Season 6 Episode 12: So This is How Sinatra Felt

Al Bundy comes home happy three days running, which in this household registers as a medical emergency. Peg has already had a physical and ruled herself out as the cause, so she asks directly, and Al eventually admits what has happened: a pretty girl has been coming into the shoe store every day that week to flirt with him. He describes her, with complete sincerity, as a shoe groupie. Bud and Kelly find this the funniest thing they have ever heard and say so at length. Peg does not. By the time the laughing stops she has concluded that her husband is cheating on her, and she dispatches both children to the store to spy on him. What they find is Ricki, who is real, who is genuinely interested, and who has no interest at all in being discreet about it. Al, confronted with the first unambiguous romantic opportunity he has had in two decades, spends the episode discovering that he does not actually want it. The episode also gives Al a customer named Leona who has come back to the store with a pair of split shoes and a demand for a refund, which produces one of the better shoe store exchanges of the season and a threat of legal action that Al treats as a punchline. Underneath the farce is a straightforward question about whether Al Bundy will leave his wife, and the answer is the one the series always gave. It is one of the few episodes that takes Al’s marriage seriously for a minute and a half, and it does not undercut the moment when it arrives.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 1, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 12
• Overall episode number: 117
• Written by: Stacie Lipp
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: November 15, 1991
• Production note: Jessica Hahn’s first credited acting role. She and series co-creator Ron Leavitt began a long relationship around this time that lasted until his death in 2008.
• Title note: A nod to Frank Sinatra, who recorded “Love and Marriage,” the show’s theme.

Guest Cast

• Jessica Hahn as Ricki
• Maggie Montgomery as Leona

The Shoe Groupie

The term shoe groupie was not invented for this episode. Al had used it back in season 5’s “Route 666,” listing the attractions of a shoe convention in Los Angeles, and the show remembered. Having set up the idea a full season earlier and then delivered on it is the sort of continuity this series got very little credit for.

Al’s entrance is the scene to watch. He works his way along the back of the couch touching each family member’s face and announcing them: my child, my child, and then, arriving at his wife and stopping short, my God. Peg’s interrogation that follows is a model of how the two of them actually talk to each other, ending with Al cheerfully confirming that yes, he was lying.

The confrontation scene lets the show get away with a line that would be unusable from anyone but Al. Peg accuses him of waiting until she was a tad over thirty to cheat on her, and Al’s rejoinder about how drunk he must have been at the wedding if that is her current estimate is delivered with real affection, which is somehow what makes it land.

Buck gets the episode’s best throwaway. Al claims the dog would defend him if only he could speak, and Buck’s internal reply is that if he could talk, he would have taken the Carson job.

Famous Quotes

• Al, greeting his family: “My child! … My child! … My God!”
• Al, asked why he is happy: “What if I said I’ve come to grips with my job and I’ve come to appreciate what the three of you mean to my life?” Peg: “We’d say you were lying.” Al: “And you’d be right!”
• Bud, on his father’s news: “A lot of people think rock stars get the best groupies. But now it’s clear. Nothing gets them antsy like a shoe horn in your pantsy!”
• Al, to Peg: “I would never cheat on you, and if you think you’re just a tad over thirty, then I was just a tad drunk at our wedding!”
• Al, to a customer returning a split pair of shoes: “It’s just like an elevator. There’s a 2-ton weight limit on these shoes. What say I nail the soles directly to your feet? It’ll give you more traction when you’re pulling the ice wagon.”

Notes

• Peg reveals that Al cries at the end of Bambi.
• Al tells Ricki he was a rookie shoe salesman in the winter of 1968, which lines up with the “Rookie of the Year Shoe Salesman 1968” trophy seen in season 3’s “He Thought He Could.”
• Kelly’s internal monologue while she and Bud decide what to tell their mother is lifted from Rocky and Bullwinkle, though with different voices. June Foray, the original voice of Rocky, had appeared on this series four episodes earlier in “God’s Shoes.”
• Al asks whether Leona’s lawyers are from the law office of Hagaan and Dazs.
• Goofs: the cassette in Marcy’s recorder is not turning while she holds down the record button, and Ricki is visibly wearing a top under the sheets in a scene where she is meant to be naked.