Episode 98: I'll Be Seeing You by Lurlene McDaniel

Dumpsterpiece Theatre cracks open a 1996 Lurlene McDaniel paperback and finds exactly what you'd expect: overdramatic teenagers, medically detailed suffering, and one girl's heroic commitment to making everything worse for herself. I'll Be Seeing You follows 16-year-old Carley Mattea - hospitalized with an infected broken leg from a rollerblading incident - and Kyle Weston, a chemistry club enthusiast who burned his corneas (and some of his chest) trying to make homemade rocket fuel. He's temporarily blind. She has a facial deformity from childhood tumor surgery. They meet in the pediatric ward of Knoxville General Hospital, which in 1996 apparently had rooms the size of studio apartments and a staff that dispensed sleeping pills like breath mints.

Rather than tell the cute blind boy about her face at literally any of the dozen natural opportunities, Carley instead constructs an escalating tower of lies that includes: dodging his parents, refusing to let him touch the left side of her face, conscripting her hot sister Janelle into a wheelchair-based impersonation scheme, inventing a fake jealous boyfriend named Jon (who is actually her sister's boyfriend), and orchestrating a coffee shop viewing arrangement where Kyle can look at the wrong girl from across the room and then leave.

We are genuinely impressed that Lurlene did her ophthalmological homework on acid versus alkaline chemical burns. Lurleen's teenage boys, however, remain consistently terrible, with Janelle's boyfriend Jon delivering the all-timer: "You're not normal, but you're all right, Carly."

Peak Dumpster Moments:
◆ Carley's parents leave their hospitalized teenager alone for days because the hospital is 60 miles away and they have a bookstore to run - different times, folks
◆ Kyle's chemistry club origin story. Rule one of chemistry club: don't talk about chemistry club.
◆ The sister switcheroo: Janelle sits in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs and is told to "just mimic my voice" - a plan with zero chance of working on a guy whose other senses are heightened
◆ Carley invents a fictitious boyfriend whose name is… Jon. Which is also the name of her sister's actual boyfriend. Or was it George Glass?
◆ The Mudpie coffee shop sting operation, where Kyle agrees to "see her from a distance".
◆ Liz reads aloud the line where Kyle expresses regret that they didn't meet two years later, when plastic surgery would have made Carley "more acceptable." Bad timing, Kyle.
◆ Kyle reads books on quantum theory. On audiobook.
◆ John's apology to Carley for calling her a dog face boils down to "sorry you heard that, but your sister's hot and I don't want you ruining this for me"
◆ Dr. Chafoo. We just enjoy saying Dr. Chafoo.

The Tangent Files: Liz discusses the new busy-mom buzzword "Maycember" (or Maytember?), which Scott firmly does not believe is a real thing. Justin Timberlake's DUI situation comes up. We then take a hard left into the Fisher-Price PXL 2000, the Home Alone 2 Talk Boy, the lost art of recording songs off the radio, and the ideal silence gap between mixtape tracks. Scott cops to once owning a "For Your Consideration" bootleg of Fellowship of the Ring, plugs the LOTR 25th-anniversary theatrical re-release, and concludes that Peter Jackson is, fairly, sitting on his pile of money. And Scott's "Who are you?" Airbnb incident - the time he sat up in bed and demanded, in perfect theatrical diction, to know who was in the room - is dragged out of the archives and entered into the canon.

Coming Up Next: Horse Sense (1999), a Disney Channel movie starring Joey Lawrence and Andrew Lawrence — but not the third Lawrence brother, which is a travesty. A spoiled city kid gets sentenced to ranch life with his cousin and aunt. Liz is anticipating terrible horsemanship. The trope bingo board may make its debut. Yee-haw.

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