July/03 Officers and Gentlemen, not to mention Mr. Coffee
Mulligan and McCabe were not a New York City law firm. They were a never-ending accident waiting to happen. Willie Mulligan’s mom used to say, “Willie and Tommy McCabe could get in trouble waiting for a bus.” Tommy and Willie were cousins. They were likeable guys and two of the funniest individuals you would ever meet. They were masters of improvisational comedy, long before it became an art form on television.
Willie was constantly producing street theatre that featured him, Tommy and whomever was along on that particular day. There was the time Willie, Tommy and Dennis Jansen were walking up Broadway together. Willie would point to posters in front of theatres along the way and say, in a thick east European accent, “Dat vout nevah be tololated in my country!” This went on for several blocks when a man who had been walking along side the trio, could hold out no longer. “Where are you from?” he asked Willie. “Twenny toid and ninth,” Willie replied and the three headed into the subway.
The subway was always a great venue for them. I was along one day, when they played out a wonderful scene. Tommy and I headed down the subway platform so that we would get on the train several cars away from where Willie would get on board. Key to this scene was the fact that Tommy had a handkerchief hanging out of his pocket. He and I stood next to the middle door of the train talking. Tommy was turned facing the door, with the handkerchief hanging out of his pocket toward the center of the car. A couple of stops passed, and here came Willie. He was snorting and sniffling like he had a bad cold. Tommy and I talked and appeared oblivious to Willie. As Willie drew even with us, he took the handkerchief out of Tommy’s pocket, blew his nose and then replaced it, moving on to the next car. The response of our fellow passengers covered the range from disgust and outrage to hysterical laughter. It was quite obvious that some people got the joke. McCabe walked over to the door, called Willie back into the car for a curtain call, and we all received an ovation.
There were other performances that were not as well received, however. There was the time, while waiting on line at Madison Square Garden’s advance sale ticket window that Willie and Tommy got into a wrestling match over whether roller derby or ice hockey was a better spectator sport. It started when Willie approached Tommy on line getting hockey tickets. As far as the other people on line knew they were strangers to each other. Then it began. “What are you here to see?” Tommy asked. “Roller derby,” came the reply. “Geez!” Tommy said, “whaddya stupid?” “Tell ya’ what stupid is,” Willie shot back, “Stupid is payin’ money to watch a buncha’ Canadians who skate like they wuz in the freakin’ Ice Capades.” With that Willie grabbed Tommy and they were rolling around in the lobby of the Garden. When security showed up, the cousins began to laugh and let everyone in on the joke. Security wasn’t laughing, nor were the cops who answered the call. That night Willie’s father came to the 19th precinct to get them out. They had a desk appearance ticket to go to court for disturbing the peace. When their day in court arrived, all charges were dropped. The Rangers at that point in the season had 12 wins, 10 losses and 4 ties. The judge said, “Don’t the Rangers have enough problems without you two morons?” McCabe and Mulligan wore that admonishment as a badge of honor for weeks.
The most notorious adventure for the cousins began as all their adventures began, innocently. Pete Crowley was a business representative for Minute Maid orange juice. He was in Miller’s bar one night and told Tommy and Willie that there was a huge show at the Sheraton Center Hotel. It was an industry show where companies sold products and services to the government. Crowley told them that everything was free. If they just came to the show, he would get them identification and they could enjoy all the hospitality suites. They agreed and it was set up for them to meet Crowley in the hotel lobby on Saturday afternoon.
They entered the lobby at about two o’clock and could not locate Crowley. Suddenly there came a public address announcement, “Will Captain McCabe and Colonel Mulligan please report to suite 119.” It didn’t register the first time, but upon hearing the announcement repeated, they headed to the designated suite. Crowley met them there with name tags that identified them as “Colonel William Mulligan”and “Captain Thomas McCabe”. Upon receiving their battlefield commissions they set out to sample the wares of each hospitality suite.
The most difficult part was trying to act interested as people tried to sell them everything from toaster ovens for the apartments of personnel living off base to individually wrapped English muffins. Willie finally mastered it by saying, “Uh, very interesting, please fill the Captain in on that”, pointing toward Tommy and moving toward the bar.
Afternoon turned into night and Willie and Tommy had become separated in the crush of the show. Willie turned a corner into another suite and was thrust into a surreal scene. There was Tommy with a glass of champagne in his hand talking baseball with Joe DiMaggio. “Joltin’ Joe” was there as a representative of Mr Coffee and was being kind and understanding as Tommy went on and on about how he always thought Ted Williams was a better hitter than Joe was, but Joe had the better glove. Willie rescued the Yankee Clipper and got Tommy out to the car for the trip home.
Later on, Willie told me he remembered nothing of the actual trip home, but would never forget the arrival at Tommy’s house. McCabe stepped out of the car, took three steps forward and fell head first into the hedges in front of his father’s place. The old man came out in a rage. Pulling Tommy up by the back of the neck he called him a “drunken bum.” Tommy broke away from him, straightened himself up and said, “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m a Captain!”
