Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday, on a Tuesday! This week, we’re celebrating the birthday-anniversary of sitcom superstar Lucille Ball, who was born on August 06, 1911. Every year, I like to celebrate this important lady by sharing a related rarity — that is, with subscribers who comment below to alert me of their private, educational, non-commercial interest.

How’d you like a copy of an unproduced script from the Redhead’s third-best half-hour sitcom, Here’s Lucy? This draft, dated July 09, 1968 — during the series’ first season — is called “Lucy’s Lucky Day” and uses an idea that the series would partially adapt for Season Four’s “Lucy And Candid Camera” (written by Al Schwartz and Milt Josefsberg), where the leads are tricked into committing a robbery under the belief that they’re performing a prank for Candid Camera. Here, Lucy is recruited by her brother-in-law/boss to help a department store test its new security system by attempting to shoplift without getting caught. The only catch is he can’t tell her why, so he lies and says she’s on a “hidden camera” type program. But, of course, she ends up bungling the job when she confuses the store in question for another one just across the street. It’s no classic Lucy, and the mistaken store bit is a letdown because it does not stem from the lie itself. But the script reads better than “Lucy And Candid Camera” turned out, for the whole idea is more logistically predicated here — it doesn’t require a fantastically convenient Allen Funt doppelgänger to justify its foolishness. Also, Lucy’s textually explicit daffiness is what leads to the comic conflict, which means, it’s slightly more character-based and therefore exists better within the particulars of the series’ situation. It’s thus a less dumb version of what came later.

However, that’s not the most interesting thing about “Lucy’s Lucky Day.” The most interesting thing is that this was a spec script — written on speculation, in the hopes that it would be bought or lead to a job — by Henry Garson and Edmund Beloin, a duo who had previously contributed six scripts to The Lucy Show’s fourth season. Although they moved the next year to Family Affair, it’s unclear why they never wrote for a Lucille Ball sitcom again — especially when Milt Josefsberg was continuing to serve as her head-writer. Both Josefsberg and Beloin — at different times —  had written for Jack Benny. In fact, Ed Beloin is one of the guys, along with Bill Morrow, often credited with actually creating Benny’s enduring comic character. And, frankly, the script that he and Garson submitted for this then-new Here’s Lucy strikes me as neither particularly better nor worse than the series’ baseline in its first season, so the fact that it was never used — and then (unknowingly?) repurposed in such a gaudy, unsatisfying way three years later — remains a mystery. But see for yourself. Here’s a sample — another rarity with an interesting sitcom pedigree that I’m proud to present in honor of the great Lucille Ball.

Come back next week for another Wildcard! And stay tuned tomorrow for The Middle!