The One With The Dozen Lasagnas

"The One With The Dozen Lasagnas" is the twelfth episode of the first season of Friends, which aired on January 12, 1995.

Plot

After cooking a dozen lasagnas for Aunt Sylvia, Monica is stuck with them as they were supposed to be vegetarian. Ross is acquainting himself with pregnancy-related stuff. He goes to visit Carol to drop off one of the lasagnas and is thrilled to learn that the baby is completely healthy, but he doesn't want to learn the baby's sex. Carol and Susan, however, know it. The list of people who know the baby's sex is extended to everyone except Ross: Carol calls Monica to thank her for the lasagna, and she tells Monica the gender of the baby. Monica then tells Joey, Rachel, and Chandler.

Joey and Chandler's kitchen table breaks after Joey tosses his keys onto it. At the furniture store, the two can't agree on which table to buy, debating between a bird-pattern and a ladybug-pattern. The debate continues until they agree on a Foosball table.

Rachel is planning to go the Poconos for the weekend with Paolo. At Rachel's recommendation, Phoebe gives him a massage and he takes a pass at her by grabbing her butt then exposing his penis to her. Phoebe is worried that Rachel will be mad at her. Rachel is shocked, but not mad at Phoebe. Paolo later arrives to leave on the trip. Rachel dumps him and throws all of his clothes off the balcony. Dejected and single, Paolo is about to leave the apartment. Monica, while angry with him, is still stuck with several lasagnas, so she gives him one on the way out. Ross is gleeful at this turn of events and slams the door in Paolo's face. He goes to talk to Rachel, who is on the balcony, still pretty shaken about everything. Rachel, however, is sick of men and is not even thinking about being with another guy. Ross tries to talk her out of this by saying that not everyone's like Paolo, to which Rachel replies that she's sure Ross' son won't grow up to be like that. This, of course, is the slip-up that reveals to Ross that he is, in fact, having a boy.

Despite Monica managing to beat them solo, which leads to the guys kicking her out of their apartment, Chandler and Joey are deeply enjoying the Foosball table until the early hours of morning.

Cast and Crew

Main Cast

Jennifer Aniston - Rachel Greene
Courteney Cox - Monica Geller
Lisa Kudrow - Phoebe Buffay
Matt LeBlanc - Joey Tribbiani
Matthew Perry - Chandler Bing
David Schwimmer - Ross Geller

Supporting Cast

Cosimo Fusco - Paolo
Jessica Hecht - Susan Bunch
Cynthia Mann - Jasmine
Jo Jean Pagano - Customer
Jane Sibbett - Carol Willick
James Michael Tyler - Gunther (uncredited)