June/03 Bunny,Pookie and the Atlas Van Lines
Marge and Ernie Markey were nice enough people. They were married for ten years and had no kids. They were pleasant and outgoing, but there was one issue. They made people uncomfortable. They held hands wherever they went. He called her Bunny and she called him Pookie. She looked at him like he was a combination of Albert Einstein and Johnny Unitas, and he treated her like royalty.
Patty Mullen, the barmaid at Thirsty’s Bar, used to call them the diabetes twins. “They are just too damn sweet”, she said. “That isn’t real, no one is that happy with their spouse, day in and day out, all the time!" Patty, known to most as “All Beef Patty” due to the one hundred and thirty pounds she had firmly distributed on her five and a half foot frame, was funny, caustic and judgmental. Those are three prerequisites for being a barmaid in New York City. She also knew what made for a “real” relationship, having just come out of her fourth marriage. The Markeys really annoyed Patty, and she would take every opportunity to enjoy jokes at their expense.
One of Patty’s favorite Ernie and Marge stories involved Bob Connor. Bobby was a steamfitter from New Jersey, who moved to New York in order to benefit from the building boom of the early eighties. He was new to Thirsty’s back then. He fit in with the regulars, because he had a good sense of humor, loved sports and was a better than average pool player. No one realized early in the going, however, that he was also a natural born actor. We were about to find out.
It was late on a Thursday night, there were several people at the bar, including Marge, Ernie and Bobby. Marge had seen Bobby in the place before, but had never spoken to him. This particular evening, Ernie and Marge were doing that cute, albeit annoying, act where she would ask him if she could buy something and he would tell her “absolutely not”, while slyly winking to other bar patrons who couldn’t even feign interest. This night it was money to buy Christmas presents that was the topic of their conversation. “But Pookie, all I need is another $300 and I will be through with the whole list”. “I already gave you $1100, I mean what am I made out of money?” Ernie smiled and shrugged his shoulders looking at Bobby Connor. Connor stared at the two in disbelief. He had never seen the “Bunny and Pookie Show” and he was transfixed. That was when Marge made a mistake.
Attempting to rope Bobby into their performance, she said, “Excuse me, do you give your wife money to shop with?” Bobby’s answer made everyone else in the bar stop. He said,“I don’t have a wife to give money to anymore.” We knew Bobby had never been married and we sensed that great improvisational theatre was about to play out. Marge took the bait. “Are you divorced or separated?”, she asked. With a quivering lower lip, Bobby shook his head “no”. Then, burying his face in his hands, he blurted out, “God took her!” He began to sob loudly and shake his head. Marge bolted for the ladies’ room, like Wilma Rudolph, leaving poor Ernie to handle the situation.
While Bobby continued to “cry”, with everyone in the place staring at him, Ernie considered his options. Finally, he spoke up telling Patty to “…give Bobby a shot”. “Th-th-that’s alright”, Bobby said waving Ernie off with his left hand, while still crying into his right hand. Ernie countered with, “Give him a double!”A dry eyed, completely composed Bobby looked up at Patty and said, “Make it Dewars”. The bar exploded into thunderous laughter. Patty laughed and clapped her hands. Bunny and Pookie had been had. The problem was, they didn’t realize it was all aimed at them. They simply thought it was a random act of nonsense, not retaliation for months of the annoying drivel we were all forced to endure. In fact, it seemed to make them feel more at ease, like they were now part of the gang. Still, it was a good laugh. And, as it turned out, it was actually the beginning of the unraveling of Bunny and Pookie.
Several weeks later, I walked into Thirsty’s after a Ranger game. At the end of the bar sat Pookie. It was Pookie all by himself. This was unheard of. Pookie without Bunny? That’s eggs without salt. I sat down and ordered a beer, Patty served the beer and asked me if I could help her move something in the kitchen. I told her I would and we headed toward the back. When we got there, she shut the door and grabbed me by the arm and said, “Bunny did a bird. Ernie got home, the entire house was empty and her new Buick was gone. In-freakin-credible!” “Geez”, I said, “Imagine him walking into that big empty house and hearing his words echo like the PA system at Shea Stadium. Bunny, I’m home-ome-ome. Are you here-ere-ere? Aw, c’mon, this isn’t funny-unny-unny”. Patty laughed until she cried. She couldn’t wait to get back to the bar to try out the echo on Ernie.
“You want another one Ernie-eee-eee? Have a drink with the guys-eyes-eyes”. Unbelievably, she kept it up like that all night. Ernie was oblivious to her, but that didn’t matter. She was amusing herself and most of the other people at the bar. What was painful was that each new person entering the bar asked Ernie where Marge was. Each person was escorted to the kitchen for a news update from Patty. Ultimately, several people were doing the Shea Stadium PA bit. It was all quite surreal. I felt badly, since I was the originator of the PA thing. But that feeling waned with a few more beers.
Through it all, Ernie held it together. Until, during one quiet moment during the night, he recklessly felt the need to share. “You know what, Patty”, he began, “The bitch even took the toilet seats with her. Imagine?”
