At the mall, where Zack has been hanging around and taunting his friends at their xmas break jobs, he runs right into this angry frizzy girl.
And falls in love. But, then Screech wets his pants or something, and a creepy vagrant in the bathroom gives his crotch a once-over.
And then offers him tips on how to dry his pants. His excuse is that he’s been “caught in the rain many times”, but, I mean, I’ve been caught in the rain, too, and my crotch in particular never got all that wet.
Anyway, Screech is, like, really excited he found a new way to warm his crotch up, but Zack’s Stranger Danger senses kick in and he stares at the vagrant for a while, before realizing he’s probs homeless, because he’s using a mall restroom to shave. He then puts three dollar bills into a payphone and tells the hobo to check the payphone for his little prize.
I mean, it’s seriously three dollars. However, for a xmas bum, that’s enough to make it a merry xmas indeed, because SBTB takes place in the 20s.
Anyway, Zack’s new mission in life is to find that sort of average looking girl he ran into and force her to be his xmas gf, so he goes to Moody’s Store For Men, where Kelly works, to make her help. But, then he finds out that the average girl is actually Kelly’s new co-worker, Laura.
He asks her out and then regales her with stories of his generosity to winos, who he then berates for being winos or worse.
Laura’s lost her appetite due to Zack’s insinuation that a hobo would be a drug addict. At lunch, she ends up at the food court with Kelly anyway, where she sees Zack and tries to, once again, lose her appetite. But, Lisa makes a tasteless joke about oral sex.
And Kelly makes an insanely hard sell for this girl she just met to go out with her ex-bf. And also, Slater’s helpful contribution is to say, “Give him a break,” and then give a wink and a high five.
And then Zack apologizes for not knowing much about the race of “the homeless people,” and talking about how awesome it is that he lives on a street where everyone has cable. So, this all wins over Laura, who goes and eats all of Zack’s food like a pig, because I think she might be homeless/hungry. Zack then mildly suggests going to see Santa, to which Laura replies, “You’re CRAZAY!!!”
Jessie, meanwhile, working at Santa’s village, is called an “ugly old bag” by a little boy who had assaulted her earlier.
Hey, remember that episode of SBTB where Zack and Slater and Screech make fake id’s so they can get into that hot over-18 dance club, The Attic? And Zack’s mom keeps hosting sleepovers for the three of them and making them cookies and not thinking it’s weird that they’re all 16 and wearing feetie pajamas? And then when she finds out that they’ve been sneaking out each night to go to the Attic, she shows up there and the college girl Zack’s been seeing (who, for some reason, is perfectly fine with going to an over-18 dance club and not getting her own fake id to go to a real club in LA) sleazes up to Zack and says to Zack’s mother, who was introduced as his older sister, “You know, your brother’s pretty hot” and it was totally gross?
Zack’s mother’s speech about luring girls with hard candy, which I’m pretty sure is another tasteless oral sex joke, is way worse.
Meanwhile, Slater works in gift wrap, and is garbage at his job. Lisa’s pissed at him, until the vagrant, whose shave job didn’t seem to take, wanders over to attach some self-stick bows to the top of the still poorly-wrapped gift, receive tons of praise for a gift-wrap save, and then make a tasteless oral sex joke to Lisa.
He also wants some scraps, which Slater one-ups to a roll of xmas paper and some bows, and approximately twenty seconds later, the food court is abuzz with activity about ten feet from the wrapping station.
It takes the three stooges a few minutes to figure out that it’s their hobo friend, passed out, possibly dying, and receiving absolutely no help from every other shopper in the mall.
Fun fact: this entire 30-second scene of Slater being the only person, including the security guard, in the entire mall to know cpr, begging for a mouth guard b/c homeless ppl sleep in dumpsters, and then teaching Zack how to lift a dead person’s head was cut out of the re-broadcast of this episode.
At Moody’s, Laura’s become obsessed.
So obsessed that she’s willing to ask for time off from the job that is bringing in the only income her family has right now (spoiler alert), at which she’s been working a total of three hours so far, to be in some rinky-dink food court production of A Christmas Carol starring Zack.
Mr. Moody, her boss, is in a bad moody.
And would like her to save the chattah for her next pajawma pawty. Her big shot is ruined, but even worse is the sad sack news Zack, Slater, and Screech bring about that homeless guy Zack’s been talking about all day who collapsed in the mall earlier. I like that no one mentions the fact that Slater essentially saved the dude’s life. Speaking of hospitals btw omg, the gang has to get to the hospital to dress up in elaborate costumes and hand out candy canes to some terminally ill babies. Laura, for some reason, is not insistent on joining them.