Crew

Directed By:
Paul Lazarus

Written By:
Jeff Astrof, Mike Sikowitz, Adam Chase & Ira Ungerleider

Trivia

General

The word dozen means twelve, and "The One With the Dozen Lasagnas" is the twelfth episode.
The blue dress Rachel wears in the coffeehouse when she's asking Ross why he doesn't want to know the sex of the baby is the same one she wears when she meets Mindy in "The One With The Evil Orthodontist".
When the gang are covering up the fact they were talking about Paolo, Ross mentions Uma Thurman. Ross puts Uma Thurman on the list of celebrities he's allowed to sleep with.
Phoebe tells Rachel that she never lies; however she lies on various occasions in future episodes.
This is the first episode to show Monica's competitiveness, a running gag in future episodes.
This is the first episode to show Phoebe's occupation as a masseuse.
The song the gang sing at the beginning of the episode is the main theme of the TV series "The Odd Couple". Matthew Perry starred in the 2015-2017 revival. Ross starts singing the theme tune to "I Dream of Jeannie" afterwards. Like Friends, 'The Odd Couple' was set in New York.
The theme to 'I Dream of Jeannie' comes up again in a question in Joey's quiz Bamboozled .
Monica and Ross' "Aunt Syl" is almost surely Aunt Sylvia, who is referenced in other episodes:
- In "The One Where Old Yeller Dies" (S2E20), Chandler tries to grow a mustache like Richard. The sight of Chandler with a hairy upper lip reminds Monica and Ross of their Aunt Sylvia, who is presumed to have a mustache too.
- In "The One With The Dollhouse" (S3E20), Monica learns that Aunt Sylvia died, and she is thrilled, because, as she puts it, Aunt Sylvia was a "cruel bitch". She also inherits her fancy dollhouse.
Apparently, Phoebe is great at baking cookies. In this episode, Rachel expresses her fondness of Phoebe's oatmeal-raisin cookies, while in "The One With Phoebe's Cookies" (S7E3), Monica insists on obtaining Phoebe's grandmother's secret chocolate-chip cookie recipe, until she learns that the recipe is the word-by-word copy of the Nestle Tollhouse variation.
This episode shows another weird feature of Phoebe's - her habit of carrying unusual things in her bag. In this episode she pulls out a thermos with milk from her bag for Rachel. Although she may have planned ahead and brought the milk, knowing that Rachel might want something to drink afterwards.
- In "The One With Rachel's Sister" (S6E13), Phoebe pulls out a whole assortment of things from her bag when trying to find some gum: a purse, a brush, a sneaker with an egg in it, and a goldfish in a plastic bag filled with water.
- In "The One Where Rachel Goes Back To Work" (S9E11), Phoebe pulls out a thermos again from her bag, this time to steal Joey's coffee. However, she probably intended to do this.
- In "The One Where Chandler Gets Caught" (S10E10), Rachel and Phoebe are about to follow Chandler, when Rachel jokes to Phoebe how she just needs to grab her night-vision goggles and her stun gun. In all seriousness, Phoebe pats her bag and replies: "I got them!".
Despite saying that she "couldn't not [want to] know" about the sex of the baby, in "The One Where Chandler Takes A Bath" (S8E13), Rachel and Ross initially agree not to learn the sex of their unborn child.
In this episode, Rachel accidentally reveals the sex of Ross' child. Later on in "The One Where Chandler Takes A Bath", Ross accidentally reveals the sex of the baby to Rachel.
Rachel breaks up with Paolo. Paolo returns for one episode at the start of the next season when she has a one-night stand with him.
During the scene in Monica's apartment shortly before and immediately after Rachel breaks up with Paolo, the closet door near the bathroom can be seen open.
Ross is still jealous of Susan as he tells Carol the lasagna is probably vegetarian upon learning Susan doesn't eat meat.
Joey suggests buying patio furniture for their apartment, which is rejected by Chandler. Ironically when all the furniture is stolen, they end up with rusty patio furniture (and the canoe which they exchanged for the hi-fi unit which Joey had made).
A Deleted Scene involving Phoebe talking about Paolo's pass at her has saying she took care of it. The scene shows Phoebe forcing Paolo off the table and onto the floor by pulling his towel out from under him.
When Phoebe tells the gang Paolo tried to cheat on Rachel with her, Ross insistingly tries to convince Phoebe to tell Rachel. When later Ross is the one who actually sleeps with another woman, he spends his day chasing after Chloe, Isaac, Jasmine and Gunther to prevent them from telling anyone who knows Rachel.
The uncut DVD episode features extra dialogue between Ross and Rachel when she tells him she wasn't "supposed to care about this guy (Paolo), it was meant to be just this fun Italian thing".
The scene where Rachel breaks up with Paolo and throws his clothes out on the street is preceded by a shot of clothes falling on the street outside the Greenwich Village building.
- To authenticate the shot, a camera crew traveled to New York City and a crew member went inside the Greenwich Village building with bags of clothes and threw them down from a very high floor of the building through a window. The window is cropped out of view in the original broadcast and uncut DVD versions, yet is barely visible in the widescreen version so that viewers actually see the clothes coming out of it.

