"On a slow day at the Crab Shack, me and Randy liked to bet on who was gonna come through the door next." "I think it's gonna be a Chinese guy named Townsend." "Randy, no Chinese guy named Townsend's ever come in here." "Ah, I'm feeling pretty confident, Earl." "I already called a black chick named Henrietta." "Chinese Townsend." "Chinese Townsend." "Chinese Townsend." "Chinese Townsend." "Crazy Witch Lady!" "I heard that if her shadow falls on you, your blood freezes and your heart falls out your butt." "I've heard that, too, Randy, but I got to go talk to her." "She was #186 on my list:" ""Was mean to the Crazy Witch Lady."" "Every town has a spooky old lady who lives in an even spookier old house." "In Camden, ours happened to be on my way to school." "But every time I tried to cut across her lawn, she would chase me way." "Get away!" "My birds are buried there!" "So I came up with a plan to get even-- a plan that involved superglue and food coloring." "A plan that I'm ashamed to say I still think is pretty awesome." "When everything was ready, I sprang my trap." "There's a Crazy Witch Lady trying to eat some kid at the corner of Fourth and Pine." "Come quick." "I have no respect for your property!" "Oh!" "I'll get you." "You're trampling my hemlock!" "Help!" "Crazy Witch Lady's trying to kill me." "Sweet mother of God, drop the broom, Witch Lady." "I can't!" "Do it now, kid eater!" "So, I-I..." "I just want to say how sorry I am, Mrs., uh..." "Sorry." "I..." "I don't even know your real name." "Young man, you are the first person who has bothered to ask me my name in years." "I'm Griselda Weezmer." "I know." "It doesn't help things much." "Well, there's-there's got to be something I can do to make is up to you." "I do get lonely." "Maybe you could come over for tea tomorrow afternoon." "No." "No." "Yeah, I-I..." "I'd like that." "I hear good things about tea." "Look at that cross-eyed old goofball." "God sure broke the weirdoes stick on her." "Joy, that's not very..." "Hold on." "I got more." "She's creepier than babies with glasses." "She smells so bad, when she sits in the sand, cats try to bury her." "Bam!" "Joy, listen." "I've been waiting for a time to bring this up that wasn't premenstrual, menstrual or postmenstrual, but I think I'm just gonna jump in." "Why do you always have to say those kind of things?" "Oh, here we go." "Always sticking up for nearsighted babies." "It's not just nearsighted babies." "You say mean things about everybody." "It's not mean if people laugh at it." "What about when they cry at it, like Eugenia did yesterday?" "She set me up." "She said she thought she could be a plus-size model." "I had to say, "Yeah, plus-size model home."" "Joy..." "One person cried, six people laughed." "That's all I'm saying." "The next day, me and Randy drove over to Mrs. Weezmer's house so I could have tea with her." "Come on, Randy." "I need you in there to keep the conversation popping." "You like talking about the same things old ladies do, like socks and joint pain." "Say, that reminds me." "Last week, my sleeping socks came out of the dryer so damn fluffy, my knees didn't hurt all day." "See?" "This is great stuff." "She'll eat it up." "No, she won't, 'cause I'm not going in there." "It's suicide." "She'll lop off your head and make pudding out of your blood and trick people like me into eating it, and I'll do it, Earl, because I love pudding." "Even if she doesn't give me a spoon, I don't care." "I'll find a way." "Fine." "I'll go by myself." "I'll see you in an hour, 'cause my head will still be on." "When I was kid, there was no way I'd have been caught dead having tea with Griselda Weezmer, but as a grown man, I saw that I misjudged her." "Sure, she was a little odd." "These are my mother's teeth." "Okay, a lot odd, bushe was harmless." "Your mom's teeth, huh?" "Well, that's quite a..." "Rise and shine." "What...?" "What's going on, Griselda?" "This is a little weird." "Last week, I would have agreed with you." "Truth is, I haven't thought about what you did in years, but your big apology brought it all back." "In-In a good way?" "No." "And then I got thinking