops I Did It Again” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” That just makes the tabloid writers’ jobs too easy.

Punctuator's Anonymous

Hi, my name is Shannon, and I’m addicted to parentheses. Not just parentheses, commas too, and the dash, - how I love the initial and final dash - to set off ideas in my sentences. I know I once knew this stuff. I know what comes at the end of a question or a "declarative" sentence. But I am lost in a sea of punctuation when I try to quote a question inside parentheses at the end of a sentence. An example would be:(I wonder to myself, “Why am I addicted to parentheses?”). There are times when I am writing up an essay that I stop to consider how many punctuation marks a person can put in a row and still be within the limits of grammatically correct. I believe my personal record is five, with a word in quotes inside a quote ending in a question mark, followed by a parenthesis, and period : ‘”?). (Hey look! That sentence had six!) I have the spell/grammar check turned on - Microsoft Word is welcome to put its wavy green line under these creations and mark them as mistakes, but typically it never does. My personal opinion on Word’s lack of interest in punctuation is that it wants to encourage people to use symbols rather than swear words, in sentences such as “I can’t believe this #$%^ idiot uses so many *&%#^ punctuation marks when she writes these ?:<”$# lame pieces of <>:”$#@!!!”

I know I learned a lot about grammar growing up, since I went to good schools. In fact, I know that it is very bad to use the word “very” since it weakens the thought, and yet I do it very often. I know that you should not end a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes I don’t know what else to end it with. I can identify a run-on sentence with the best of them – in fact I can remember sitting in Mrs. Devine’s seventh grade English class and picking out run-on sentences from countless worksheets and textbooks, particularly in the lessons where you are supposed to identify fragments also. Oh, fragments - bad. I know you are supposed to use “one” instead of “you” when referring to a person other than myself, but you know how it goes.

If there was one activity in 8th grade that I led the pack in, it was diagramming sentences. I could assign a name, purpose, and place on the diagram to every word in every sentence that came my way. What I was never so hot at, was taking the words off the diagram and figuring out how to put them in a sentence with proper punctuation. Now that I have chosen the run-on sentence as a style, the rules of punctuation should be more important to me, I should be making more of an effort to indicate where one thought ends and the next begins, I should utilize that red-headed stepchild of punctuation, the semi-colon, so that people would understand what is going on in these seemingly endless sentences.

I remember sophomore year in high school Sister Michaela made us answer essay questions about American authors in the style of the author. Maybe answering the Ernest Hemingway essay question caused me to suffer a chemical imbalance which led me to adopt (or should I say bastardize) his long, long sentence structure. Story-wise, I definitely preferred the John Steinbeck novels that we read, but apparently his style didn’t rub off on me at all. So maybe substance is more important than style, and if you are saying something interesting, people will listen whether your sentences are long and convoluted or short and choppy. When I write I imagine that I am saying things out loud, and I don’t seem to be a very good storyteller – I can rarely hold anyone’s attention long enough to get to the end of my story. With this in mind, I probably just write like I would speak - I have so much to add to a topic, and so much fear that no one is going to stop and listen to the whole of what I have to say, that I string it all together in one long sentence in hopes I get it all out before my audience wanders away.

I wish I had taken more classes on writing in college, but as a chemistry major, few of the electives I was offered involved the finer points of essay writing. I’m sure I summarized some technical articles, and I know I wrote laboratory reports, but in technical writing, all aspects of style are sacrificed in the name of simplicity and organization. No one really cares to compliment your sentence structure, particularly if it becomes so complicated that the central idea is hard to follow. I know some people might argue that non-technical essays are also hard to read if your sentence structure is complicated, but I for one, don’t really mind rereading a complicated sentence if the pay off is especially clever (and I’m not claiming that this is ever the case with me).

