We begin with Lucy sorting out items from drawers, throwing away almost nothing. Ethel drops by and Lucy tells about the wonderful memories each item brings. When she pulls out her marriage license, she notices for the first time that Ricky's last name is spelled as "Baccardi." She immediately worries that this might make her marriage not valid.
Ricky comes home and she expresses her huge concern and dashes off to city hall to find out if they are legally married. Ricky, for reasons that boggle the mind, decides to take advantage of Fred's having a buddy who works in that department, by calling him (unseen) and having him tell Lucy that the license is not valid.
Next we see Ricky and Fred worried because Lucy has been gone for hours. How they could not think this would be most troubling to her is a mystery to me. She was obviously greatly concerned when talking to Ricky.
When she gets home, she tells Ricky they have to re-do it, the proposal and elopement in Connecticut, just like before. Ricky agrees to go along, realizing how furious she would be if she learned the truth at this point.
Most of the show is set in Connecticut. We see them at a park, where Lucy has to prompt Ricky to go through his proposal just like 10 years ago, on his knee, line by line. When she gets to the clincher, Ricky, after playing it straight the whole time, comes up with one joke line about not being so sure he wants to pop the question again. Lucy immediately jumps up and storms off, ignoring his apologies and insists she now doesn't want to get married again herself.
So they go to a hotel where Lucy insists on behaving like they aren't married—well, she thinks this is so—and it takes quite a bit of talking from Ricky before he gets her to change her mind the next day.
At the park, Lucy tells Ricky she took his wallet out of his pants, because on the original proposal he had forgotten it. So Ricky had no driver's license or money. At the hotel, once the matter of separate rooms--$4 each—was determined, Lucy refuses to pay for Ricky's room even though she is the only reason he had no money. So she stays in a nice room while he sleeps in the lobby. There are more troubles for Ricky when she refuses to pay for the gasoline put into the car, prompting him to almost be arrested.
Now married or not, since she took his wallet away from him, it was totally wrong for her to refuse to pay for the room, or the gas for the two of them.
The funniest scenes involve the hotel clerk, played by Irving Bacon, who is one of those TV-style small town man does everything characters. He is the justice of the peace, sheriff, desk clerk, gasoline attendant, and more. Each time the need for these different jobs is mentioned, he reaches under the counter, sometimes rushing back to it, and slips off one hat to put another one on. At one point Lucy proclaims, "The big money in this town is selling hats." Elizabeth Patterson plays his wife, and she does a marvelously off-key rendition of "I Love You Truly." After this performance, the 77-year-old actress became a semi-regular on the series as Mrs. Trumbull, the lady always willing to babysit Little Ricky at a moment's notice.
Bacon has a list of film credits dating to 1915. He had small roles in all sorts of movies, from serious dramas to westerns to comedies, including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a Hopalong Cassidy movie, Mr. Moto's Gamble, before becoming a regular as the postman on the Blondie series of movies. His last listed credit is that of a customer in the shoe store in an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1965.
Years later, Dick Van Dyke had a similar episode, better done. In that one, because of lie about her age, it was stated that Rob and Laura weren't married, so they went to Connecticut to see a justice of the peace, only they got into a big fight and almost didn't get re-married that day.
The two things that bugged me on this I Love Lucy were Lucy's relieving Ricky of all his money and then refusing to pay for things, and Ricky thinking his obviously-bothered wife, willing to race downtown right away to find out about this matter, would not be troubled to be told she was never married. It just seems like a truly stupid practical joke on Ricky's part. Without that, we had no show—unless it was re-written.
Oh, and the biggest thing to be re-written would be the thought that such an obvious mistake as "Baccardi" instead of "Ricardo" would not have been noticed by either of them before ten years of marriage. An extra "c"—maybe, but not an entirely different name that doesn't even begin with the same letter. For that matter, how in the world could any clerk hear or see one name and write down the other on the license? I can give this episode a 5, mostly due to Irving Bacon's scenes.
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