Honestly, one of the fastest ways to make the list to go into this column is to come to my attention as actually still being alive. Whether you’ve been hidden by age or obscurity or both, a “holy, crap, really?” tends to be your best bet. Joyce Randolph is 94, and almost every credit she has is for playing Trixie Norton—most recently in 1991, for an episode of the long-forgotten Hi Honey, I’m Home, which was a Nick at Nite original sitcom. (A TV family joins the “Sitcom Relocation Program.” Almost everyone you’ve heard of who was on it had previously been on a classic sitcom and appeared in a single episode.) I genuinely have no idea what she’s been doing most of her life.

In 1951, Jackie Gleason saw her on a Clorets commercial. At the time, she was your standard working actress—she didn’t even have an agent. But he saw her and liked her. He’d done a short about two young couples living in an apartment building in Brooklyn. One of the wives in the original sketch was played by Elaine Stritch. I don’t know why he recast, but when the show went to series, he put Randolph on in the role instead. She played Trixie Norton, married to Art Carney’s Ed. Eventually, the show was such a hit that there are even adaptations of it in several countries, as disparate as Poland and Indonesia.

I think the place of The Honeymooners in pop culture is out of place to how much people have actually seen it. I have, but probably not since the ’80s. I remember watching some of the “lost” episodes (not so much lost as “in Jackie Gleason’s personal vault,” you understand) when they aired on cable, but I think that was the last time I saw it. I’m curious now if I’d think it was funny. I don’t remember my reaction to it from the time. I should really seek it out one of these days.

But of course the wholesome, cheerful Trixie Norton became the wholesome, cheerful Betty Rubble, when the show was turned into The Flintstones. Even beyond people who assume she’s dead, I suspect there are more than a few people who are unaware that The Flintstones is based on anything. I always liked Betty and Wilma better than Fred and Barney, and I don’t think I’m alone in that, so I suspect I will like Alice and Trixie better than Ralph and Ed.

Mostly what I remember from the show is that Ralph is always threatening to beat up Alice. According to Wikipedia, he also routinely insisted that Trixie had worked in burlesque, which she denied emphatically. I’m not okay with this. Even if it were true of the character, it’s clear that she doesn’t want to talk about it, and Ralph should respect that space. I’d like to say that this is the sort of thing that is Of Its Time, but unlike the “straight to the Moon” thing, I can see that joke in a new adaptation of the show. Though I doubt it made it to the Indonesian version.

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