July 1985 was pretty epic, as it included such iconic, news breaking events such as Live Aid, the premiere of Back to the Future, and the most ambitious episode of the public access cable comedy program DDT-V.
Two major (and by major I mean somewhat tedious and overlong) segments included the opening sequence, which was a parody inspired by the recently released James Bond film A View to a Kill, and the avant-garde, subtitled, French horror film The Creature From Alsace-Lorraine, in which the entire company was required to speak French.
Not in French accents. In actual French.
By the third act (there were three acts) we decided it might be funny, and much easier, to speak in English with French subtitles. Easier, anyway. Like most of the bits on DDT-V, it was Fred's idea, and after its release, he said something I have never forgotten and have since kept as a important lesson.
He said, "I didn't hear any of you jokers telling me 'no.'"
We made an awful lot of commercials, and like so much of the work we did, they became dated very, very fast. Many of them were lampooning current events, or even other commercials, the kind no one remembers. My favorite, because I was featured in it, was the ad for Hondel Scooters.
Over Phil Collins' recent hit Sussudio, we see a frenetic, fast-cut mix of street scenes from downtown Cleveland, including one funky pigeon. Close up on me, as Phil Collins, on a motorbike, telling the viewer, "Hey. Get yourself a Scoo-scoo-scooter."
It has been so long since then, I had completely forgotten the inspiration for that bit. I seem to have told myself we were just riffing on Phil Collins again. 1985 was peak Phil Collins.
What I had forgotten, until it popped up on my social recently, was that it was a parody of an ad Lou Reed did for Honda. Using the song "Walk On the Wild Side," the spot features a frenetic, fast-cut mix of street scenes from downtown New York City, and then there's Lou, telling the viewer, "Hey. Don't settle for walking."
Selling out was once the least hip thing you could do, and often a subject of ridicule on DDT-V. But it isn’t anymore which is probably why I forgot it.
Merrill Markoe & David Letterman "The David Letterman Show" October 24, 1980 (NBC TV)
Had some folks over last night to celebrate my birthday. I thought it would be good to have several people over so they could talk to each other and I would just listen. As it happened, I feel like I did most of the talking. I felt more normal than I have in a week.
Sleeping is still very uncomfortable. In the middle of the night, I watched a YouTube video of the last episode of David Letterman‘s morning program. His first shot at stardom was a daytime television program which was part David Letterman humor, and part… morning program. Who greenlit this, I cannot fathom.
It lasted six months, even that long is crazy when you think of it, over the summer and early fall of 1980. I actually saw this show, because you know, it was summer, I was 12, and it was on television.
For this last episode of what he at that time probably considered the end of his career, he introduced and had a brief interview with the entire company. Announcers, musicians, video editors, crew, etc. He tried to give everybody a little time and also keep it entertaining.
Each staff writer had the opportunity to come out and do one bit. One by one, a white man in a corduroy blazer would step out and make a joke.
At last, he introduced Merrill Markoe. The only female writer on his staff. She was the only one who looked cool. Like, she didn’t care what she looked like, which was on point in 1980. She was wearing a show T-shirt and jeans. She looked like a rock star. She looked like Patti Smith.
Her bit involved explaining to Dave, in the audience, how the show was probably getting canceled because it didn’t have enough sex and violence. To rectify this omission, she brought out a copy of Playboy, and also Playguy (?), set them on a table in the middle of the stage, and offered a tiny peek of each to Dave. That was the sex.
Got my birthday cake.
For the violence, she ushered Dave to the side, put on dagger goggles, undid a rope that was tied to the wall, blew a whistle, and a very heavy weight dropped straight down from the ceiling onto the (pre-scored) table, destroying that — and the pornography she had left sitting on it.
Three or four dudes came out and told their little joke, then Markoe pulled a stunt that worked on many levels.
Did I mention she was the only female writer on the staff? She was also the head writer. Merrill Markoe is such a boss.
Had my follow-up with the eye doctor later in the morning, and things are progressing well. The tear has been repaired, it is healing, I no longer have to keep my head down, and I can sleep normally so long as it is on my right side. This is such excellent news.
I may not resume running for a month, but you know. I can deal with that.
Fred kept us honest. Any expression of ego was roundly mocked. We were kids, making a cheap comedy show.
DDT-V (“Lethal Television”) was created by high school and college students, and broadcast intermittently on our community access channel from 1983 to 1986. It was a collection of sketches, fake news shows, and a lot of commercial parodies.
Fred was the driving force, no matter what any of the rest of us thought. He wrote most of the sketches, did so many of the voice-overs, even appeared in front of the camera a couple times.
After he died from a heart attack two years ago (on my fiftieth birthday, as it happened, thanks, Fred) I came into possession of the archive of our work.
Some of it holds up surprisingly well. And even where the humor is a bit obtuse, at least it has style. We used every square foot of the studio building, went all over Bay Village, hosted an entire episode from a booth in the North Olmsted Denny’s, did a location shot outside Cleveland Municipal Stadium downtown.
When we held a charity baseball game against the high school faculty to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, our team had a ringer in the recently retired Cleveland Browns offensive tackle Doug Dieken.
Cartoon, The Bay Window March, 1986
Watching these episodes I am able to track my development from a self-conscious freshman to a cocksure senior, which is a blessing and a curse. The one big regret I have, looking back, is that I never wrote anything for the show. That’s not true, I wrote one sketch that was recorded and aired. It’s not great.
I was intimidated. I didn’t know how it was done. Most significantly, I had nothing, at last, to say. I still believe that, at that age, I actually did not have anything of value to say. Or I did not know if I did. Most of what I did write and put out into the world, in the form of op-eds for the weekly high school paper, took the form of snark and grievance.
My editorial cartoons weren’t bad, however. They improved by the year. I suppose there is a lesson in that, that if I had tried to write, at that time, I would eventually come up with something worth being produced.
I guess that is exactly what I have been doing ever since.
There was a time I wanted to be an actor. During the 1990s I was even attached to a talent agency in town, and did all the requisite things you do when you are represented by an agency. I had a composite photo, I had a voice reel. I spent a lot of money in an effort to promote myself, largely in vain.