about all the other things that people have done to me." "That angry mob that tried to drown me in the lake to see if I'd float." "I" " I didn't have anything to do with that." "I..." "I was just drinking beers and watching from a house book." "And then, yesterday, when you went blabbing on," "I thought, "Griselda, you know what you should do?" ""Lure him to your house, drug him, and then stick him in the basement."" "So that's just what I did." "Well, it worked." "I'm totally freaked out." "This is a real pants-crapper." "The..." "I-I guess we're even, huh?" "You little scamp." "You'll never see daylight again." "When I didn'come back out to the car," "Randy worked up his nerve to go knock on the Crazy Witch Lady's door." "Hello." "I'm looking for my brother Earl or any parts of him you haven't made into pudding." "Oh, goodness." "I didn't turn him into pudding." "We just had some tea." "And now he's in the video game room playing with my wrestling action figures and watching naughty movies." "And what other things do boys like you enjoy?" "Well, I think you've hit everything except for peanuts." "Oh, and there's a big bowl of peanuts." "I'm coming in." "Randy!" "Come on, lady." "Just please let me and my brother go, and-and we'll forget all this ever happened." "Let you go?" "!" "Oh, don't be silly." "I couldn't possibly." "I'm having such fun." "You know what you could have even more fun with?" "Money." "Oh, thank you, but no amount of money can beat the look of terror in a fresh victim's eyes as he takes a header into the coffee table." "Ooh, the feeling is exquisite!" "It's what I always imagined an orgasm might be like." "Where am I?" "Locked up in Mrs. Weezmer's basement." "Oh, no!" "We're gonna die!" "And it's gonna hurt!" "I guess this is good-bye, head." "Thanks for all your hard work." "Apparently, Mrs. Weezmer had a reason to be mad at Randy, too." "A few years ago, he'd come up with a plan to get rid of the Crazy Witch Lady once and for all." "Why aren't you melting?" "Come on, melt, bitch!" "Okay, so she's mad at both of us." "Let's just stay calm and-and think of a way out of this." "Sorry." "Stopped breathing for a second there." "Meanwhile, above ground," "Joy was still ticked off that Darnell didn't think she was nice." "Hey, loser, if you had to describe me in one word..." "Mean." "Let me finish." "...and it couldn't be "hot,"" " what word...?" " Mean." "Not "hilarious," huh?" "Okay." "Hey, here's one." "If you had to describe Darnell in one word, and it couldn't be "black,"" "what word would you use?" "Can't use "black," huh?" "Ah, it's a toughie." "Okay." "How about "nice"?" "No." "I'm gonna go with "great."" "Or "marvelous."" "I'm really going back and forth between "great,"" ""marvelous" and "nice."" "All right, fine." "You can use "black."" "After an hour of trying to come up with an escape plan," "Randy thought he had something." "Step one: we catch a mouse." "Step two: we teach him sign language." "Step three:" "we throw him as hard as we can up that chimney." "Someone's up there." "We should yell for help." "Okay, let's yell on three." "One... two..." "Damn it." "Since when does everybody like tea?" "So you're telling me her MO is to kidnap people she wants revenge on?" "Yeah, but she's not just going after Mos." "She's taking straight guys, too." "This is crazy." "I've never even seen this woman before, let alone done anything to her." "And I'm sure you haven't, either." "Kenny shouldn't have been so sure." "My fault?" "!" "How could this possibly be my fault?" "Look, ma'am, I don't want to offend you, but, you fit a certain profile that we in law enforcement call a whackjob." "But I'm not hurting anybody." "Yes, but you're different, and that's bad." "I mean, we all have parts of ourselves that are wrong and weird and shameful, but it's our responsibility to bury those parts very deeply and go bowling with our straight friends." "Good day, madam." "Don't give me that look." "You know, you are turning into your mother." "Guys, blaming each other isn't going to help us." "You were a cop." "How do people get out of this kind of thing?" "Oh, they don't." "Yeah, we