With all apologies to the English, History, and Philosophy departments, the college class that taught me the most about writing was Mr. Toolin’s first-year physics lab. Mr. Toolin gave every student six lines on the front of each laboratory report for the abstract. We were told that these six lines must include the purpose of the experiment, the procedure, and the conclusions. The abstract was something like 25% of the grade for each experiment, since he wanted us to learn that if you couldn’t explain what you had done, why you had done it, and what you found out, no one would go past the abstract; no one would bother looking inside to see the data, and thus there was no sense in doing the experiment in the first place. I had to rewrite abstracts over and over again to get them to the proper length while retaining the proper information. I think the stringent requirements of Mr. Toolin’s abstract writing are the source of all the praise my writing I received in the working world. I know how to identify and toss out every extraneous word thanks to the unrelenting tutelage of Mr. Toolin. But here I have no such need, no one will really care if I stick in extra words (and punctuation marks). Some people might actually enjoy it.

But to think some people might enjoy it is to let myself off the hook. I should learn a way to express myself without endless asides and parentheses and commas and dashes, but I only have time to do one thing at a time, and right now what I am doing is getting into the habit of writing. Once I have a firmly established habit, maybe then I will clean up my act and get into the habit of writing nicely. Until then I guess any readers I find will have to muddle through with me and try to find their way around these sentences. Hey, it’s season finale week on TV, what else is there to do this summer?

Pomp and Circumstance

This weekend marked the beginning of college commencements and the premiere of one of my favorite shows on C-Span. Okay, I don’t really have an extensive list of shows on C-Span that I love, but the compilation of commencement speeches by famous politicians, writers, and others (sometimes actors, sometimes scientists) is a once-yearly program that I thoroughly enjoy. The three times that I was pregnant during the spring and unable to sleep through the night, I would sometimes lie on the couch and flip through all of the channels desperate for something to watch, something that would distract me from worrying whether baby #1 (or 2) would feel disenfranchised by the arrival of baby #2 (or 3). In a public service that I feel has not previously been properly acknowledged, C-Span collects video of commencement addresses and runs them for an hour or two during its off hours.

Back in the day (well okay, 3 years ago), I used these speeches to calm my fears for my children. Sometimes when I interact with other parents enough, and read Newsweek enough, I feel like no one is looking out for my kids but me (and of course the HP and our immediate families). I feel encouraged to hear that people in government or the arts still appreciate the kids coming up behind them and look forward to viewing their contribution to the future. Each of these speakers is agreeing to spend some time motivating and supporting graduates, not because of family loyalty or hope of financial gain, but because she doesn’t think wishing graduates well will somehow lessen her ability to be successful. That is an attitude that borders on the un-American these days.

No matter how old I am and how far removed from college I am, a college commencement speech is always inspirational to me. Perhaps there are other rapidly aging mothers out there who listen as I do, as someone who has long since graduated and yet has still not found a career that I want for a career. I use the encouragement and the perspectives that successful people offer graduates to try to push myself to consider the future differently, to think about what’s possible, to try to believe that I am the one who can take my future and make it what I want. Listening to the advice, the warnings, the suggestions from people who have achieved greatness (or some measure of it) in this country always transports me back to my college graduation (more on this later). I can imagine the seniors sitting in the audience, some of them hung over and having been up all night, who don’t yet quite realize the change that is about to come.

So can you picture me there, dressed in my cap and gown, soaking in the wisdom of my commencement speaker? Neither can I. First of all, my commencement cap and gown ensemble was clearly intended for someone who was 6 feet 4 inches rather than 5 feet 4 inches. It completely enveloped me and dragged across the grass so that I was in constant fear of tripping over it. Fortunately, I was not in fear that my hat would fall off because: 1) I have a huge head; and 2) my friend LT loaned me one of her three bobby pins to secure my hat. The securing of my hat is a memorable moment, because as I was complaining to a four-year acquaintance of mine (who I won’t single out here except to say that her name was Christine) that I had no way to make sure my hat didn’t fall off, she looked at me and said “Oh, that’s stinks.” When I looked up at her, I noticed that her hat was completely encircled by bobby pins. That’s how you know who your friends are, not to get all biblical or anything, but your friends will give to you from what little they have, and the other people will shrug as your hat falls off your head on graduation day.