Goofs

Joey and Chandler have a conversation about Kip, Chandler's old roommate. However, in "The One With The Kips" (S5E5), Joey seems to have no recollection of who he is (possibly not a true 'goof', considering Joey's demonstrably low intellect). Also in this version, Chandler says Kip ran off and got married but in the later episode Rachel says he dated Monica, broke up with her and got frozen out. It's possible Kip did run off and get married after breaking up with Monica and got frozen out when things got ugly.
Despite the fact that the lasagnas contain meat (which is why Monica is stuck with them in the first place), Phoebe is seen eating from one near the end of the episode. However, it might be that she scraped the meat off her part, but this is not mentioned or implied at any time. Monica does state that the meat is every third layer and mentions to her aunt that she can just scrape, implying that any one vegetarian, such as Phoebe, can have certain parts or they can scrape the meat off. It's also possible that the writers hadn't decided that Phoebe was vegetarian yet; she is not explicitly vegetarian until "The One With Two Parts, Part 2" (S1E17)
In a later episode, Phoebe is seen speaking fluent Italian to Joey's grandmother. When asked about whether she speaks Italian by a shocked Joey, she stated that she 'guessed so'. However in this episode she responds to Paolo's complaints with "I don't know what you just said". But it is very possible she only knows a little bit of Italian.
Even though in the previous episode the apartment numbers were 19 and 20, they're back to 4 and 5 in this episode. This may have been because the actor playing Paolo wasn't available for the scheduled recording date of this episode or may have been unwilling to return for one episode. It seems possible this episode was recorded at the same time as the other episodes with Paolo before the door numbers were changed.
During the beginning of the episode, when Ross is holding his mug in his lap, there is a shot of Monica with Ross' empty saucer on the table. In the next shot, the mug has appeared on the saucer.
When Ross says he could escape from any uterus, Joey is holding two small books. In the next shot they have vanished and he is holding a large book.
When Ross is talking about calling immigration, his hands move with no time to do so.
When Ross visits Carol, he hugs her, and puts his hands on her hips. In the next shot, he isn't touching her and has taken a step back instantly.
When Chandler and Joey are talking about buying a table, a line of stage lights is visible in the TV.
During the scene where Phoebe is telling Rachel that Paolo made a pass at her, Rachel unrolls a long length of paper towels. During the scene there is a shot over her shoulder where we see that the towel roll is as normal and in the next shot we see it unrolled again.
- When Rachel sits at the table, in the shot over her shoulder, her hands are empty, but when the shot changes, she is holding the paper towels. This is clear as it goes back and forth a few times.
When Ross is on the balcony trying to comfort Rachel after she has split up with Paolo, there are a couple of shots from the balcony looking into Monica's apartment. At the top of the screen you can see where the walls of the set end, and all the stage lights hanging from the ceiling of the studio.
The green door in Monica's apartment can be seen open but unlike later in the series, everything is neat and tidy with clothes on hangers visible.
Just before Rachel reveals the sex of the baby, her dress changes back and forth from being undone from the waist up, to only having two buttons open at the top.
At the end of the episode, when Monica scores a goal against Joey and Chandler, she is playing with the red team and scores with her strikers. In the next shot, a blue midfielder scores the goal. It's a re-use of a shot from a game earlier in the episode.
When Phoebe is telling everyone that Paolo made a pass on her, Ross was sitting on the single coach. When Joey takes his coat off and comes to sit down, he sits where Ross 'was' sitting and Ross is seen sitting on the right side of Phoebe.
The wall hanging calendar in Carol's apartment shows the month of December 1994, even though this is the second episode aired in January 1995. This may indicate that the episode order was changed after recording and this episode was originally scheduled for December or all of Paolo's episodes were recorded en-block.
During the beginning of the scene with Ross and Carol, the camera facing Ross goes out of focus briefly.

Memorable Quotes

Ross: [Looking at photograph] Hey, when did you and Susan meet Huey Lewis?
Carol: Um... That's our friend, Tonya.
Phoebe: [Describing Paolo on the massage table] ...And, all of a sudden, his hands weren't the problem.
Monica: Was it..?
Phoebe: Boy Scouts could've camped under there.
Joey: [Shopping for a new table] Will you pick one? Just pick one! Here, how about that one? [points to a table]
Chandler: That's patio furniture!
Joey: So what, like people are gonna come in and think, "Uh-oh, I'm outside again?"

Ross: Looks like we kicked your butts.
Joey: No, no. She kicked our butts. You could be on the Olympic Standing There team.
Monica: I'm sorry. I'm just excited about being an aunt.
Joey: [adding to Monica's statement] or an uncle.
Monica: Okay, that is either, "how could you?" Or "Enormous breasts."