Season One, Episode One: Hello, It's Me

I've come to kill off Carrie Bradshaw for the good of us all.

Once upon a time on magical Manhattan island, a very married Carrie Bradshaw stood, salting salmon on her kitchen island in her Manhattan kitchen, like approximately one-third of a modern-day Julia Child, in stilettos and pearls.

But let’s not get carried away! Our heroine might have traded her single gal days for a single man. But Miss Bradshaw was no Puritan! She was determined to make a better trade than the Lenape. Manhattan Isle might have earned them twenty-four bucks and a handful of beads—but what true New Yorker couldn’t turn that trade around?

Carrie had always known to match a thrift shop frock with a pair of heels that, resale, could feed a small hamlet! And if something was rotten in the state of old New York, she could hack it. There were more things in Soho and Chelsea than ever she dreamed when, all those years ago, she left her mother in Castlebury, Connecticut to—finally!— come home sweet home to her Biggest dream of all: Mr. Big, not at all dead, opening a bottle of red, and putting on his favorite record so he could dance with his baby.

“What’s on the turntable tonight, Mr. DJ?” Carrie asked Big, as she flipped the salmon.

“Todd Rundgren, baby! Oh, and I bought you something special, Kid.” Big winked as he handed Carrie a black velvet box.

“Looks even older than you!” she said. “But not vintage. Are these… beads?”

“Kid, those are the very beads the Indians traded for old Manhatto’. I got ‘em at an estate sale on 68th and Lex. Best trade since the Yankees got The Babe, babe!”

“Wow,” said Carrie, flipping the salmon again. Big laid the beads around her neck, unwittingly cursing his wife with countless generations of colonial theft and misery without a second thought. “These were made for you, Kid— my Kid—” he whispered into her ear.

Carrie flipped the salmon. “So, Todd Rundgren, huh? Is this like when you played me The White Album and made me find all the secret messages that told me Paul was dead?”

A shadow came over Mr. Big’s face like a passing town car. He coughed. “Ah— no. Definitely not.” Carrie flipped the salmon. Big drew a deep breath, but his courage failed him. “Hey Kid,” he said, “Did you know Liv Tyler thought Todd Rundgren was her dad her whole childhood? And then one day she learned her real dad was Steven Tyler? Wild, huh?”

Carrie flipped the salmon. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, “But I don’t know who any of those people are. Anyway, I’m going to Lily’s piano recital tonight so we’ll drive out to the Hamptons when I get home, okay? I love you!”

She flipped the salmon. “And I hate these beads!”

*

At Lily’s piano recital, as her best friend’s teenage daughter played Rachmaninoff with absolute mastery, Carrie ignored her and thought about the fusty old beads around her elegant neck. Was Mr. Big trying to tell her something? He seemed so strange in the kitchen! She had always hated beads and he knew it. She thought about The Russian’s floating diamonds with a sigh and fingered the beads, unwittingly allowing 500 years of genocidal land-theft to infect every cell of her body and every hair on her head. Carrie was mad! Who did Mr. Big think he was, buying her these stupid trinkets? What did he pay for them? Twenty-four thousand dollars?! She was worth more than that, and he needed to know it. She shifted lightly in her seat and, as she did, her micro-movement was immediately noticed by Miranda, Charlotte, Anthony, Stanford, Steve, Brady, LTW, the guy who was George Washington in Hamilton, his asshole mother, Rock-Rose, and the theater’s remaining extras.

“WHAT’S WRONG CARRIE?!” they yelled in unison. Lily stopped playing abruptly. Carrie stood up.

“I’m sorry, Lily, but you’ve been Russian through that recital piece and I have a man to yell at! I’m Rach-man-in-off!” And with that, Carrie headed home to give her husband a BIG piece of her mind!

*

At home, Carrie found Big half-dead in the shower, which was a real shame, because the water drenched her wedding shoes and they had hard water in the master bath no matter what they did and now the blue satin would be discolored forever. Was life even worth living?

“BIG!” she yelled.

“Kid,” he whispered. “My… kid…”

“My shoes are RUINED!” Carrie yelled, openly sobbing. “And I had to wear these stupid old BEADS! Don’t you even LOVE ME?!”

Mr. Big stared into the over-charcoal-lined eyes he loved so well. They were just the same as another pair of eyes— those of that hot cougar waitress he met during his stint as a junior tennis pro at a country club in Castlebury, Connecticut, the summer before he started Yale. She loved Vogue magazine and wore Candies. She gave him a handy in the walk-in next to a massive platter of cold lobster tails under Saran wrap. It was definitely an affair to remember, but he totally forgot what happened to the baby she said she was carrying as the summer closed and he went off to Branford College…

Until he met a wisp of a young woman on the streets of old Manhattan, and refused to tell her his first or last name for the six years they dated.

Carrie looked at Big. Big looked at Carrie. He had been trying to tell her something! When he said that thing about Steven Baldwin being Olivia Newton John’s real dad while they listened to Todd Rundgren! This truth was bigger than big, bigger than the massive coronary blowing up the spot where Mr. Big’s heart would have been if he had one.

Big was—

“That’s right, Kid. I’m your Daddy.”

Carrie wished she had a salmon to flip. But there was nothing to flip but her shit. She screamed. Big died. And as Carrie fingered those hideous beads, she had a vague memory— a weird play from senior English— someone who married their own mom, GROSS, and then blinded himself— she looked at Mr. Big and noticed her wedding shoes, soaked through. The satin was ruined. She was stuck wearing BEADS. Why bother going on? She grabbed one shoe in each hand and gauged each over-charcoal-lined eye out with a stiletto, before she stabed herself in the heart.

They weren’t sharp enough for Hara-Carrie—but they did just fine for shoe-icide.

*

At the funeral, Carrie and Big lay side-by-side in matching glass coffins, laid out in her old apartment on East 73rd, where they would reign forever, preserved. Samantha was responsible, of course. As soon as she heard the news, she had flown in from London to arrange the service, and paid to turn Carrie’s old place into a funerary museum. It was the least she could do. She stood with Miranda as Manhattan’s A-List filed by the famous couple.

“Well, even in death, he’s beddable,” Samantha said to Miranda.

“I think you mean Oedipal,” Miranda said back.

“Stop it, you guys!” Charlotte said, as tears rolled down her face. She wandered over to adjust the flowers by Carrie’s casket.

“Now there goes a woman who has definitely never fucked her Daddy,” said Samantha.

Miranda chuckled. “God, Samantha, this is amazing. What did you pay for it all?”

Samantha freshened her lipstick and smiled. “Never you mind, honey. It was worth it to lay our girl to rest right here.”

Miranda nodded. “I guess it proves you can go home again. But it’ll Ja-cost-ya.”