used to find mutilated skeletons chained up in basements all the time." "We never saved a single person." "No tears." "We've got to be strong, Bear Cub." "Back at the Crab Shack," "Joy was getting desperate to prove she was as good a person as Darnell." "See, what people don't realize is I got tons of, like, secret inner niceness." "Well, niceness really is best when no one ever gets to see it." "You're just trying to get me to snap at you, but I won't, because I am full of super niceness." "How can I help..." "Witch!" "Sorry." "Hello." "Pardon me, dear." "I wondered if you could come to my house and do me a favor." "Of course, I will do you a favor, ghoulish old lady." "Because I am a nice person, and favors are what nice people do." "Oh, my God, it's Joy." "This one's nasty." "She took a swipe at me on her way to the floor." "I wasn't surprised to see Joy." "A few years ago, somebody told her it was good luck to push over a witch." "Idiots, idiots." "If just one of you butt-nuts had been man enough to stop the biddy, she never would have gotten to me." "What, are you just down here waiting to starve to death?" "No, Joy." "We tried screaming." "And Randy's got a great mouse plan we can pull out if we ever see one." "If you have a better idea, we'd love to hear it." "Nope." "Seems like you guys covered every reasonable base." "All that's left for me is to be an idiot and call 911." "She's got a cell phone." "She's got a cell phone!" "Can I check my e-mail?" "Kenny, this is what I was talking about." "You have a media disease." "What the hell?" "They put me throug to voice mail." "Oh, yeah." "It's 3:30 on a Friday." "Sharon's probably knocked off for the weekend." "You know her boyfriend's got a house on Lake Wheeler?" "I'm calling Darnell." "He was a government assassin, and he takes vitamins." "You might want to watch and see how a real man handles this kind of thing." "Crap." "Hey." "That sack has the same ring tone as Darnell." "I wouldn't drink the tea, so she whacked me in the head with a giant ceramic rooster." "Wait a second." "If you're here, then you must have done something nasty to the old biddy, too." "See, y'all, Mr. Perfect can be just as mean as anybody." "Who's the black calling the kettle pot now?" "Tell what you did." "Actually..." "Hey, Darnell." "You see that lady over there?" "Which lady?" "That crazy lady over there." "Which lady?" "That lady." "Which lady?" "That lady!" "Which lady?" "!" "Son of a bitch, Darnell." "It's like I married Jesus' nicer brother." "Makes me want to kill somebody." "Let's start with the woman that locked us up." "Hey, that's a good idea." "I learned on the force that if you punch an old person's head from the correct angle, their skull pretty much turns to powder." "Let's do this!" "She's coming." "Tell me the angle..." "Tell me the angle!" "Oh, hi, everybody." "Catalina!" "How did you find us?" "No, no, no!" "Catalina, what are you doing?" "Mrs. Weezmer lured me over here and tried to drug me, but I've had so many roofies slipped in my drinks over the years," "I've developed quite a tolerance." "She was trying so hard, and she looks a little like my aunt." "Anyway, here I am." "Like Joy, Catalina had grown up with a lot of superstitions about witches." "And just when the little blind boy turned to the tree and said, "Mommy, why is the floor so cold?"" "the frozen lake cracked under him... and he drowned." "Oh... that is so sad." "I did it!" "I captured the tear of a witch." "I shall live forever!" "Seriously, what the hell is with sticking people in burlap sacks before you kick them down the stairs?" "It's more dramatic." "She's right." "It is dramatic." "No, I never did anything bad to her." "The old bitch is just crazy." "I can't tell you the number of times I've been out working and she's been standing there and staring at me." "It's creepy is what it is." "And she wonders why I took Dad's side in the divorce." "Oh, yeah." "She's my mom." "Hookers have moms?" "Patricia!" "As long as you are under my roof... uh, and my kitchen floor, there will be no smoking in this house." "What are you going to do, ground me?" "If grounding worked, you