Hal’s teeth-dream; Mario and WYYY

Here's how the mother does intervene, once she decides to: not by going herself, not by asking Mario directly, but by quietly deploying an alum — Corbett Thorp, thumb over his expired I.D. — to drive her worried son to the radio station and get him inside. It's the characteristic Avril move, care routed through a proxy so that the hand doing the arranging never quite shows, the same mediated, screened style the whole theme keeps cataloguing. The errand's payoff is its own small joke on hiddenness: Mario learns the vanished host works behind a folding screen on-air, a concealment inside the concealment, which is exactly what tips him from worry into agitation.