by SpiderBraids
Season 3, and you still haven't changed your titles to reflect your characters? Some of them look so different from when the series began, you know.
Okay, we open with Estes "Hulk Hogan Clone" Pangborn dedicating their new Conway Ufner Down Memorial school auditorium and worrying about fire codes, blah, blah, blah. Apparently, some spark decided, "Hey, let's clone Hey Arnold!'s school auditorium, only bigger!"
Meanwhile, some kids are apparently playing shadow puppets with the spotlight that's on Pangborn. Up in the rafters, we find that "some kids" are Phil and Lil. Chuckie is chiding them, as he's the president of the audio visual club, BTW, a target for geeks ever since Nicole Eggert blasted AV types on an ep of "Who's The Boss?" back in the 80s (and perhaps even earlier!). And thank you, Finster, for giving us some exposition about yourself, but we still haven't gotten any word on how you fared in the safety commissioner election [["Izzy or Isn't He?"]]. Phil drags Finster in anyway.
Back to Pangborn, and the meat of the eppy. He's getting a student to sing the first ever song here. Angelica is excited to hear of this opportunity, even though her singing talent, judging from her past record, is not even on par with Wanda Shirk (and Wanda was, well, Shirked by the others on her show pretty quickly). Everybody is too busy laughing to hear the details. Yay for shadow puppets.
Anyways, Angelica briefly bumps into some boy (note the boy) before signing up for the audition. Dil points out that Susie has the best voice in the whole school. No kidding, Dylan. But Angelica tells the Pickles brothers that Susie is helping her grandma with her hip replacement. Tommy tells her to call Susie about the audition on her cell phone. Since Susie's out (and I assume the rest of her family), she gets a machine with Susie's beautiful (if hip-hoppy) voice on it.
And not a well-functioning machine, either. It starts malfunctioning and Angelica takes advantage of this by pretending nothing is wrong, and "leaving a message" (raises hands Dr. Evil style). The sign-ups end tomorrow, and I don't see why anyone else couldn't have told Susie about the audition between now and then. And Houston, we have our first problem with the main plot. "Now if you'll excuse me I have to figure out what I'm gonna sing for the opening night.. oh audition that is."
Interlude! While Chuckie, Phil and Lil are discussing their shadow puppets, they come across Mrs. O'Keats complaining about the lack of sign-ups for her planned rhythm of arts performance. She complains to our convenient passers-by: "This is what held me back from the stage... Teenagers are too caught up in popular culture to be enchanted by true art. They wouldn't get their keister up for a ballet if a train was coming at them." (Recapper remembers his sister dancing in a local ballet when she was 11 going on 12... ahhh...) Chuckie points out that teens are so stuck-up (Angelica, I'm looking in your direction!). Our convenient passers-by happen to be 12, 11 1/2 and 11 1/2, however, so, long story short, she just signs them up instead. This should be fun...
For some reason, we jump past the audition itself to Angelica giddy at winning the audition (With her worse than Wanda Shirk voice? No way!), and Susie PO'd that she didn't even get a chance to play. "I know you Angelica, you'd do anything to claw your way to the middle." Angelica drags Tommy in to confirm that she left a message for her, and Susie realizes that the machine was broken and leaves. Time to get back to feeling victorious for Angelica, just so we get it that leaving Susie out was her main point.
On their way home. Chuckie talks about the whole deal with getting signed up for performance arts. Dil tells the gang about the titular concept of karma. "Karma is this cool eastern philosophy that says if you do good things, good things happen to you. And if you do bad things, bad things happen. And I for one believe in it." This is coming from a kid who believes that aliens live in instant mash potatoes (maybe he should watch this British commercial then ;)). Anyways, what's that got anything to do with anything you ask? Well, four words: Pangborn and shadow puppets.
Next morning! Angelica does something we've never seen her do: sing and not make us cringe. How's that for a feat? Bathroom. Angelica, meet huge ugly zit. Huge ugly zit, meet Angelica.