wouldn't be sleeping with men for money and food and gasoline." "Now, what was I here for?" "Oh, yes." "I'm going to kill one of you." "What?" "Uh, well, I have a lot more people to kidnap, and we're running out of space." "Now, I'm not a monster." "I'm going to let you folks decide which one of you" "I stab and stab and stab until you're dead." "Not it!" "Good luck, suckers." "It's bad enough being kidnapped and chained in a basement, but when the kidnapper tells you to pick somebody to get stabbed, relationships show the strain pretty fast." "Everybody, calm down." "We got to figure out what to do here." "We know what to do." "We decide who will be missed the least, and the rest of us just get on with our lives and never look back." "Good idea" " I say we give her the bitch." "You better be talking about your boyfriend." "See, that's the kind of mindless hate speech that proves the world would be better off without you." "But if I don't get the votes for that, I say we snuff the whore." "Why me?" "Hookers are killed every day." "Face it, you're living on borrowed time." "Darnell, you're a nice guy." "Why don't you just volunteer to be killed?" "Look, I'll give you a ride to the airport, but I'm not dying for you." "Nobody's going to die, Darnell." "She's just going to stab and stab and stab one of us until... oh, no." "Oh, my God." "Okay." "New front-runner:" "the dumb guy." "Of course." "The dumb guy-- why didn't we think of it before?" "If we lie to him, he won't realize what's happening until it's too late." "I heard that." "You burn in hell, stripper!" "All right, stop." "Look what we're doing to each other." "It's exactly what we did to Mrs. Weezmer." "Again, never did anything to her." "Totally innocent and still might die." "Welcome to being gay." "Don't you see?" "We labeled her as the Crazy Witch Lady, and now we're labeling each other." "The bitch, the nice guy, the gay guys, the stripper." "Freaking Karma zombie." "Okay, that, too." "But maybe this is what Karma wants us to learn." "Look, guys." "When you label somebody, you stop seeing them as a real person, and suddenly, you can do all kinds of terrible things to them." "And pretty soon, they stop seeing themselves as a real person, too." "They just turn into that label." "Yeah, so Mrs. Weezmer acted crazy, but after 20 years of people treating her the way we did, can you blame her?" "Earl." "Mrs. Weezmer, we're all real sorry for what we did." "Do you mean that?" "Yeah." "Yeah, and if you're going to kill someone, kill me." "But... but I know you won't, 'cause you're not really crazy." "We drove you to act like this because of what we did." "It's okay." "It's all okay now." "Oh, my God!" "Crazy Witch Lady stabbed me!" "It hurts so much!" "Sorry, Mom." "Collect her tears!" "We can all live forever!" "Turns out, Mrs. Weezmer was crazy and so the courts placed her in a home for the mentally frazzled, where they could give her the help and care she need to get well." "And we all found ourselves making a little extra effort not to let other people's labels define who we were." "Joy did what she could to show Darnell she really could be nice." "Here's some sugar peas for my sugar pea." "Hope you enjoy it." "And Darnell knew Joy would be happier if she didn't always feel like she was married to a saint." "Bitch, you know I hate peas!" "Thanks, baby." "That's all I need." "Just act like a mean bastard every once in a while." "And I decided to spend a day relaxing and show that I wasn't always just "that guy with the Karma list."" "And Randy got himself a "word of the day" calendar, so he could show people he wasn't always dumb." "You know, Earl, this beer obviates the need to go to the Crab Shack." "Obviate." "And Patty?" "Well, Patty was called a lot of things, but the one label she never really lived up to was daughter." "She decided to fix that." "And after Mrs. Weezmer spent some time being seen as a mom instead of a crazy witch lady, she was well enough to come home." "And that gave us a chance to treat her like a person with no labels at all, which meant that I could finally cross her off my list." "I'll do it later."