“Building a Bar-B-Q”

(S6;E24 ~ April 8, 1957) Directed by William Asher. Written by
Madelyn Martin, Bob Carroll, Jr., Bob Schiller, and Bob Weiskopf. Filmed March 14, 1957 at Ren-Mar Studios. Rating: 42.1/56

Synopsis ~ Lucy thinks her wedding ring has fallen into the wet cement used to build their new barbecue, so she and Ethel spend all night taking the barbecue apart to look for it – all to no avail.

At home, Desi Arnaz built this mammoth barbecue grill, big enough for Lucy and their two dogs to stand atop!  

Lucille Ball is more than capable of handling this modest backyard BBQ, despite her worried expression!

At the time, reruns were still not common on television. To introduce an old episode, a ‘bridge scene’ was filmed to used to start the flashback into the rerun(s). 

During the filming of this episode, two bridge scenes were filmed to introduce reruns of season one episodes: “The Diet” (S1;E3) and “Men Are Messy” (S1;E8). Although some script pages for these scenes survive, the footage never entered syndication. 

This episode of “I Love Lucy” competed against the final episode of “Life Is Worth Living” starring Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on ABC TV.  

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To get the boys to build the barbecue, the girls use reverse psychology, a plot device often used on the show. It often backfires, as it does here when Ricky recruits Lucy and Ethel as helpers to mix the cement and pile up the bricks. It also backfired when Ethel clumsily tried to talk Little Ricky into playing his drums in "Little Ricky Gets Stage Fright” (S6;E4): 

ETHEL: I said, ‘Little Ricky, you don’t want to play those nasty old drums, do you?’ and he said ‘No.’

When Ricky says he’ll buy Lucy a brand-new ring with huge diamonds all the way around, Lucy says that she wants the old ring with the little diamonds halfway around. This is a reference to Lucy and Desi’s real-life elopement in 1940. Desi only had time to buy Lucy an inexpensive ring from Woolworths. He later bought Lucy a beautiful aquamarine ring, but sentimental Lucy still loved the dime store ring just as much. Lucille Ball wears her original wedding ring in early episodes of the series, but starts wearing her aquamarine ring around season four.

ETHEL: If I lost my wedding ring, we wouldn’t have to find it, we’d just have to buy another box of Cracker Jacks.

This is the the last of several references inferring that Ethel’s ring is so cheap that it was found inside a box of Cracker Jack as one of their famous ‘prizes’. The first was in “Breaking the Lease” (S1;E18). Ethel makes a similar joke in “Bonus Bucks” (S3;E21). 

Trying to explain away the lopsidedly rebuilt barbecue, Lucy offers natural phenomena as the excuse for its nocturnal transformation. Ricky claims they don’t have earthquakes or tornadoes in Connecticut. Although uncommon, both are by no means strangers to the Constitution state. The most severe earthquake in Connecticut’s history occurred at East Haddam in 1791. In June 1957, just two months after this episode aired, an F1 category tornado touched down in central Glastonbury in Hartford County. When Lucy brings up hurricanes, Ricky doesn’t dispute that they were very likely to be the cause: Hurricane Lucy and Hurricane Ethel! In 1971 a real Hurricane Lucy hit the Philippines. Hurricane Ethel hit the panhandle of Florida in 1960, just three years after this episode’s initial airing. 

Lucy Ricardo would take a job as a TV weather girl in “Lucy Wants a Career,” a 1959 episode of “The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour.” Her forecasts were as disastrous as her barbecue-building skills!

This episode is ingeniously written with a plot to rival the best stage farce. Consider this exchange, which occurs after it has been established that Lucy’s ring is not in the barbecue, but in Ricky’s shirt pocket:

LUCY: That shirt was all covered with cement. I gave it to Ethel to use as a rag.
ETHEL: Oh, and I gave it to Fred to use on the lawnmower.
FRED: Oh, for corn’s sake. I tore it to pieces to make the tail for Little Ricky’s kite.
LUCY (to Little Ricky): Oh, well, where’s your kite?
LITTLE RICKY: That’s what I been trying to tell you. It flew away.

So it is assumed that Lucy’s ring is “flying somewhere over Long Island Sound.” 

In the next scene, a different scenario is revealed, one which played out in full view of the audience, although viewers didn’t know it at the time: the ring dropped from Ricky’s shirt pocket into a bowl of ground beef, which he had to bend over to pick up because Lucy was about to place it on the still-wet cement of the barbecue! Lucy took the meat back into the kitchen and made it into burgers, embedding her the ring in her own dinner. Good thing she learned in “Lucy’s Night in Town” (S6;E22) to chew her food 25 times before swallowing, or she might have digested her much-beloved wedding ring. Moliere couldn’t have done better!

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FAST FORWARD! 

During the first season of “The Lucy Show,” Lucy Carmichael’s sister Marge is getting married and her wedding ring accidentally gets lost in the punch bowl just as Lucy Ricardo’s wedding ring accidentally gets lost in the hamburger meat! Lucy and Viv decide the only solution is to drink the (spiked) punch to find the ring!

In “Building a Bar-B-Q” Lucy Ricardo thinks she’s lost her wedding ring in a Bar-B-Q, so she spends all night looking through wet cement and in “Lucy’s Contact Lenses” (TLS S3;E10) Lucy Carmichael thinks she’s lost her contact lens in a cake batter, so she spends all night looking through chocolate cakes!  Both times Vivian Vance, her partner in comic crime, is by her side. 

In 2013, a replica of the deconstructed / reconstructed BBQ was built in the backyard of 59 Lucy Lane, Lucille Ball’s childhood home in Celoron, New York. It was unveiled during the annual Lucille Ball Comedy Festival. The barbecue sits on a replica of the Westport home’s flagstone patio. Wedding ring hamburgers are probably the special of the day there!