They have SO MUCH FUN, but then Slater has the bright idea to go look at the homeless guy, and they all decide that they’ve had enough of charity work for the day. Slater and Jessie have also had enough of wearing tights with no underwear.
You know what Zack has not had enough of? His Santa costume. Particularly, the padding. Oh, hey, and Laura is the hobo’s daughter. Spoiler alert!
They give him a big tin of those weird Danish butter cookies that seem like they’d be really good but are usually pretty dry, and the hobo is, like, “Ehhh, coookies… Just what the doctor ordered.” You know he “accidentally” left that tin of cookies in the hospital room when he checked out.
Zack invites the homeless people to his house for dinner, and Laura eats five lamb chops, and then she and her father hold hands and talk softly about being homeless.
And Zack finally understands that being homeless really doesn’t mean not having cable.
He also stammers awkwardly over saying that his father would like to meet them because he has a homeless fetish.
The hobo’s story of his “one rumpled suit” gives Laura the idea to buy a sports coat from Moody’s for him for xmas, but Moody won’t give her an advance on her salary. Kelly tells him that she’s homeless and he should stop being a dick, and then he informs her that homeless people steal.
Zack, whose Dickensian costume looks a lot like a Lisa Turtle Original, shows up to walk Kelly down to the stupid food court play.
He also manages to convince Moody to let Laura be in the play. After they leave, Kelly grabs the sport coat to put it in the back so she can buy it as a surprise for her new bff Laura. Kelly’s, like, one step from being homeless herself, so I’m surprised she’d waste the money.
Hey! It’s Marlene! One of the college girls from the Attic!
Slater plays Tiny Tim in the play, and the audience – the SBTB audience, not the food court audience – awws at his arrival, like, you guys know that Slater’s not really crippled, right?
They did not have a reaction, however, to his choice of a curly gray wig for his part as the pawn shop owner.
When the play – which, as per Zack’s bribe for Laura, was changed to constantly advertise Moody’s Store For Men – is over, Laura comes back to the store and finds that the only sport coat in the whole store has been sold, and she stands next to it for as long as it’ll take someone to notice her, looking sad and homeless.
It doesn’t take Moody long. He doesn’t buy her story about being blue about the coat being sold, because it doesn’t involve the words, “I’m homeless, so I stole this coat to burn for warmth, and also to eat,” so he runs to the register and goes, “Uh hah, uh hah, uh hah there’s no receipt!” and then tell her he’s going to call the cops.
Kelly and Zack show up to congratulate Laura on her thirty-second cameo in A Christmas Moody, like they weren’t in the play themselves, and find out from Moody that Laura’s a thief. Kelly gets pissed because she was gonna pay for the jacket RIGHT. NOW. Oh, and Zack is disgusted by Moody’s poor treatment of the homeless winos.
Everyone gathers to hunt Laura down. Including Mrs. Morris and her nun-on-vacation culottes, and Lisa and her grandmother’s xmas pantsuit.
So, I guess if I was homeless, I would probably want to park my car somewhere that wasn’t totally deserted and scary, but I also probably wouldn’t pick the handicap parking space in a busy xmas tree lot.
But, then again, I don’t know that much about the homeless people. Anyway, thank GOD they’ve been found alive, and Moody’s not pressing charges, and Mrs. Morris is totally grossed out by the fact that these people are sleeping in a car, and her husband is still not home from his mysterious trip which was supposed to be over by now and she’s decided that a strange hobo and his frizzy daughter who’s also sort of dating her horny teenage son are the perfect house guests in her ritzy Bayside mansion for xmas eve.
Homeless people are funny.
Moody ends up giving the sport coat as a gift to Laura who then gives it to her dad, who can wear it with his rumpled khaki pants to job interviews. Mrs. Morris and Zack (?) invite the two of them to move into the house indefinitely until they get on their feet, which probably won’t be for a while considering Laura’s taking time off and accepting expensive gifts from her employer, and the hobo is still a hobo and possibly a wino and possibly worse.
But, anyway, they’re invited, and, in a moment that my friend Meghan always hated because, as she said, it made Jessie seem like a shallow bitch, Jessie begs them to stay because she wants new neighbors.
“I totally meant what I just said. I hate the Morrises.”
Then, as a gift to everyone else, the homeless people sing Silent Night. It’s like a nightmare. In fact, this is exactly what it seems like to me:
Sorry to have done that to you, but as a final bit of xmas cheer on what is almost the end of xmas day, I give you a constant stream of Zack Morris’s magician-like hand movements.
Merry xmas. !
