"I Do, I Do" script introduction

The time was January 29, 1981.  Drug humor was somewhat mainstream, from Cheech & Chong (on albums and in films) to, well, ABC sitcoms.  Three's Company in '78 had Jack and Chrissy think that Mr. Roper was growing marijuana in his garden, while more recently, Bosom Buddies got away with even cocaine jokes.  And of course there was Robin Williams getting whatever he could past the censor on Mork & Mindy.  The mood would change on television as the decade went on, with new First Lady Nancy Reagan in '83 telling little Arnold Jackson on Diff'rent Strokes to just say no.  The drug-related death in 1982 of John Belushi, good friend of both Robin and Penny, would contribute to the culture shift as well.

All this is background to why, when the episode "I Do, I Do" aired less than a month after the Revised Final Draft was written, it did not stand out to me, even as a clean-living thirteen-year-old.  I can remember a friend of a friend at around that time saying that Happy Days wasn't as good since Richie left, but I had no one to discuss Laverne & Shirley with until I met my eventual ex-husband a few years later, so it wasn't like I went to school the next day and said, "Wow, Laverne and Shirley and Lenny and Squiggy got stoned last night!"

But, you know, it's still kind of amazing that Laverne and Shirley and Lenny and Squiggy got stoned.  No one was actually getting high on Three's Company, Mork & Mindy, Bosom Buddies, or most other ABC sitcoms.  They just talked about drugs.  (OK, there were Very Special Episodes about drugs, like on Welcome Back, Kotter.)  I can understand, although not condone, why this episode has sometimes been banned.

With such a unique episode, you won't be surprised to hear that the script is rather unique, too.  I will start posting scene analyses tomorrow, but first we need to look at this page.  (I apologize for the blurriness.)

Here, in what is currently one of my only two L&S scripts from Season Six, Squiggy is still "Andrew Squigmann" with one G and two Ms.  But the "Leonard Koznowski" spelling with a Z pops up, although I don't think it ever did in the Milwaukee episodes.  Furthermore, the guest characters were not yet cast, although it's hard to imagine anyone but Peter Noone and Eric Idle as the two "grooms."

The sets start off as straightforward, although I hadn't realized that the party house belongs to London.  But the set of the "girls' apt.," such a fixture in so many episodes, does not actually appear in this draft, or indeed on the episode as aired.  Not only that, it's just the three relatively long scenes, one at each of the other venues, and no tag.  Perhaps they intended to later come up with a tag of the girls' coming home from Vegas.  Instead, we're left to assume that they got back safely, since the entire experience is never mentioned again. 

And yet, the memory lingers on, even if some people don't remember it exactly as it happened....