There were a couple industrials, and by that I mean two. There was the greeting card shoot, a couple radio spots, and dozens and dozens of auditions.
The auditions were ridiculous, they would call lots of us in to pad out a reel to meet some quota the producer requested. Once I read for the pilot for a sit-com on a network. The part I was asked to read was obviously meant to be Asian American (it was the 90s, you could tell) but the agency had few people of color on their roster, it was a national call, and they needed to pad that reel.
One of the managers told me quite frankly that I probably wouldn’t get any work until my thirties, and by that he meant I was losing my hair. I was very glad, later, to have lost my hair, hair never worked for me, anyway. But the losing of it was troublesome.
In 1995, The Drew Carey Show premiered on ABC. Drew was a stand-up comic from the Old Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland, something he was and is always proud to mention. We met a couple times in the early 90s, after he broke big on The Tonight Show in 1991. My college roommate’s sister was friends with him, and brought him to see Guerrilla once. After the show he sat me down and gave me a critique of the performance which I did not appreciate at the time.
His sit-com was about working class Cleveland, but though the exteriors were Cleveland locations (the department store, the bar, his house) the whole thing was shot in L.A. There were two occasions when Drew brought the production to town; the opening credits sequence they filmed all over the city in 1997, and the episode about the gang sneaking into the season opener at the brand new Cleveland Browns Stadium in 1999.
News of the impending shoot spread through the community as press releases announced that there would be a massive call for extras to fill sections of Browns Stadium for the show and to be part of a long line for tickets at the box office outside the stadium. There were also calls for featured, non-speaking extras held through my agency.
Frankly, I was not interested. I had been an extra for a couple motion pictures shot in and around the Cleveland area (My Summer Story, House Arrest) and I did not feel that making seventy-five bucks a day to appear in the background of a crowd scene was a valuable use of my time.
However, I did receive a phone call from a different talent agency, a new talent agency, one that had just started business. They had gotten my name from someone at Playhouse Square. Apparently my agency was only sending reels and resumes of “print talent” (see: beautiful people) and the show was looking for ordinary-looking Clevelanders. Would I be available to audition for them, for this new agency? Sure. It’s always flattering to be asked.
They put me on video for my audition, handing me a small blue page of dialogue. They asked me to read three lines, which I thought was a pretty labor intensive way to cast the hundreds of people they were looking for, but fine. It was perhaps the most disinterested read I’d ever given in my life.
I got a call a couple days later. The guy said, rather enthusiastically, that I may have the part, and to make sure my calendar was clear for shooting. I said, "maybe," which was not the response he was expecting. He said he’d get back to me soon.
The next day I was told I had the part! "Great," I said. I told them I planned to be there. They pressed me, I had to be there, and I said, "Sure." I have it on my calendar. Again, I was as surprised by their enthusiasm as they were surprised by my not having any.
Then they asked if I still had the blue sheet. I said sure, and they reminded me to have those three lines memorized.
Wait. I am going to be speaking these lines? On the show, these are my lines? I have lines? Lines of dialogue?
Ah. Now it all made sense. I had just blithely sleepwalked through the audition process for an under-five role (as they say) on a nationally broadcast network sit-com.
Day of shooting, I arrived early at my trailer. Yes, I had a trailer. I never spent any time in it, as it was located well out of sight behind Browns Stadium (they took advantage of the thousands of people who arrived to join a line that stretched around the stadium in the opening aerial shot) and those of us who were contracted got to spent breaks in the new, air conditioned ground floor bar and grill while everyone else had the stand around in the ninety degree heat.
However, it did provide me a place to store the five outfits I had brought for the costumer to consider. I can’t remember what those were, I was wearing brown Chuck Taylors, late 90s high-waisted jeans, and a T-shirt featuring a smiling boy saying, “Cleveland! It’s fun!”
The costumer said what I had on was great, so that’s what I have on in the show.
My job was to stand in line in front of Drew and his friends. Spoiler alert, I ask to buy one ticket, and he makes fun of me for going to the game alone. So I buy five, which happen to be the last available tickets. Cue “Cleveland Rocks.”
This meant I would be on-camera, next to Drew Carey, for the entire pre-credit sequence. And as we were shooting in sequence, and that it took several hours to get through two minutes of gags, I was able to pay close attention to how to act -- how to speak -- when being filmed for television. Because frankly, I could barely hear them. They were just talking so naturally.
I had a brief, personal, mental list of things I would not be doing. I would not attempt to be chummy with the gang; Drew, Ryan Stiles, Diedrich Bader, Christa Miller -- and Jenica Bergere, who, for the past several episodes, had been playing Drew’s girlfriend, Sharon. I would speak when spoken to, offer no suggestions, do what I was told.
Also, I would not fuck up. I had that little, blue sheet of paper in my pocket. I had my lines cold. There had been no rehearsal, I was obviously expected to just leap in, prepared, and that is what I would do.
In hindsight, maybe I should have been a little chummy. On the best of days I can appear imperious, aloof and distant, but that’s because I am terrified of saying something stupid, or worse, tedious. It would have been nice to introduce myself, but I was afraid of being rejected by the cool kids.
Early in the proceedings they asked a member of the line to get into a sleeping bag, one which we all stepped over. Boy, did I feel sorry for that guy. Not only did he spent the afternoon lying on the pavement in a down sleeping bag in the hot, hot sun, he was no longer able to tell his friends to watch for him. You can only see the top of his head and his arm.
When my turn came, they wired me with a mic (you can see the pack in the small of my back) and told me what marks to hit and when. And we just did it. Hit my mark, said my lines, didn’t fuck up.
While they set up for another take, I was just standing by the ticket window with Drew Carey. I wasn’t sure if small talk was in order. Throughout the day I had noticed how, though the episode had a director, Gerry Cohen, Drew was providing a great deal of the acting notes. After all, this was his show, It had his name on it. We’d just done one take, and no one said anything to me about how it went.
So I asked him, “Did you have any notes for me?”
