Season 7 Episode 10: Death of a Shoe Salesman

Original air date: November 22, 1992
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 10
Overall episode number: 141
Written by: Stacie Lipp
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: November 13, 1992
Production note: Seven is discussed throughout but does not appear.
Title note: From Arthur Miller&#8217;s Death of a Salesman .

November 22, 1992

Published 11/22/92

Al’s hero, a Western star named Fuzzy McGee, has died, and Al discovers that the cemetery plot next to him is for sale. For a man who owns almost nothing and expects nothing, spending eternity beside John Wayne’s stand-in is the first ambition in years he can actually afford, and he buys it. Peg’s reaction is that if Al is going to be buried next to somebody, it should be her, and she sets about arranging a plot nearby. The quoted prices are the problem. The funeral director, played by Dan Castellaneta, walks the couple through a cost structure that reaches twenty-seven thousand dollars, with a discount available if they are willing to dig the graves themselves, and Peg’s requirements include a bubble-top coffin to accommodate her hair. Her eventual solution involves rearranging the existing occupants, which she explains at the graveside while tapping Fuzzy’s headstone. Elsewhere, Seven has moved out. He has been living with Marcy and Jefferson for three days, having walked in and declined to leave, and the Darcys arrive to ask the Bundys to come and collect him. Neither parent is especially bothered. Marcy would like to rename him Henry, and Peg agrees without hesitation. The reason the Darcys want him gone turns out to be the names he has started calling them. It is one of the show’s better uses of the Bundy-Darcy relationship, because for once both couples want the same thing and neither will do anything about it. The cemetery material, meanwhile, lets Al be sentimental about a man he never met while remaining completely unsentimental about his own family, which is about the right balance for him.