Life with Orin in the Jim-provided co-op: the cleaning ritual, the midnight family seminars

texture · UNDATED (~her B.U./Orin years, from late 2001)

• When: UNDATED (~her B.U. years with Orin, up through the pre-Subsidized era; the co-op era precedes and spans the Nov 2001 Thanksgiving)
• What: Joelle lived with Orin in a Back Bay brownstone co-op "provided nearly gratis by Jim"; her get-high-and-clean ritual began there. Orin delivered stale midnight accounts of his family (Avril as emotional sun, JOI as black hole; the Quaker-Oats-box-over-Mario's-crib confession); his nicknames 'Himself'/'The Mad Stork' gave her the creeps even then. He ranked her third-neatest woman he'd known after the Moms and an O.C.D. teammate — an Avril-resemblance whose import (n.305) she registered only in retrospect. Her verdict: the Incandenzas were "the second-saddest family Joelle'd ever seen." Corroboration (scene 179): in Hal's recounting of Accomplice!, the film's interior set is identified as the co-op Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. — tying the apartment to JOI's filmmaking (cf. scene 159's Carlisle-adopted note that Notkin's co-op is that same brownstone).