Season 7 Episode 5: What I Did for Love

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 .

October 11, 1992

Published 10/11/92

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.