Season 10 Episode 2: A Shoe Room with a View

September 24, 1995

Published 09/24/95

Two storylines run in parallel here, and both are about men trying to get something for nothing. Bud opens the episode freshly unemployed, having been fired from the Department of Vehicle Services for the offense of opening a second window to shorten a long line, and spends the half-hour hunting for work while his mother refuses to look away from the television long enough to hear about it. He eventually lands a gig apprenticing as a chimney sweep, which is less a career move than a punishment the script hands him for ever having had a government job in the first place.

Al’s half of the episode starts with a complaint from Kelly about the bus ride home from her aerobics class and turns into a business proposal. He pitches Gary on filling the empty lot beside the shoe store with an aerobics studio, reasoning that a wall of athletic women on the other side of his workplace is the closest thing to a fringe benefit the job will ever offer him. He then drills peepholes through that wall, and the plan curdles immediately: the clientele the studio actually attracts is nothing like the one he imagined, and Al spends the rest of the half-hour wrestling workout shoes off customers whose feet have, by their own account, expanded during class.

The episode ends with physics settling the argument. The women attempt a group move the show calls the “Dumbo Drop,” the Pointer Sisters play, and the back room of Gary’s Shoes comes down on Al’s head, which is roughly the reward every scheme of his has earned since 1987. It is a tidy, mean, very season-ten piece of construction: Al builds his own trap, installs a window to admire it through, and then stands underneath it.