“You?” he said, and did a little, dismissive headshake. “You’re fine.”
Then he leaned in and added, “Everyone who gets a walk-on role treats it like it’s the most important thing they’ve ever done. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
We did another take. This time I looked over from the box office to see the other stars, Stiles, Bader, Miller, clustered by a large cement column, just watching.
Bader looked at me intently and deadpanned, “That was really good.”
In the moment I couldn’t tell if this was one of those situations where you say, “Really?!” And they respond,” Naaah.” So I just kind of shrugged and smiled.
Three takes, and that was it. Last shot of the day. The next day they would shoot all the scenes inside the stadium. Eleven thousand unpaid extras, or so they say. I went back to my trailer (I had my own trailer) picked up my things and went home.
By the time the episode aired it was late September, and I was excited. That day the Plain Dealer ran an article about the "most prominent of the local extras" to be featured on this most-anticipated episode of The Drew Carey Show … but it wasn’t me.
There’s a big reveal at the conclusion of the episode, in which Drew (and the entire stadium) spy Drew’s girlfriend Sharon on the “jumbotron” making out with another guy. That guy, played by Eric Matuschek was represented by my now-former agency, which had the wherewithal to contact the media about their star client.
Most prominent. He didn’t even have lines. You couldn’t even really see his face.
Ah, well. Since then this episode has been rebroadcast countless times in syndication. Every now and then someone new contacts me to say, “Was that you ..?”
I have performed on stage since I was fourteen, in some fifty productions, where my work has been seen by thousands of people. But millions watched me speak those three lines just on that premiere broadcast night, twenty years ago. Two minutes on national TV is my lasting legacy.
"Thanks, pal!"
“Drew Goes to the Browns’ Game” premiered on ABC, Wednesday, September 29, 1999.
Source: "Carey Show At Stadium On Tonight" by Tom Feran & Mark Dawidziak, The Plain Dealer 9/29/1999
Nick Koesters, Allen Branstein & self (Beck Center for the Arts, 1999)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) was either:
Written by people who love Shakespeare for people who hate Shakespeare.
Written by people who hate Shakespeare for people who love Shakespeare.
Written by comedians for an audience of absolutely no one.
The bane of critics everywhere and to the delight of audiences everywhere, this show has been produced constantly since first produced by the Reduced Shakespeare Company at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. The wife and I saw the original in 1997, near the end of its nine year run at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End.
Classify this one as Shakespeare (not) On Stage, as not only does Shakespeare not appear, but the entire play ostensibly celebrates Shakespeare while simultaneously reinforcing those elements that everyone hates about Shakespeare.
It is also horribly dated, including gags that are casually sexist and outright racist, that is, unless you think the idea of three white guys deciding to interpret Othello as a rap song as “edgy.”
This month, I will appear for only the third time onstage at Beck Center, and each time in the Studio Theatre. Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of King Lear opens May 31. Seven years ago, I played Chris in Eric Coble’s The Velocity of Autumn.
Twenty years ago, with Nick Koesters and Allen Branstein, we performed The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).
I was shocked when director Roger Truesdell asked me to consider the role, especially playing against two accomplished comedic actors. “But Roger,” I said. “I’m not funny.”
“Yes, you are,” Roger said. “You’re just afraid people might think you are.”
The one saving grace of Complete Works is the note on the front page which reads:
“... it’s also important to keep the show fresh and timely by updating the many topical references as events warrant.”
To put it another way, you are free to change the script to make it funny. As a result we felt entirely justified in not only changing the late-80s pop culture references to late-90s pop culture references, but also anything else that wasn’t funny.
What we couldn’t do was write a different play, so we still labored with the Titus Andronicus cooking show, including my lame impersonation of the then-87-year-old Julia Child (huh-larious) and the aforementioned “Othello Rap.” At least we could pretend to be appalled, like you do, and to change truly offensive verses like:
Now Othello loved Desi like Adonis Loved VENUS And Desi loved Othello cuz he had a big … SWORD
Into:
AL: Desdemona, she was faithful, she was chastity tight DAVID: She was the daughter of a duke NICK: Yeah, she was totally white
My voice was more Ad Rock than Ice Cube.
We also had great fun tweaking other local companies. Our changes are in red.
AL: One popular trend is to take Shakespeare’s plays and transpose them into modern settings. We have seen evidence of this with Shakespeare’s plays set in such bizarre locations as the lunar landscape, Nazi concentration camps and even Akron. DAVID: Akron? NICK: Who does Shakespeare in Akron?
Later, I had a discursion regarding ‘The Apocrypha’ or those works whose authorship was once in dispute, referred to as “‘The Lesser Plays,’ or simply, ‘The Bad Plays.’ And yet, not all of The Apocrypha are completely without merit … except Edward III.”
Cleveland Shakespeare Festival had produced the only-recently canonized Edward III that past summer. One night a contingent from the company were in the audience and they booed my little joke.
“Oh,” I ad-libbed,” you’ve seen it.”
I went on to to describe what a fascinating play Troilus and Cressida is, but then bore the shit out of absolutely everyone in telling the story, which is coincidentally what I also did for Cleve Shakes audiences in 2018.
We changed scripted references about Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Boris Yeltsin to Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani and Vladimir Putin, which are more relevant now than they were twenty years ago.
The inclusion of Putin was odd, though, because the run of the show ran over into the year 2000, and Vladimir Putin was only just inaugurated on January 1st of that year -- we changed the reference from Boris Yeltsin after the announcement.
No one knew anything about him, except the name, so I suggested we change Nick’s recitation on "Chernobyl Kinsman" (Two Noble Kinsman, get it?) to include this exchange:
NICK: Does it have Vladimir Putin in it? DAVID: It doesn’t have anybody pootin’ in it, Nick.
He's a monster. We didn't know.
We threw in Ally McBeal jokes, Jar-Jar Binks jokes, references to The Blair Witch Project, and my personal favorite, when Nick’s Macduff emerged with "the usurper's cursed head,” he was, in fact, holding a replica of his own head, which was the same prop used when he played the lead in Macbeth at Beck Center the previous season.
