CAPE AUDIENCE CHEERS AS `SEINFELD' JAILED

The River City Yacht Club was nearly filled Thursday night with people merrily laughing at the last episode of "a show about nothing."

The outcome of the final "Seinfeld" show, a closely held secret, landed Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer in prison for "criminal indifference." They were found guilty of witnessing a crime and, appropriately given the show's near-neurotic ambivalence toward everything, doing nothing to prevent it.

The Yacht Club served patrons "totally meaningless hors d'oeuvres" and "Nazi soup" -- French onion actually -- in honor of one of the show's most famous characters, the Soup Nazi.

"This is like the Super Bowl," said Doc Cain, proprietor of the River City Yacht Club.

"The only difference between this and the Super bowl is there are a lot more women."

Indeed, women dominated the crowd. Carie Dunn, a mass communication and Spanish major at Southeast, watches both the current shows and reruns.

"It's about nothing but's it's so much fun. You can sit there and not think," she said.

Dave Brown, who owns a cleaning business in Cape Girardeau, is a faithful fan who wanted to watch the farewell show on a big screen TV. The show's appeal to him was its lack of substance.

"It's like when you were a little kid and your mom asked, What have you been doing today?" Brown said.

"Nothing.

"The little nothings they do in the show are what we do in our lives."

His favorite episode is one in which Jerry bought cabinets and then discovered he didn't want them. "We've all spent money on things we didn't want," Brown said.

Before the final episode started, Brown couldn't guess how the show would turn out. "I think that's part of why everybody's watching," he said.

Chemist Jeff Kaszuvski likes the show but said, "I'm not religious about it."

The real-life situations made it work, he said. "They take things that happen to everybody and make it funny."

Chastity Stanford, an elementary education major from Bernie, liked the show for its realism. "It talks about things other shows don't," she said.

Amy Austin, a deejay on Mix 104.7, enjoyed the show's "criticism and insulting jokes." Her favorite episode was the one about the Cadillac, though she couldn't recall exactly what happened -- one of the major complaints of the show's critics.

At the end, a parade of witnesses from the show's past testified to the foursome's "anti-social behavior" -- from the elderly woman Jerry stole a loaf of rye bread from to "The Bubble Boy" whose life-support system George punctured.

Cut to Jerry and George in a jail cell talking about the placement of one of George's buttons, a conversation they seem to recall having before. They did, in the very first Seinfeld episode nine years ago.

In other words, nothing happened.