We had arrived at the staging area on graduation day after a rather severe night of partying. As I imagine is the case for many people, a few of my close friends and I found ourselves at Denny’s eating breakfast with some people we barely knew. Suddenly we were all close, because we were all undergoing the same huge upheaval on the same day. We all agreed that we would go home, shower, get dressed and meet back at my apartment for champagne before the ceremony. I don’t remember how many of the group made it there, but I do remember my friend Doreen and I calling each other repeatedly to make sure that we didn’t fall asleep and miss graduation. When we were both dressed, she came down to my apartment and we lay down on my bed to wait for the guests, and probably would have slept there all day if we hadn’t had 5 other housemates looking after us. Eventually we all set out into the blazing sun to make the trek to the stadium and graduation. The sun was an absolutely unfair development, because all of Cape Week and Senior Week had been freezing cold, and now that we could all use a bracing stiff breeze, instead we got a hangover-inducing beatdown courtesy of the sun. We had walked to the end of our street when we realized we had forgotten the roses that Doreen’s mom had sent for us to carry as we processed in, so we all turned around and went back for them, a straggle that drained the last bit of energy we had left.

I remember lining up and marching into the stadium. When I looked behind me, the crowd was a sea of waving relatives who didn’t realize that everyone else was looking and waving at someone else. I remember being sort of proud to have a Chemistry sash instead of a liberal arts one (although the color was awful), and I remember the sun beating down. I remember I felt sort of bad because I knew that if my mom managed to pick me out in the expanse of graduates, she would likely spend much of the ceremony worrying about the sunburn that was rapidly spreading across the back of my neck. Who was the commencement speaker? I’m not entirely sure. I think he was a Jesuit named Father Healy who was the president (or former president) of Georgetown University. All I know is that he was brain-numbingly (no, that’s the wrong word, I would have done anything for brain-numbing at that point) fingernail-yanking, torturously boring. Bear in mind that this is my memory of his speech, if I saw it replayed on C-Span this weekend, it might have brought a tear to my eye. Our valedictorian was a guy named Mo (really, his name was Maurice) who was somewhat engaging, but nowhere near as entertaining as we’d all expected him to be (I guess we weren’t really considering that he had to write a speech to please the administration, graduates, and thousands of family members in attendance).

I remember showing my namecard to the lady who was making sure we were all in alphabetical order, and then navigating the stairs very carefully since I was hungover/slightly drunk, dabbling in heat exhaustion, and wearing a gown for someone a full foot taller than me. I heard my name, and I remember shaking hands with the president of the college since it was the first and only occasion I ever came in contact with him. I remember feeling happy when I heard my friends and family cheer for me, and then I remember just sitting in my seat and crying, waiting for the ceremony to end. I was overwhelmed by everything that had happened, the exhaustion, the sunburn, and the friends who had gotten me through the four years and across the stage with my hat on my head.

The rest of the day is a blur. My parents and my sister and I all went out to lunch with one of my aunts and my grandmother. My parents dropped me back at my apartment to pack up, and I was alone because my roommate had gone home with her parents and was coming back later to get all of her stuff. I didn’t even want to pack my stuff, I wanted to leave it and get on with something new (of course being a rather frugal, sensible girl, I would never have been so romantic as to make such a dramatic break with my sheets and towels). Doreen and I talked about going to a party down the street, but all I wanted was to go to bed and get clear of that house. I couldn’t let the long goodbye go on any longer. I wanted to be back in Washington where I could clear my head and somehow make sense of everything that had happened in those last few weeks of college. In a final act of irresponsibility, I never turned in my enormous cap and gown; I left it hanging in the window of my apartment. I imagine one of my friends or roommates must have turned it in (as far as I know my parents were never billed for it), but I didn't have the strength to go back on campus and see anyone else.

