Scars and Souvenirs/Grey Matter

Debora Cahn on "Scars and Souvenirs"...

Original airdate: 3-15-07

Izzie and George sleep together.

Izzie and George sleep together.

And what does sleep mean, really, it could mean anything, which is what you figure’s going through Izzie’s head when she pulls up the sheet to check if she’s wearing anything, and the answer is, “No. Nothing at all. You’re naked in a bed with your best friend, and it sure as hell looks like he’s naked too. Everybody’s naked and in the bed and have been for a while and they have bed head and are naked.”  So sleep could just mean sleep, but probably doesn’t.

The moments you wait for, in a job like this, are ones like when Shonda calls you into the writer’s room and says, “You know how we talked about how maybe George and Izzie sleep together? Put that in your episode.” That’s when you smile, and try to be cool, and say, “Oh, sure, I can find room for that.” And then you leave the writer’s room and do the biggest happy dance you’ve ever done, and it goes on for a while, until you realize somebody from the script department is standing nearby and watching and now thinks you’re epileptic.

Izzie and George sleep together.

Well it was bound to happen, right? Best friends. They get each other like nobody else gets them. They share everything. It’s easy. It’s natural. It’s like gravity, how can you fight it? How can you not fall? Okay, there’s a way to not fall. Lots of people don’t sleep with their best friend. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to assure my husband that I’ve never slept with any of my best friends, and I don’t plan to start any time soon. But it makes sense, in a way, right? Isn’t that the fantasy? That the guy and the best friend can be the same person? That Izzie and George, who have shared every minute of the most intense time in their lives, turned to each other in every success and every failure and every breakup and every triumph, with every piece of gossip and every bit of pain, should share…everything? Share their hearts and their souls and… all their other parts? It makes sense, right? Right up to the “he’s married” part. That’s where it all kind of falls apart.

Oh Callie. Callie gets a pretty raw deal around here. She’s tough. Which is good. She needs to be. But she gets a pretty raw deal. More on that later.

Back to sleeping with your best friend… We’ve spent some time here today wondering if this is going to encourage a whole bunch of people deciding to sleep with their best friends. And who knows what would come of that. All I’ll say is, if your best friend’s married, I don’t recommend it. But if your best friend’s single, and so are you, and you always kind of thought of them as the guy you go to for advice about guys, maybe you should tilt your head to the side and see if they look a little different. Roll the dice. Who knows? Maybe the best relationship you’ll ever have…you’re already having. Let us know how that works out.

But George is married. So there’s not really a way this can work out well.

Oh Callie.

Now, to be fair, Callie is not some innocent, trod-upon martyr. She lied. About something kind of big. And then flew off the handle when she found out George told his friends. And she flies off the handle at George a lot. The whole, “Why am I always the dog getting whopped on the nose with the newspaper” thing? I think he’s really got a point there. Callie was into the relationship first, and pissed that George wasn’t there faster. Callie was in love first, and pissed that George wasn’t there faster. There’s a lot of Callie being pissed for George having feelings different than hers, and he’s allowed to have his own feelings. She doesn’t have to enjoy it, but she can’t really blame him for it, and she does. A lot. He’s apologizing, a lot. And that’s just got to be exhausting.

Still shouldn’t turn around and sleep with his best friend, though. That’s not cool either.

Izzie and George.

I’m not going to get into the Meredith, and the Derek, and the dinner, and the father, and Cristina and Burke and Colin, who we love, not just for his dashing British accent, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and Alex, and the tragically deformed Jane Doe, because I rambled endlessly about all that on the podcast I did with Betsy yesterday and I don’t want to repeat myself. (My first podcast. Very intimidating.  Kind of horrifying, really, though Betsy is just masterful, and I think in a few years will have her own talk show.)  And because I’ve now taken up about all the real estate they want to give me on the Izzie and George. But I’m okay with that, in the end. I think I am. Because… you know… Izzie slept with George.