Ralph Kramden sweats and sweats, eyeballs bulging in their sockets. Plagued by the accursed notion that he has become a whale, no, a rhinoceros, no, an inoculated hippo that shows up to birthday parties uninvited. This visual grotesquerie, reflected back to him in the spotless glass of the teapot that his wife, Alice, had brought home, is something he cannot bear. He begins pacing back and forth, back and forth, chewing up clipped mileage in his grubby shoebox of an apartment, wanting to yell, curse, stomp, holler, blame someone or something for this condition which apparently has become him, and he it. It’s murder to know oneself in this way, and not be able shake it off, absolute murder, and the cold beetles of sweat rolling down his back and neck and jowls are making everything infinitely worse. He has been confronted by the purest form of disgust, and if his life were a show, of which he had directorial control, he’d yell CUT, and peel off this suit of blubber he was wearing and allow the sane thin man within to breathe, while rejoicing in the fact that Ralph Kramden, the sweat-slicked hippo of a hothead, was only a person meant to amuse, ha-ha, laugh everyone, laugh, it’s just a fat suit designed for your entertainment—I am not him, he is not me—yet this fictional reverie was betrayed when Ralph caught a flickering glimmer of himself, his true self, in that goddamned glass teapot (where had Alice gotten it? and more importantly, where was she?). Desperate for air, and solace, Ralph opens the window and calls up to his neighbor and best friend, Ed Norton … Norton, hey, Norton!! It is only when speaking this name aloud that revelation hits hard, as if the window had suddenly slammed shut on his head, an aspiring guillotine: Alice wasn’t coming back. There was no more Alice. No more Norton, either. No more Trixie, Norton’s wife. All of them were gone. The schtick which Ralph’s life had become had run it course. He had been left alone, with unbearable reflections, and no one to raise his voice against.