Of course, once I was well into the summer, I couldn’t wait to get back to my friends and carry on the way we had in school. I was worried about getting a job, traveling, getting into graduate school, finding a boyfriend, finding a party, all kinds of things that a commencement speaker glosses over as he offers advice on what should come next. If I had been listening, I would have known that I should have been spending that time deciding what I was going to do with my life, how I would make a difference, how I could be a “Person for Others” in the grand Jesuit tradition. Well, though college is a rather distant memory, I find myself finally ready to listen and to take the advice of people who are smarter and more lucid than I am. It’s time to decide what else I’m going to do with my life. And so I shall. For right now, I’m going to turn on C-Span.

So Much for Being Nice, Here's Another Rant - Take This Crap Off The Air

When some of my friends and family started to read this blog, they asked me “When do you find time to do all this writing?” I have one answer: every evening from 8 to 11 pm (with the exception of Wednesdays) because there is absolutely nothing on TV the rest of the time. Of the 4200 hours or so of prime time TV available on my cable system every week, I watch the following shows regularly: The Amazing Race, Lost, What Not To Wear, and The Sopranos. I have watched other shows from time to time, but invariably they disappoint me with idiocy (jump the shark as they say). I can’t watch CSI and other coroner shows because they are too gross, and I can’t watch some other shows because it is too hard to figure out when they are on. I usually jump from channel to channel checking out the food network or a sitcom, and then clicking away at the start of each commercial. I wish I had some stuff to watch on TV, I like lying on the couch as much as the next girl, but things just haven’t worked out for me.

I must confess that there was a time last spring and early last fall when I though Grey’s Anatomy was a pretty good show. Unfortunately, like all pretty good shows, they only had enough plot for about 5 or 6 episodes. After that they obviously locked their writers in a room, starved them, deprived them of sleep, fed in some funny gas through the vents of the HVAC and had a few monkeys record the plots they came up with. I suppose it is possible that two people impaled by the same pole could be brought into the ER and make witty banter for an hour before one of them kicks off. I guess it’s possible that a doctor who performs open heart surgery in an elevator would gain absolutely no confidence and become a sniveling idiot with the start of each new episode (a doctor with the worst haircut since Buckwheat who then goes on to get an even worse haircut a la Alfalfa). I’m sure there are hospitals out there where almost all of the action takes place in an elevator that can only travel one floor per minute because it is operated by a small gnome frantically pedaling a tiny bicycle. But once you’ve used up all these great ideas, what else could possibly happen?

Okay, maybe a crazy war reenactor could end up with an unexploded rocket lodged in his chest. Maybe it could have been held in place inside his chest by a paramedic for hours, while being lifted onto a stretcher, through an ambulance ride, the hallways of the hospital, the elevator, and more hallways. Maybe when the scared paramedic took her hand away, a doctor could have instantaneously stuck her hand into the guy and stabilized the rocket. Maybe a cute, understanding, explosives expert would have let three doctors stay in the room with the patient who could explode at any time. Maybe when the doctor moved her hand and pulled out the rocket, nothing would have happened. Maybe if you suspend all belief, these things could have transpired. Where I must draw the line however, is that the cute explosives expert (wearing no protective gear) would have the rocket pulled out and put onto a tray which he would then carry down the hallway to a waiting disposal box, all the while chatting with yet another explosives expert (wearing no protective gear) as if he is carrying a tray full of macaroni from the cafeteria. Is there an explosives expert anywhere, cute or ugly, that would not have had the explosion proof container 6 inches from the patient? At the very moment where we are all supposed to feel sad and surprised that cute explosives expert has been vaporized, I was rolling my eyes in disbelief that they would top off the world’s most unlikely scenario with somehow an even more unlikely scenario.

