10 Items or Less: 2.2 ‘Forever Young’ Recap
January 24, 2008 by Chandra
Original Air Date: January 22, 2008
Oh no, Buck! The resident bagger arrives at work over an hour late, reeking of alcohol. When RICHARD ask what’s going on, BUCK reveals his buddies took him out the night before, and he drank five Kamikazes because they didn’t taste like they had liquor in them. Worse, on the dance floor, he hooked up with an older, very blonde woman. Richard tries to find out who the woman was, but Buck insists he wouldn’t be familiar with the woman since she was French and from out of town.
Well, who should walk in at that moment but retail rival AMY from SuperValueMart. She stands very, very close to Buck, almost in a daze, to say hello. Richard ain’t no dummy, and he figures out what’s going on in no time flat: the woman Buck hooked up with is none other than Amy. Yikes!
Amy has ventured over to see LESLIE about another shipment of sprouts that was sent to her store by “mistake.” It turns out that Leslie ships the food to the wrong address intentionally to provoke Amy, whom he’s had a crush on since high school, to come over.
Amy goes to Leslie’s office and soon both managers return, just as Richard is warning Buck that not only is sleeping with Amy like sleeping with Saddam Hussein since she’s trying to take Greens & Grains down, but he’d better not tell Leslie because of their boss’ longtime crush on her.
After Amy leaves following another lingering, sensuous look at an uncomfortable Buck, Leslie stands close to the bagger and notices he stinks of booze. Robert sends Buck to a fake cleanup in one of the aisles to get him away, but it’s too late. Thanks to a recent management training seminar he attended, Leslie has determined that Buck must be an alcoholic because he smells like a distillery and obviously slept in his clothes.
Further proof of Buck’s problem comes when Leslie hides in INGRID’s customer service booth as Buck and Richard argue about wrinkly bags. Robert’s opposed to them, but Buck thinks that as long as customers get home with their groceries in good shape, who cares?
Leslie claims to Ingrid that he completed a lip reading course. Thus his take on the conversation from across the room is that Buck is trying to convince Richard he doesn’t have a drinking problem, and Richard falls for the lie because he’s codependent and gets off on enabling Buck’s alcoholism. And, of course, gullible Ingrid believes Leslie’s interpretation.
Next up on Leslie’s list of people who need to help him dry Buck out is TODD the butcher. Todd doesn’t understand why the manager doesn’t just talk to Buck directly instead of staging an intervention. When Buck walks over, however, cowardly Leslie drops beneath the counter and tells Todd to repeat what he says to Buck.
After Todd repeats Leslie’s question about hanging out with him skateboarding and doing ollies later that day, Buck figures out something’s up. But he erroneously thinks that Richard has told everyone he slept with Amy, so without specifying what he’s referring to, he angrily informs Todd that it was a one-time thing and a mistake, and then he stalks away. Now both Leslie and Todd are certain Buck’s a drunk.
So, Todd and Leslie wander over to the produce aisle, where YOLANDA’s pissed because there’s a huge display of boxed popcorn right next to the cobs of corn. Leslie arranged for the combination because a TV commercial convinced him that family needs to be together, meaning that the popcorn needs to be next to its father maize [Duuuuumb, dumb-dumb, dumb, DUUUUUMB!]. Yolanda doesn’t believe Buck’s an alcoholic because she’s never seen him drink. Yet, at this point, Leslie thinks they’ve never seen Buck sober, and he orders Yolanda to get a hair sample from Buck and Todd a urine sample for testing.
It’s then intervention time—or as CARL initially says, intermission time. The entire staff confronts Buck and Richard in the employee lounge, and Leslie informs the pair that they’re both being shipped off to deprogramming camps to rid them of their problems, Buck a work camp and Richard a musical-theater camp.
Buck’s manual labor camp comes courtesy of a recommendation from Ingrid, who attended it to control her obsession with Milli Vanilli. After the duo were found out to be a sham and were forced to return their Grammy award as a result, she couldn’t blame it on the rain anymore—Get it? One of their “songs” was called “Blame It on the Rain”—and had to take responsibility for herself.
Buck, thoroughly exasperated, insists he’s not a drunk. He reveals that some friends took him out to the Fantabulous Bang Bang Monkey Bar the night before to celebrate his 21st birthday, and that’s where he got carried away with the booze and slept with Amy Anderson. Although shocked, Leslie seems most crushed that lucky Buck turned 21 and slept with Amy on the same day.
Later, Leslie is sitting out on the loading dock, drinking beer and feeling sorry for himself because he’s getting older and older. Buck comes out to apologize for unintentionally hurting him, and Leslie’s whines about his increasing age leads to Buck’s complaints that being young isn’t so exciting—all he does is go to work and school and then hang out with friends on the weekend watching other people dance. Somehow during Buck’s contribution to the conversation, Leslie gets the idea that the younger man has invited him out with him and his friends, and Leslie is 100 percent stoked to run wild with the bucks.
Realizing that his dance moves are a bit rusty, Leslie goes over to the produce section to ask Yolanda to help him brush up on his dance skills. All he finds is Carl and their son MANNY because an angry Yolanda stayed at home after learning Manny, who can’t be more than four or five years old, had been posting stuff from her private journal on MySpace.
No worries, though. Carl convinces Leslie he’s got a few moves in his pocket he can teach. So, Leslie fires up the old boombox he brought along and we get treated to a minute or so of two guys who have no business dancing doing so anyway, all while their flailing limbs come within dangerous proximity to stunned shoppers in the area.
Segue to the club, where Leslie’s out embarrassing himself on the dance floor with Buck’s female friend. Leslie’s completely clueless that he looks like and is talking like a total dork. Soon an equally dorky-looking Amy walks over and, not noticing Leslie sitting right next to Buck, leans between the two and kisses Buck on the lips. She then sits on the other side of Leslie and starts asking if Buck lost her phone number, which she put in his wallet the last time.
Buck decides to be honest and confesses he thought them having sex was just a one-time thing, and he apologizes for any misunderstanding. Amy acts like that’s cool, until Buck and his friends head to another club, leaving Leslie and Amy alone. She can’t hold herself together for long and walks away about to burst into tears.
Leslie eventually follows Amy into the women’s bathroom where she’s sitting on the floor crying. With the stall door separating them, they talk about how getting older is hard and how young people these days are so lame with all of their texting and club hopping and networking. Their generation was only interested in networking in the bedroom.
To make Amy feel better, Leslie offers the ridiculous metaphor that Buck had a chance at the Super Bowl and decided to return to the minor leagues instead. The comment prompts Amy to open the door, drag Leslie into the stall with her, and start making out with him. She warns him that it’s just a one-night stand, though, which Leslie so doesn’t mind.
The next day at work, Leslie walks up in the same 1990s outfit he was wearing at the club as Buck complains to Richard about how awful it was the night before. Like Buck earlier, Leslie smells noxious, but this time it’s because he didn’t shower, not because of too much drinking.
The manager immediately begins bragging that he and Amy finally hooked up, which amazes Richard. Then the scene cuts to more of Carl and Leslie terrorizing customers in the produce section the day before with their unbelievably bad dance moves.
MY TAKE: “Forever Young” was another winner, with extra praise due to Jennifer Elise Cox as the simultaneously kooky and nasty Amy Anderson.
