Quinn is faced with a mindnumbingly difficult dilemma: due to her lack of organization, she has scheduled a date with Skyler, Lawndale High’s most popular guy, on the same night as a babysitting job. Naturally, she chooses the date (bet you never saw that one coming), but, unfortunately for her, can’t con any admirers to fill in for the babysitting. So she turns to Daria. Daria promptly refuses.
However, due to intervention on Helen’s part, Daria ends up having to choose between the said babysitting job and Focus-on-Teens Night at Couples’ Workshop. Quinn offers to pay her extra money, plus she’ll be able to work on her History term paper at the job, so she finally decides to just go with it. She convinces Jane to join her on the great adventure.
Helen and Quinn attend an Organizing-Our-Lives-And-Ourselves type session, out of which Quinn comes with a matching cute, coral-coloured organizer, compact, and lipstick. (And for the first time, we get to know that Helen’s marriage isn’t going as, er, spicily as she’d like it to.)
Finally, the big night arrives. Skylar takes Quinn out for a date at Chez Pierre. And the Guptys, the family Daria’s babysitting for, turn out to be the truly astoundingly cutesy, lawn-gnome (and duck, and windmill, and little kid bent over so you can see its underwear) kind of people. The kids, Tad and Tricia, love flossing, bouncy hair, the weather channel’s five-day-report, rasins, and self-esteem albums, but hate sugar, commericals, and doing anything grownups tell them not to do. The TV has one of those stupid block things. The snacks are balanced and healthy. In short, by the time Jane (aka: Grandma) arrives more than an hour late, Daria is pigtailed, junk food and SSW deprived, and about to go insane.
Jane, however, who used to help take care of Summer’s kids, helps her friend in more than a few ways, and by the time they go to bed, after modified bedtime stories and other discussions, the kids are a lot more normal. Things get even better when Jane overrides the block on the TV, the four enjoy a rousing round of televised mud wrestling-induced bonding, and Daria is proclaimed Tad and Tricia’s favourite babysitter.
Meanwhile, as Skylar is dropping Quinn off, he gets hold of her planner and discovers that she’s scheduled a date with his best friend that next week and that she was planning to dump him by September, anyway.
Despite not working on her History paper at all while actually at the Guptys, Daria does manage to get something valuable out of the experience. Her essay, which earned her an A, is titled: “The Real-Life Experiment in Mind Control Deprogramming,” with the subtitle: “My Night at the Gupty's”.