I mean, at the time that was the world’s most unlikely scenario – little did I know what was coming up next. The “two-part season finale” has made the exploding rocket episode look like a documentary. I have not watched this show very closely lately, but it appears that one doctor (Dizzy) has fallen in love with a patient who needs a new heart. He is some sort of construction worker, who apparently works for a company that provides unlimited insurance benefits, allowing him to live in a private room at a private hospital for months without the need for a single conversation regarding who is paying the bills. He has had many close calls, almost dying, but then finally, miraculously, a heart donor is found. Actually, two heart donors (brothers) that were in the same car accident (and both died of injuries that spared all their organs) are found and are about to have their organs harvested simultaneously when the guy designated to donate Dizzy’s boyfriend’s heart dies and becomes unable to donate. Since the donors were brothers, the other brain dead (but not totally dead) brother would also be a donor match for Dizzy’s boyfriend, but since the person who was supposed to get the heart from the second brother got onto the transplant list 17 seconds before Dizzy’s boyfriend, he has dibs. So what do you think happened next?

Of course Dizzy, holes up in her boyfriend’s hospital room, and although he is on all sorts of monitors and drugs, no nurse ever stops by to see what’s going on. Then Dizzy, outraged by the 17 second rule and driven to insanity by her love for a guy she has played Scrabble with several times, decides to cut the wires to her boyfriends external heart pump, essentially killing him, so that he will be sicker and he will win the second heart. Even if you believe all the parts of this scenario of the doctor gone crazy for love, tell me if you can believe the rest of this: By phone, Dizzy tells the doctor in charge of the transplant what she is planning to do. Does he send a nurse, a security guard, another doctor, a maintenance man, in to stop her? No, he decides to drive back across town to check on the situation himself. Dizzy has one of her fellow interns come into the room and tells him what she is planning to do. Does he wrestle the scissors out of her hand? Call for help? Run so he will not be a part of the crazy scheme? No, he stands there wringing his hands and looking perplexed about what’s going on and unable to think of a way to stop it. So as the meaningful song plays in the background and the camera shots jump from scene to scene throughout the hospital, Dizzy cuts the wires and the show ends.

Unfortunately, while the camera is jumping from scene to scene, we get to see that the transplant doctor has been shot right outside the hospital (by a known teenage assailant who shot up a fast food restaurant and then eluded police all afternoon until he found his way to the hospital where all of his victims were being treated – clearly no police would have been waiting for him there). Is he shot in the leg so that he can limp into the second part and do surgery while he bleeds? No. Is he shot in the head so he can die and throw Dizzy’s plans into a tizzy? No. Come on now, put on your soap opera hats. He gets shot in the shoulder with just the slightest nick to his nerves so that one of his hands (Gasp! He’s a surgeon!) is paralyzed and he needs emergency neurosurgery. Meanwhile, hours later, the chief resident finally locates every other doctor in the show in the room with the rapidly dying boyfriend and gives them a talking to.

What happens next? I’m sure you know that the Dizzy is fired for what she’s done. Ha! Of course not! The interns all band together and reprise that famous scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers where they all take blame (credit) for the wirecutting (baby) so that all of them will keep their jobs (keep from being strung up by angry fathers). So what does the chief of the hospital do when he is confronted with this defiance from interns that have been working for him for less than a year? Suspend them all? Cut off their funding? Stop it silly! Of course he makes them throw a prom in the hospital for his niece who was brought in earlier that day (from her prom, I’m not sure why she needs another one, unless it is to complete sleeping with her boyfriend because apparently she passed out doing that at the first prom) because she has cancer.

I don’t know how this show will end because it is on right now and I can’t take one more second of it. I’m sure the heart transplant guy will probably die and the surgeon will get his fingers back. Everyone will break up and get back together and cast knowing glances at each other since everyone loves the people that belong to every one else. This little synopsis barely scratches the surface of the stupidity of what I saw in one and a half parts of the two part episode (I can't even face detailing the fast food plot). I find myself rather queasy at the fact that I have wasted 1500 words on it, but something must be done. Please, please take this show off the air.