An open house to remember

It is a special afternoon in the Los Angeles canyon hills; golden, lethargic, smelling faintly of eucalyptus and expensive rosé. This homely environment has a way of making strangers feel like they’ve known each other for years. The open house at 4200 square feet of panoramic splendour with 2 double baths and an indoor pool in the shape of a guitar was supposed to be one realtor’s crowning professional moment. Instead, it became the unlikely meeting point of two television universes, a weird collaboration of bruised egos and tender hearts, and one catastrophically drunk astrophysicist who should have stayed home with his dog Cinnamon.

It all begins with Penny. Fresh off a career-defining Netflix special, she has decided that she and Leonard are moving. Not across the hall. Not to a bigger Pasadena apartment. A real house, in the hills, with a wine cellar and a view and, most importantly, a working elevator! Leonard is on board. Sheldon Cooper is not. Sheldon’s objections, delivered with the calm authority of a man who has prepared a detailed list of violations of the “Friendship agreement” and a supporting PPT presentation with pie charts and graphs. He gives in after his wife Amy drags him to attend the open house. Raj tags along, freshly heartbroken and still wearing the psychic residue of an empty rosé bottle and too many scented candles. Howard and Bernadette, meanwhile, are on a romantic getaway in Santa Monica that maybe quietly sabotaged by Howard’s ulterior motive, i.e., a comic book convention!

Phil Dunphy arrives at the listing in peak form. This is a man who has been waiting for a house this good his entire career. He greets everyone with enough voltage to strike down a full-blown moose. Claire accompanies him with the perfect mix of love, patience and a good amount of eye-rolling. Their daughters Haley and Alex are there too, one with her head stuck in the phone and one in her book.

The Pritchett family situation draws itself in the posh fancy mansion with Jay screaming “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” with a glass of scotch in his hand and Gloria taking her own sweet time to make an entrance from the newly leased “Taka taka taka taka” or as Jay would call it, a “helicopter.” Manny and teenage Joe in a death grip as little Joe snatches Manny’s list of sonnets and his feather hat just to avoid embarrassing himself at the open house. Mitchell and Cam, impeccably dressed and already low-grade bickering about staging decisions that Cam has not technically been asked to make. It is, in other words, a completely normal Dunphy open house, until the Pasadena party rolls up and the afternoon takes a sharp turn, possibly off the cliff.

Sheldon’s arrival is announced, by none other than, Sheldon himself. He enters adorned in his signature flash t shirt with his clipboard and pen, immediately identifying three LA building code discrepancies and a concerning hairline crack in the east foundation wall, and begins a running structural audit. Before Phil starts sweating through the 50th suit he tried on since morning, Amy snatches the clipboard and tosses it out. Claire admires Sheldon’s OCD with the focused energy of a woman who has spent years being the most particular person in every room. She found the perfect peer to yell “I was right!” after literally every sentence. They spend the better part of an hour discussing on how the tulips and roses as the place setting was a gaudy mistake. By the end of the afternoon, they plan a visit to Sheldon’s Pasadena apartment for an elaborate structural audit and Sheldon forwards his bathroom schedule with Claire to avoid “last minute surprises.” Amy Farrah Fowler watches this entire development with an expression of subtle exhaustion that does not fool anyone anymore.

Alex Dunphy spots Sheldon Cooper across the driveway and visibly jumps in excitement. This is a young woman who read his paper on the asymptomatic movement of particles in a quark gluon plasma thrice when she was just 14. Sheldon acknowledges her effort as “slightly above average” and goes on to ignore her. She manufactures a series of increasingly transparent “coincidences” to make herself attractively visible in his vicinity, while Haley cringes at her hopeless attempts in wooing a nerd. Sheldon is oblivious to the subtext. Amy is not. What follows is a prolonged, exquisitely polite standoff between two highly intelligent women with a level of psychological tension that would be at home in a Cold War thriller. Amy resorts to the last arrow in her quiver, which is feigning a pregnancy test to establish that Sheldon is indeed hers.

Raj’s afternoon is defined entirely by a single bad decision made in the first ten minutes. He arrives at the open house emotionally fragile and with light speed, moves straight toward the bar. Several glasses of Grasshoppers and Mimosas in, he turns around and encounters Gloria Pritchett in her full Colombian glory. With a barrage of failed flirtation attempts, including “brown sugar” and “sweet caramel,” he manages to anger the tough knuckled Jay Pritchett.

Joe and Manny resort to all means necessary in dodging a full-blown rumble in this open house. When their attempts are proved useless, Cinnamon’s and Stella’s cute feline friendship does the trick. Now all Jay and Raj can care about is clicking Instagram pictures with the two cute dogs.

No one is entirely sure how Stuart got there. Maybe it was the “Free appetizers” poster hung outside the open house venue that made him sneak in with Tupperware containers. What he finds in the corner of the open house library is Luke Dunphy, who idly flipping through a stack of comics that Stuart instantly recognizes from his own store shelf. Instead of confiscating his property, Start manages to find himself in the middle of a heated argument with Luke on whether the Dark Knight Returns defined the modern era of comics.

Meanwhile, across town, Howard and Bernadette’s romantic weekend hits its predictable turbulence when Bernadette discovers the comic con schedule Howard sneakily packed in his bag. The argument that follows in the restaurant is a little louder than the vibe of the place. The man at the adjacent table hogs up Bernadette’s attention with an interesting relationship gossip delivered with theatrical flair. The man is Cameron Tucker, who has yet again managed to insert himself into the marital dynamics of a stranger with complete sincerity and zero apology. His husband Mitchell watches with the weary resignation of a man who has accepted the fact that this is simply how his husband moves through the world.

Penny and Haley find each other within twenty minutes and proceed to close out the afternoon at the kitchen island over a bottle of champagne, trading notes on auditions, antifungal cream commercials, and tacky serial killer gorilla movies. Penny, who has lived the longer version of this story, gives advice that is honest and unglamorous to the younger and more fashionable Haley. Gloria joins them toward the end of the afternoon with a special Colombian surprise for Penny that would put 100 such bottles of champagne to shame. After 3 shots of Gloria’s Colombian treat, the 3 fashionistas decide to take the ‘taka taka taka taka’ out for a spin to the Napa Valley.

By the time the canyon light goes golden and the open house begins to empty, Penny pulls Leonard aside, still in a mild buzz, to make an offer at asking price. Phil Dunphy, alone in the beautiful empty room after everyone has gone, turns off the lights and pulls out his RealHeadscratcher TM for some relaxing ‘me time.’ Sheldon, for the record, still objects to the move and somehow, no one is surprised!