It gets better. As prescribed in the stage directions, “(drop kicks the head into the audience)” -- but then Nick hollered, "GOOOOOAAAL!!!!" and ran in a tight circle, before sliding on his knees and ripping off his shirt to reveal a Brandi Chastain inspired black sports bra (Google Women’s World Cup 1999.)
The script as written closes with a familiar theater cliché:
"If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. If you didn't, tell your enemies."
By the second weekend we were sold-out in spite of receiving some scathing reviews from those aforementioned critics who simply hate the idea of this admittedly dumb little play.
AL: If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. DAVID: If you didn't ... you must write for the Free Times, man.
(Spoiler for the Netflix series "The Crown" ahead.)
My mother stayed with us one evening before the holidays, and she set herself up to watch The Crown on Netflix. She’d gotten ahead of me, and was taking in the final episode of the recently released season two. I was trying not to pay attention, but something caught my eye.
“Is that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?” I asked. She wasn’t sure, but it was apparent to me that it was, two men in suits with skinny ties, one noticeably taller - or, the other significantly shorter, anyway - performing a sketch on a stage in a theater. The short one had on a woman’s hat and was clutching a handbag. It was obviously a comedy sketch.
Anyway, I tried not to pay attention, I would get this episode eventually. I was doing housework and trying to shut down the house for the evening. But then I saw four men, and it was obvious what I was looking at, because the other two were dead ringers for Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. I was looking at a recreation of Beyond the Fringe (circa 1963.)
Most Americans are familiar with the absurdist satire of Monty Python, and I would suggest its international success was based on its platform - television, and later film. It had wider reach and longevity. However, that team has roots in the same university cabaret traditions which were the basis for earlier comedy teams which made their fame in Great Britain through stage and radio, including Beyond the Fringe, Flanders and Swann, and one the most inspirational comedy troupes of the century, The Goons.
Patrick Warner (center) as Peter Cook in "The Crown"
In Cleveland, my family were exposed to a great deal of their work on WCLV “Saturday Night” (now Weekend Radio) a weekly show where program director Robert Conrad let his hair down to play comedy and satire from both sides of the Atlantic. Staying up late, listening to this show, hearing selections from not only the aforementioned British troupes but also everything from Nichols & May to the National Lampoon, I received a tremendous education in wit and satire before I had even reached adolescence.
Even so, I was a bit young to attend the 1975 American tour of “Good Evening” starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (post-Fringe) which played the Hanna Theatre the week of May 19th -- which also happens to be my brother Henrik’s birthday. My father took him to an evening performance, but brought the three of us to the stage door following a matinee performance to see if we could score some autographs.
Moore did not make an appearance at the stage door, but Cook did, and he was a tall man -- taller than my father at 6’2”. I was not yet seven years old, and I remember the look of complete incredulity on his face as he leaned over to take and sign my little autograph book. What bizarre American would bring a small child to this somewhat cerebral and somewhat filthy comedy revue?
Anyway. In the episode of The Crown in question (S02E10 "Mystery Man") Prime Minister Macmillan is goaded into attending a performance of that West End smash, Beyond the Fringe, by his surprisingly cruel spouse. The company generated a great deal of attention satirizing modern politics and even the royals, in a time when it was still technically illegal to do so (see: The Licensing Act of 1737.)
In case you didn't know who Peter Cook was.
Macmillan's wife intimates that he is set up for harmless ribbing. However, when he attends, the PM is not only humiliated, but in a surreal moment, the gigantic Peter Cook (Patrick Warner) actually notices him in the house, breaking the fourth wall, leaning into the house, and drawing the entire audience's attention on him for ridicule.
Prime Minister Macmillan promptly resigns.
Last year I wrote a meandering piece inspired by an episode of Mad Men in which Don and Megan attend a performance of America Hurrah! As with that event, I am almost touched by the loving artistic detail paid to recreating a moment in theatrical history. Even more so, by the defiant protestation from the creators of television programs that live stage performance once did and could still affect the course of history.
If he had lived, James Maury "Jim" Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) would be seventy-seven years old today. My parents are older than that, though not by much.
His impact on popular culture, on my life and on the life of those my ages and younger, cannot be overstated. Sesame Street is the gold standard in education television, and we were born at almost the same time. I and everyone who follows has watched that program, all across our world.
Prior to the creation of Sesame Street, television programs could be for children, or educational, but not both. Not instructive and entertaining. And there is no way that show would be anything but a brief moment in American media history of it were not for Jim Henson and the Muppets.
Sam & Friends, 1955-61
Arguably, Jim Henson was the most talented and luckiest artist in human history. He was brought up by a loving family that was full of humor and loved to play. He did not aspire to puppetry - because let’s face it, in 1950s America, who would - imagining for himself a life as a scenic designer.
Discovering a knack for this ancient entertainment, he recreated the idea of what puppetry could be on the new medium of television. He redefined the relationship between the puppet and the viewer, breaking the “puppet theatre” model of Howdy Doody and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, inspired by geniuses like Erne Kovacs, he used the TV screen itself as the only boundary for his puppets’ world.
We loved The Muppet Show in my house, which turned the model of having puppets in a human world on its head, inviting human guests into a show populated by puppets. The Muppet Movie took this even further, moving puppets into the real world.
Seriously. Could you have imagined before 1978, the idea of a critically-acclaimed motion picture, one which also generated millions and profits, that stars PUPPETS.
The swamp may be a set … and Jim Henson is underwater with his hand inside a puppet.
You know what is amazing about this guy? His failures are successful. In 1986, the year I graduated from high school and had very little time for fantasy (or David Bowie for that matter, have you listened to the Tonight album recently?) he released Labyrinth, which was a critical disaster and did terrible box office in the United States when it was released.
Since that time, generations younger than myself, who watched it endless times on cable and DVD, have embraced this entirely bizarre move starring David Bowie’s crotch.
Everybody eventually loves everything Jim Henson ever did.
His death came in that valley of my wonder, when I was still striving
to bury childish things and move into a world of more adult
entertainment, studying plays, making videos, avoiding puppets. I was
twenty-one years old, but the suddenness of his demise came as a shock. I
did not know what it meant. It was just sad.
