Season 7 Episode 5: What I Did for Love

A straightforward premise executed well: Peg wants her husband’s attention and Al wants dinner, and neither of them will accept the other’s currency. Peg’s campaign involves buying an escalating series of expensive outfits designed to produce a reaction, and the episode follows the two of them to a lingerie shop called Hemphley’s where Al is visibly miserable and a fellow shopper offers an unsolicited opinion about Peg. Al’s counter-position is simple and he states it repeatedly: he will consider the whole subject once there is a steak in front of him. Kelly, of all people, is the one who gives her mother useful advice. Bud’s subplot has him loitering in the women’s section of the same store and striking up a conversation with a mannequin, having seen a film in which this worked out. The scene most people remember involves neither plot. Al, having handed over money he had been saving for a specific magazine on the understanding that Peg was going out to buy him chocolate cake, sits on the couch with Jefferson and works through whether he made the right call, weighing one option against the other out loud with a palm raised for each. The resolution he arrives at, and the way Jefferson receives it, is one of the purest Al-and-Jefferson moments in the run. Al closes the episode singing “Moon River” to his wife, which tells you how the negotiation ended. For an episode whose plot is barely there, it has an unusually high concentration of lines people still quote.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: October 11, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 5
• Overall episode number: 136
• Written by: Ellen L. Fogle
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: September 25, 1992
• Title note: From the song of the same name in A Chorus Line.

Guest Cast

• Penelope Windust as the sales lady
• Keith Coulouris as the guy
• Jocelyne Kelly as the girl

Choco-Hooters

The couch scene is the episode’s reason for existing. Al has made a trade he is not sure about, and he works the problem the way he works every problem, which is out loud, slowly, with hand gestures, while Jefferson nods along supportively and contributes nothing. The eventual solution is a compound word, and both men find it so funny that Jefferson repeats the hand clap back at him. It is two minutes of nothing and it is one of the best things in season 7.

Seven gets the other standout exchange. His question about the difference between men and women leads Al through a short series of logical consequences that end with the boy arriving, innocently, at the most accurate assessment of Al’s life anyone makes all season. Al’s single-word reply is perfectly played.

Al’s resistance to Peg’s outfits is written as a matter of principle rather than disinterest. His line about the Statue of David not being asked to move a little is doing real work: as far as Al is concerned, the arrangement is finished and renegotiating it is somebody else’s problem.

Bud’s mannequin conversation is a reference to the 1987 film Mannequin, in which precisely that happens. It does not happen here.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, raising the subject: “Al, I want sex!” Al: “So do I, but I see no reason to drag you into it.”
• Peg: “Al, there is nothing happening in our bedroom!” Al: “Well, Peg, if it’s working, don’t fix it.”
• Seven: “What’s the difference between men and women?” Al: “One works… and the other’s a woman.” Seven, after following that through to its conclusions: “No wonder you sell shoes.” Al: “Yes.”
• Al, weighing his options with Jefferson: “Hooters… Choco Cake… Decisions, decisions. Well, I guess that’s part of being an adult.” Then, after a pause: “Choco-Hooters!”

Notes

• Peg reveals that she spies on the neighbors and watches them having sex.
• Peg states in this episode that she is the same age as Al, which is one of the few direct statements the series makes on the subject.
• Al compares his own requirements to those of Robert Mitchum.
• Al closes the episode singing “Moon River” to Peg.
• A goof: a pink shopping bag appears in Peg’s hand, and separately on the floor by the chairs, at various points in the Hemphley’s scene without ever being brought in.