Plot
The SEC has impounded most of the family's vehicles, so Michael is forced to ride his bike to work. However, he soon realizes that he needs a car. When he finds out that Gob has been secretly driving their father's car, he confronts him about it at the banana stand. Gob admits to it, but says that Lindsay is currently using it. Michael realizes that Gob has been receiving free frozen bananas from the stand. Fed up by Gob's deception, Michael instructs George Michael not to give Gob anything free. Gob offers to pay by giving Michael the rights to promote the stand with Mr. Bananagrabber, a cartoon character drawn in Gob's likeness, but Michael declines. Next, Michael tracks down Lindsay, who is busy preparing for the annual charity Bachelorette Auction at the local country club. Michael, unimpressed, says that Lindsay cares more about getting a high bid amount than about saving the wetlands; Lindsay says he wouldn't understand since he's not charitable. Michael asks her about the car; she says Buster has it.
Michael goes to Lucille's apartment and finds her getting ready for the Charity Auction as well; Lucille admits she's only doing it to be "sold" for a higher bid than her rival Lucille Austero. She rehearses with Buster their plan that he will bid $10,000 for her. Michael gets the car keys from Buster and sees the terrible condition his siblings have left it in: Gob scorched it while performing magic, Lindsay spilled nail polish, and Buster left items from an archaeological dig. Michael visits his father to discuss building permits for their new development, which George Sr. failed to file for. George advises Michael to send Gob, who is especially furtive, to break into the permit office, slip the application into a folder and tell the permit office they messed up.
Reluctantly, Michael approaches Gob, but Gob insists on certain conditions: a free frozen banana whenever he wants, and full creative control to the Mr. Bananagrabber character and any spinoffs that may occur. He also wants Michael to make up for humiliating him in front of George Michael. Michael agrees, and instructs George Michael he should do whatever his uncle asks. Stung by constant charges of being selfish, Michael decides to do something nice: he offers a ride to Lucille's new housekeeper, Lupe. However, Michael has actually picked up another woman; when she notices the skull left by Buster, Gob's burn marks, and the blood-colored nail polish, she becomes convinced that Michael is going to murder her.
Gob, meanwhile, cases the permit office, but decides to ask George Michael to break in. George Michael is reluctant, but Maeby's enthusiasm changes his mind. Michael gets a call from Lindsay, who begs him to pick her up from the wetlands, where she went to prove she cares about the environment, but now was finding to be too much for her. At the same time, Lucille Austero is stalking Buster, hoping he is planning some grand romantic gesture to save their relationship. Lindsay, running out of time to get to the Charity Auction, calls a cab home – but forgets to call Michael. When he arrives at the wetlands, his terrified passenger takes off running. The auction starts, and a scratched, scraped, ragged Lindsay isn't fetching any bids. Michael, seeing that she really did try to help the wetlands and feeling bad for her, pledges $1,000. Lucille Austero takes the stage, and Buster, hearing only the first name as he rushes in the door, bids $10,000 for her. Lucille assumes this is his "grand romantic gesture." Walking to the parking lot, Michael is arrested for the forced abduction of his passenger earlier in the day. And when he's tossed into the back of a squad car, George Michael is sitting there already, having been arrested during the permit office break-in.
Read more about this topic: Charity Drive
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“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)
“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)