The rumors were fast and furious. He knew he was
dying, that was why he had sold out to that entertainment monster
Disney. Or he had died of a staph infection in a hospital while being
treated for something else. Or it was because he had been raised
Christian Scientist and had died of something which the workaholic
Henson had been living with and could have been easily cured.
None of this is true. In the book Jim Henson: The
Biography, author Brian Jay Jones lays out in painful detail the
encroaching effects of a rare bacterial infection, symptoms even I would
have ignored, or tried to ignore, choosing instead to take more naps
and over the counter pain remedies. For weeks, it is true. I do that,
too. I think most men do.
By the time he felt truly ill, it was far too late. He
checked into a hospital and was dead in two hours, at the age of 53.
That’s it. That’s all there is to say. Rare, freak infection and it
destroyed his internal organs. Could have happened to absolutely anyone.
DID YOU KNOW ..? The song Mah Nà Mah Nà was originally written
for an Italian soft porn flick from the 1960s, which is like, duh -
that’s exactly what it sounds like.
Reading this book filled me with joy and terror. I thought I had already been through my midlife crisis, but everywhere I look I am reading or seeing evidence of the complete fragility of life, and for the first time I am seriously afraid of death. Not of what comes after, that does not trouble me, but of what is left behind.
Great men walk the earth, and women, too. Those whose names we know, and also those we do not. Their greatness is defined by their acts, those which effects cascade across humanity, having a broad effect, alternating our life experience, making it grander, more relevant, richer, deeper, more, more, more.
Resigned, I am lesser man, and grudgingly content to be so. We, too, have our place. Not all can awe inspire or ground break. But we speak, move and act. We do not cause even little earthquakes, but merely exert our will to shake the walls, and observe and respond so that those in our midst, even those unknowing our works, can say, “Yes, that was worth it,” or “I felt something,” or best of all, simply saying, “Thank you.”
"The version of Lysistrata you are about to witness comes at a time of particular economic strength in this country. The United States is not at war. People are making a lot of money, and nobody's losing his life on foreign soil. So, can Lysistrata only be performed when things are good? Is its original daringness never to be experienced by theater audiences again? Where is the radicalness of this play? What makes it worth seeing now, under these conditions?"
- David Bell, Lysistrata, Then and Now (Bad Epitaph production program)
In 1996, I picked up a copy of Aristophanes' Lysistrata at ABCDEFG Books in Camden, Maine. This edition was translated into verse in 1924 by the noted Australian Jack Lindsay, with illustrations by his father Norman Lindsay. One of the original hardcovers, this was exactly the kind of smutty book that would have been found indecent and its transmission through the U.S. Post illegal under the Comstock Act of 1873.
And this wasn't even the original. While Lindsay père created line drawings that are delightful and racy, featuring a collections of male and female characters naked or mostly naked, all actual genitalia are either (in the case of males) cast in dark shadows or (in the case of females) erased. You may interpret such censorship as you will.
The text of Lindsay fils, however, goes through an even more bizarre transformation. Reading it, I wasn't immediately compelled, for example, to produce it for the stage. It wasn't very funny, and though the sexual humor was apparent, it was so tame as to be virtually uninteresting. Later I found a paperback of Lindsay's translation that was published in the 1960s, and learned he had bowdlerized his own work! His original text, as published without fear of censorship, still includes innuendo and puns rather than outright obscenity ... but they're better.
The last major notable production of Lysistrata in Cleveland was the legendarily pilloried production at the Cleveland Play House in late 1970. That production was actually produced at a time America was at war, but as Tony Mastroianni reported in the Cleveland Press, "This is an anti-war play, basically, but it is difficult to find the message under all the sniggering and archness."
Cleveland Play House, 1970 Photo by Tom Prusha
Both he and Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy delivered the production a one-two punch the day after it opened (Bellamy called the production, "perverted" and "obscene") and reservations didn't merely dry up, people were calling the Play House to cancel. In what may have been the shortest run of any professional production in Cleveland, Lysistrata at the Play House had three performances and suspended the run.
Our new company, Bad Epitaph, was maintaining a streak of strongly-received productions. I had an idea at that time that we would produce a classic in the Spring and something contemporary in the fall, as far as we could take that. Having produced a Shakespeare as our inaugural production (Hamlet) I didn't want to return to the Bard again for as long as possible.
I found Lindsay's verse translation to be clever and funny, but possibly a little inaccessible to a modern audience. However, reading other, more recent translations, I realized that this was its strength. For example, the translation the Play House used thirty years earlier was by Douglass Parker, written in 1964, and that should tell you right there what went wrong. A jazz aficionado, Professor Parker strains to be hep and obvious with his sex jokes, and the entire script reads like an extended comedy sketch from Playboy After Dark.
But what is Lysistrata, anyway? Is it an anti-war argument, the purpose for which Aristophanes wrote it in 411 BCE? Is it one big sex comedy? Is it an Ur-feminist text, championing the strength and power of women? Or is it exactly the opposite of that -- as Mastroianni pointed out in his review, "What the Play House production misses in emphasizing the obvious is the underlying story of women desiring to resume normal domestic relations."
Lysistrata can be seen as a conservative piece of work; the women are refusing to have sex with their husbands until they abandon unending war and return home.
Also, at this point in history, I was only recently married, and my wife and I were making plans to have children. So my interest in staging a happy celebration of marriage, sex and procreation was also very personal.
Shannon McNamara, Alison Garrigan, Elaine Feagler Photo by Anthony Gray
Director's Note:
There
is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and
there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal. - Charlotte Bunch
The Greeks invented Democracy, built the Acropolis, and then called it a day.
- David Sedaris
Bad Epitaph's production of Lysistrata opened on May 19, 2000, and it was very successful. The Plain Dealer called our production, Helter-skelter and often hilarious, the Free Times a high-spirited and campy romp, and Scene Magazine christened it that summer's first joyous work.
