 The old friends visit Manhattan together and share the events of their lives over the intervening years; Mary then invites Rhoda, just returned to New York, to stay with her in her duplex apartment.Mary reveals that following her departure from WJM-TV in Minneapolis as a news producer, she earned a master's degree in journalism and worked as a studio producer for ABC News in New York, until her daughter, Rose, was 12 and she decided to quit her job (eight years previously) to spend more time at home.Both Mary's and Rhoda's daughters are now in college—Mary's Rose is an English major at NYU and Rhoda's Meredith is a pre-med student and living in residence at Barnard College—and are trying to build lives of their own, independent of their mothers.