By closing night we were sold out - oversold, actually, adding more and more seats. That fall Bad Epitaph received a nomination for a Northern Ohio Live Magazine Award of Achievement, based largely on the success of Lysistrata. But that is the end of the story, not the beginning.
I recently read over my notes from the rehearsal period, and learned some very important lessons that I had forgotten.
Christopher Bohan, Jennifer Wiech Photo by Anthony Gray
My apprehension over producing a sex comedy were great. As a rule, sex just isn't funny, it's embarrassing. Case in point, the movie Exit To Eden, based on one of Anne Rice's soft porn novels. Director Garry Marshall wanted to make a gentle comedy that adults could enjoy together, but when it appeared the movie he was making wasn't going to appeal to anyone, he threw in a caper subplot (entirely unrelated to Rice's work) and cast Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd as detectives. What was merely cheesy swiftly became crass. One of the few exceptions to this rule is The Tall Guy featuring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson in the funniest sex scene every committed to film. And I've seen The Room. I must have been inspired also by my recent experience performing in The Compleat Wks of Wllm Skhspr (abridged) at Beck Center. When Roger Truesdell cast two of the funniest men in Cleveland, Allen Branstein and Nick Koesters and then chose me to round out the trio, I thought he was insane because I am not funny. The experience was a crash course in what funny is or can be, and I took a (un)healthy dose of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink ethos of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and thought I would try it with this 2,400 year old Greek comedy. The production company was solid, Don McBride build to order an Acropolis that doubled as the set from Laugh-In, with balconies and shuttered windows that open and close. Ali Garrigan - our Lysistrata - designed contemporary costumes, and Brian Pedaci the numerous ridiculous props, some of which he procured from places like Chain Link Addiction. I had invaluable assistance from my dramaturg David Bell (who provided all sources below) who provided not only a bottomless well of theater history, but was also my confidant during the darkest parts of the rehearsal process and was very insightful as to what was not working and reminding me what was.
And, of course ... it was a musical! As we assume, the ancient Greeks used song to convey strong messages, and so did we. Following my suggestion that this story plays itself out everywhere, all the time, our composer Dennis Yurich shaped Linday's verse into the lyrics for eight songs that were Goth, rock, ska, country, even a nod to the Andrews Sisters.
Of course, what everyone really remembers is the nudity. I know artists who have strong, negative opinions about nudity onstage, that it breaks down suspension of disbelief in a way that nudity on screen does not. Frankly, I think the opposite - that film celebrates unhealthy body types and calculated audience response in a way that a live naked human performing in a play does not. That doesn't mean I wasn't eeked out by casting a play where I was asking actors how much they would or would not disrobe onstage. I knew from experience in other productions that it was best to be very specific up front, and to set a date when we would commence "show conditions".
Clyde Simon, Alison Garrigan Photo by Anthony Gray
My rehearsal journals remind me how horribly self-conscious and unfunny everything was proceeding through the month of April. I was positive I was going to drop a large turd onto the stage of Cleveland Public Theatre (the company which we had made a healthy arrangement to perform) until the first of May.
May Day we played the scenes where the men and women stripped to fight ... and suddenly the show was ridiculous! Not dirty, just happy, funny stupid, which is pretty much how we rode through the rest of the experience.
In addition to his praise, Tony Brown also called the show "sloppy", and it was literally sloppy, with buckets of actual water dumped onto Nick, Chris and Rob as they scurried around in jackstraps fitted with brightly-colored erections. Our Lysistrata came onstage for the interval with a mop. Opening night, one other writer for the Plain Dealer sniffed, "Well, it's not Aristophanes." There were also more than the usual backstage pranks throughout the run, some which during any other production would have been brought up with Human Resources. By and large, it was a festive, funny and inoffensive anti-war play. Just before we really needed one.
Sources: Revival Ruins Greek Play by Tony Mastroianni, Cleveland Press, Dec. 5, 1970
'Lysistrata' at Play House Plumbs Depths of Vulgarity by Peter Bellamy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 5, 1970 Photo of Ronald Greene and Myriam Lipari as Kinesias and Myrrhina, Cleveland Press, 1970 (date unknown)
Revelry Abounds In Bad Epitaph's Version of 'Lysistrata' by Tony Brown, Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 22, 2000
Rowdy Romps by Amy Bracken Sparks, The Free Times, May 24, 2000
Greeks Bearing Gifts by Keith Joseph, Scene Magazine, June 1, 2000
From 1983 and 1986 a number of Bay High School students (and a few graduates who never really got away) produced a half-hour comedy program for our public access station. At the time we thought of our work as mediocre, but looking back is it surprising how much we were able to accomplish with so little.
Most of the bits trod well-covered ground, obviously emulating Saturday Night Live, SCTV and Not Necessarily The News, featuring fake news segments, advertisements and public service announcements. But at least the writing was original and we were able to exploit our suburban surroundings to our best advantage.
We produced two "Christmas" episodes in 1984 and 1985. We had been working on one in 1983, but someone in production rewired the editing facility and got us banned from the studio for about a year.
In the year 1985 alone the company made six shows, but after producing two more the following spring and summer, a large number of cast members graduated from high school and that was apparently that.
The comedian and I first met in early 1992. A mutual friend knew him from Los Angeles, when he was trying to make a go of things and living out of his car. After two very successful appearances on Johnny Carson, he was fast becoming one of the most famous people from Cleveland, even more than Trent Reznor or Tom Hanks or other famous Clevelanders who aren’t actually from here. His sold-out appearances at The Improv at the Powerhouse were like the return of a conquering hero. We weren't there merely to laugh, but to celebrate his success along with him.
The comedian came to see You Have The Right to Remain Silent in January, 1993. His appearance went largely unrecognized by the rest of the audience, his debut as a supporting character on a short-lived ABC sit-com was only then in the works, and his eponymous hit show still a few years off. He looked like everyone else in his jeans and Indians jacket, only the trademark glasses and buzz cut set him apart.
Following the performance, while the Guerrillas mingled among the audience, he pulled me down into a chair to show me his program. There were pencil marks all over it.
"I hope you don't mind," he said, "I took the liberty of grading the show."
"Hey," I said. "Cool." "You'll have to help me out here," he said, "these are all out of order 'cause of the show, and I can't remember which are which -- this one here, this is the one with the guitar?"
"Yes."
"Very funny, folk singer humor, very good. Now which was the one with the two guys with the guns, the John Woo thing --"
"Torque wrote that one."
"Brilliant, I was howling. I got it, too, it’s like an arms treaty thing, right?"
“Right.”
He continued. "Now this one, the one with the guy with the telephone, who gets mugged, right?"
"Yeah. That's one of mine."
"Pretty gross," he said, "not my thing, not too funny."
"Yeah, but, it wasn't supposed to be funny," I said.
He looked at me like I was an ungracious little turd.
"I know that," he said. "I'm telling you what's funny."
I do not hate Monty Python. I hate people who love Monty Python. And by that I mean, I hate people who love Monty Python but don't get Monty Python. There is a generation of twits who believe Monty Python is hilarious because it is absurd. "The Ministry of Funny Walks" is indeed hilarious. But not because it is the Ministry of Funny Walks.
It's the Ministry of Funny Walks. Do you see?
Whatever, what do you know from funny.
So, while Monty Python was skewering British society, The Firesign Theatre was smoking a lot of pot. Oh, and skewering American society.
Formed in the late 1960s, the Firesign Theatre (Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor) created surrealist tableaux of funny, often taking both sides of one LP to tell an extended, dream-like story. When I was a kid, I did not know the extent of their narratives, because the only album we had in the house was a compilation record, Forward Into The Past (released in 1976) which included selections from their previous nine albums, plus difficult to locate comedy singles.
In 1972 they released Dear Friends, a collection of their live radio broadcasts on KPFK in San Francisco. Whereas their produced work is tightly scripted, this program allowed for a certain amount of spontaneity, which on two occasions, got them fired.
Perusing the TV Guide:
BERGMAN: I like to watch that program with my girl.
PROCTOR: You have a girl?
BERGMAN: We'll go into that later.
(nervous laughter)
PROCTOR: You'll go into her later.
(big nervous laughter)
Just in time for the holidays:
"Toad Away"
Recorded December 9, 1970 on KPFK
Fan video by me.
Twenty years ago today, on Wednesday, November 27, 1991 WCPN 90.3 FM presented Calling All Ears, an evening of Live Radio Theater directed by Firesign Theatre alum David Ossman. The event was recorded at the Cuyahoga County College Main Stage Theater on the Metro Campus, and featured original works by Mr. Ossman as well as local playwrights William Borden and Aubrey Wertheim.
David Ossman and ... what the hell am I wearing?
Participating in this program was thrilling; Ossman cast me to play Fergus the bartender against his Maxwell Morgan, Crime Cabby. Unfortunately, it is a little embarrassing to listen to now, as I am trying too hard to match him, tough guy to tough guy, when my job was to be the squirrely sounding-board character. I mean, I was the bartender.
It's like Tom Hanks told me, you don't want to meet your heroes.
Before broadcast, Ossman warms-up the audience with the Firesign classic, "Bozo's Big Bang."
Having graduated from college that spring, this was my first big professional-grade theatrical project in Cleveland. The best thing to come out of Calling All Ears, however, were all the great connections I made with fellow travelers like David Caban, Brian Pedaci, Peggy Sullivan, David Thonnings, and Lee T. Wilson.
"The third Compass to play St. Louis, again at the Crystal, was produced in the spring of 1962 and featured Jack Burns and Larry Hankin … Hildy Brooks (then known as Hilda Brawner), Martin Lavut, and Maggie Sullivan under the direction of George Sherman.” - Jeffrey Sweet, "Something Wonderful Right Away"
When I was enrolled at Ohio University, the head of the MFA Directing Program was George Sherman. It is a shame I did not return to O.U. to receive a Masters in Directing from him before he retired. Though I only took one course from him, he was a strong presence at the school, and I had great respect for the work he drew out of those in his program. He had a big smile, and a wonderful snorting laugh.
The one course I did take was in improvisation. Freshman year we received basic improv training from Denny Dalen, geared more in the direction of “club” improv. Though I grew remarkably as a performer under Denny’s tutelage, improvisation was George’s domain, and I soaked in experience during that one quarter course which has served me for the past twenty and more years.
However, it was before working with him that I got the idea to interview him for a paper I would write about improv for Mel Helitzer’s comedy class. It was probably Denny who suggested the idea, informing me that George had once been a member of The Second City, which is not entirely accurate. It was George who first told me of The Compass Players. Following the success of the Compass, and its offspring The Second City, branches of each opened in other cities through the late fifties and early sixties (and even today in the case of Second City).
Compass originator David Shepherd had started a Compass in St. Louis in 1957 at the Crystal Palace, which went bust soon after. They tried again in 1959, and again it did not last long. And again in 1962. And that is where George comes in.
I never did finish my paper on improvisation. I did interview George in early 1989, and he was very informative and interesting and spoke of many things I did not at that time understand. If a microcassette recording of the interview exists somewhere in my home, I have no idea where it is. But I recently found the notes, and they are spare but kind of interesting.
((These are not exact quotes, but reconstructions based on 23 year old notes.))
George Sherman
QUESTION: So, tell me about your work with Second City.
ANSWER: I wasn’t a member of The Second City.
QUESTION: Oh, uh, but I thought …
ANSWER: I was a director for the Compass Players. The Compass Players started in the late 40s or early 50s at a saloon near the University of Chicago by David Shepherd and Paul Sills. Shepherd was the intellectual of the bunch, in 1962 he started a branch of the Compass in St. Louis, we rehearsed in a big, airy basement. There was Alan Alda, Hildy Brooks, Jack Burns, Diana Sands …
Shepherd would create the premise for a scenario, we would perform object work, and create characters. He’d give us a place and time -- for example, in 1961 Jackie Kennedy gave the people a televised tour of the White House, that is a true story. So Hildy created a scene where she played Nina Khrushchev as this motherly type giving a tour of the “Red House” in Moscow, or what have you.
QUESTION: This was an improvised performance?
ANSWER: No. It was developed in a workshop. Everything -- everything you see at Second City today, for example, it is all finished material, developed in a workshop.
{{2011 QUESTION: So, David Shepherd had a hand in the 1957 St. Louis Compass? Did he attempt to make it a “people’s theater”? What role did class and politics play in your work?
ANSWER: (Janet Coleman, “The Compass”) “Shepherd found … producer’s chores, as usual, unfulfilling. He was in a hurry to get back to scenario writing … he did not bear in mind Grotowski’s precept: the theatre belongs to whoever is making it.”
ANSWER: (Del Close, “The Compass”) “I’d had enough of his bullshit about ‘you’re an upper-middle-class housewife in love with a middle-class white-collar worker with lower-class parents.’ As soon as he left, things began to work.”}}
QUESTION: Where did the Compass perform?
ANSWER: We performed at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis. Hildy, Jack … Larry Harkin, he was tall, beautiful, not verbal, Martin Lavut ... Lavut was quite knowledgeable, good with verbal styles.
The comedy comes from character. There is a sketch we developed that is still used today, the “Van Sketch.” Two people are driving all night in a van, and each tries to keep the other awake. It doesn’t work unless each has a well-developed character and is committed to the act of keeping the other person awake.
QUESTION: When I asked about improvisation in class, Mel said there is no such thing as improvisation. Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, they prepare everything, it’s all a shtick, it’s all written and planned and they spring it on the audience and it looks like it came from nowhere.
ANSWER: Don’t tell me Jonathan Winters doesn’t improvise. In 1960 or something, he was cutting promos for a show, they just let the tape run for three or fours hour, huge improvised reams of tape. Sure, much of it would end up in some act. But he starts with, he draws on a character. And he can go anywhere.
Bert Lahr said “a comic says funny things, a comedian says things funny.” That is what makes a comedian more endearing than a teller of jokes. The Smothers Brothers routine couldn’t exist without it having grown out of their genuine relationship.
QUESTION: But I am confused. Is a Second City performance improvised or isn’t it?
ANSWER: Early in the week we would have improv sessions. Tuesday, Wednesday night, for people willing for something different. This would be pure improv. What works becomes polished in rehearsal. For the Saturday midnight show, everybody knows everything. We’d use lights to control the bits, wherever the scene was, we would end it on a huge laugh by taking the lights out.
If the show was dying, we’d dim the lights slowly. Lavut was hilarious, he refused to quit and the scene would become about the power going out.
The main show is rehearsed, out of free-form work. We did not think it was fair for people paying top price to receive the rehearsal itself.
... and scene.
Sources: Something Wonderful Right Away (Jeffery Sweet) The Compass (Janet Coleman)
UPDATE: George Sherman died in Athens, Ohio, at the age of 92 and surrounded by his family, on July 5, 2024.
Melvin Helitzer (October 18, 1924 - April 11, 2009) remains a legend at Ohio University, where for decades he was the professor of the Humor Writing for Fun and Profit course, in addition to other journalism classes. The class taught how to write for greeting cards, political speeches, cartoons. It's claim to fame, however, was the final exam which was five minutes of stand-up in front of a sold-out audience of their peers.
In the old days it was held in the Frontier Room, a bar. So the audience was drunk. When the campus went dry and the venue became the Front Room - a coffee house - the audience was still drunk but now also high on caffeine.
Prior to his "retirement" as college professor, Helitzer was one of the "Mad Men" (fo shizz) a Clio-Award winning advertising executive, though his work tended more toward and emphasis on toy companies, cereal and candy than cigarettes and bourbon. Mel was a WWII vet, and a hard-working journalist.
In spite of this sterling reputation, I was a young turk who thought he knew what's what about comedy, and saw Mel Helitzer and his class as Henny Youngman 101.
And so, I was a little confused when the director for Comedians (whose name I cannot recall) invited Mel Helitzer to participate in a symposium on comedy as part of the promotion for the play. I mean, in hindsight, duh, of course, he’s a nationally-known comedy instructor. He was an expert on writing comedy, for stand-up, for print, television, advertising, politics, public speaking. Good gracious, he wrote the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle!
But from my perspective a) he was representative of the kind of fatuous comedy that is sent up as reprehensible and empty in the play in question and b) this 20 year-old thought he was a hack. He did a few minutes of stand-up for our benefit, and every third joke was one I’d heard someone else tell before. It was unbearable. Take my life. Please.
Not to mention the fact that when the director in question did his own five minutes of stand-up at the symposium, it was like hearing watered down Robin Williams. And by 1988, I was already entirely done with Robin Williams.
Which is why, when signing up for winter semester classes, I enrolled in Humor Writing for Fun and Profit. Because in spite of my feeling like I already knew everything about everything, I had enough fire to try and beat the old horse at his own game.
It was challenging, it really was. I am not good at writing comedy. I don’t know how better to put it, but I find it very hard to slow down the thought process in my writing. I know where I am going with something, so I find difficult to spell everything out and bring people along. Gags I come up with seem so obvious I don’t even write them down, and then what I do put on paper is so obscure no one gets it but me. So that was an education. And Mel was invaluable in teaching me about the rule of three (okay, that one is easy) but also timing, set-ups, slow down!
But we had great, enjoyable conflicts about content. My routine was intentionally psychotic, half a series of jokes aimed largely at myself. I refused to make fun of others … except vague others like “ugly people” which could mean anything, and of course, Wham! Unfortunately, the Wham! joke was supposed to just be a weird twist on the old joke about separating the men from the boys in the Greek army, but in hindsight it comes off as homophobic. Sorry about that.
I think the real joke is that I love George Michael, and everybody knows it.
The second half devolves in this uncomfortable Oedipal shaggy dog story, which got laughs, and made people squirm. Mel hated that part AND YET was instrumental in improving upon my delivery. He didn’t like it, but he made it better.
Most people audit Mel’s class. But then you have to pay for it. I wanted to take it for a grade, but then in addition to the live performance, you also have to write a paper. I was going to argue the superiority of improv over stand-up.
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