“Damn”, Patty said, “that sucks-ucks-ucks.” Ernie picked up his car keys and left Thirsty’s never to be seen or heard from again.
May/03
Nobody asked me, but…
I have never seen a bad Paul Newman movie, and, I have seen them all. I cannot think about time I have spent in Wrigley Field without smiling. Listening to Cleo Lane sing is a spiritually fulfilling experience like few others. “Compact” parking spaces should only be used by compact cars. Eye contact is absolutely a lost art. Whole years of a lifetime could be saved by simply reading the owner’s manual that accompanies a purchase. People complain about the dilution of talent brought about by expanding sports leagues, but object to having their team dissolved to raise the standard. Like so many other things it comes down to, “Not in my neighborhood.”
Crabs, squid and oysters were probably first served as a fraternity pledge prank. The fact that they caught on surprised everyone I am sure. When approaching a toll plaza, you either have or you haven’t got exact change, and should choose the appropriate lane. Taverns, by and large, are not as much fun as they used to be. A New Yorker is always a New Yorker, even after decades away from the city. Sugar Ray Leonard was the second best fighter I ever saw --- named "Sugar Ray".
I miss the days when you could go to three different theatres in Times Square, see three first run movies and spend less than three dollars, so long as you did it all before two in the afternoon. Any psychic trying to convey a message from “the other side” can’t be very good if all he can muster up is the first initial of the dearly departed. Pokeymon never made any sense to me, neither did Magic the Gathering or, for that matter Rubik’s Cube.
They don’t make ‘em like the Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, or Columbo any more. The only true "King of Rock&Roll" is Little Richard.Decades after he started, people are still copying his style.
I can never understand why some supermarket checkout people feel the need to comment on my purchases. I am not at all interested in the fact that they think double stuffed Oreos are “the bomb”. I have a feeling that Bill O’Reilly got beat up a lot in high school. During my lifetime I have seen at least twenty five “next Mickey Mantles” come and go without coming within miles of the original.
When people say, "It's not about the money", it is about nothing else. Tom Green and Andy Dick are proof positive, as H.L. Mencken said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public."
That's entertainment...I guess
April/03
"I am six foot three inches tall, I have blonde hair and green eyes. Gold flecks dance in my eyes as I look toward the light. I love kids and dogs, and I send money home. How can you hate me? You have to force yourself.” That was the between record banter on the radio as I drove to get the Sunday paper. That’s pretty funny stuff. In fact, I also thought it was very funny, when I first heard it, verbatim, thirty years ago. Back in New York City there was an AM station at 1130 on the dial. WNEW played easy listening music: Sinatra, Mathis, Ella Fitzgerald, and other similar artists. It was also the radio home for New York Giants’ football. WNEW had some of the best disk jockeys on the air. Among those disk jockeys was Ted Brown. Ted was a very funny man. And, to be honest, I was offended when I heard him being ripped off even years after the fact. My indignation did not last long, because I had been guilty of the same crime. When I was in college, I played the bass and sang in a folk group called the New York Volunteers. We played at colleges and coffee houses throughout the New York City area. In those days there were a lot of political statements being made through music. Our music was a-political. We sang songs about "the war" – only it was the Civil War. Amazingly we developed a following.There was an audience that liked our white bread, non-confrontational sound. Tom Paxton, Dave von Ronk and the rest entertained the locals.We made the tourists feel like they had seen Bohemia, without making them uncomfortable. We were playing a very small circuit of clubs in Greenwich Village. There was: the Bitter End, Café Raffio, Café Wha, the Fat Black Pussy Cat, and the Gaslight. There were some soon to be famous people around then too. We, of course were not included in the soon to be famous roster. But we played in places with the likes of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby and John Byner,Each had not received their big breaks yet. There was a comedy team called Jim, Jake and Joan. I don’t know whatever happened to Jim and Jake, but Joan was Joan Rivers. Fred Weintraub owned the Bitter End. As payment to a friend who managed the place while he was on vacation, Fred put a group together called the Big3, which featured that friend. Her name was Cass Elliot and she later became Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas. Also among the musical talent was a group called the Tarriers. They had an interesting group of members. Alan Arkin was an original member, although he was gone by the time I saw them. Eric Weissberg played banjo. Years later, Eric would become famous for doing the dueling banjos theme for Deliverance. Most interesting to me was Marshall Brickman. He played bass and did all the introductions to the songs. His introductions were some of the best comedy I had ever seen on stage. Marshall Brickman went on to write, direct and produce some major motion pictures. We had the unfortunate luck to continually play on the bill with a comedian from upstate New York named Dusty Daniels. As our banjo player Bobby used to say about Dusty, “We don’t hate him, we hate the first person that told him he was funny.” One night Dusty had had enough. He headed back to Roscoe, N.Y. to go to work at his father’s moving company. That left us with no opening act. That was where the trouble started. We talked about it, and it was decided that I would go up in one and work my “comedy magic”. I was just egomaniacal enough to give it a try. My first attempt met with moderate success. The crowd knew me, because of the group and they were, in a word, amenable. Then I had a brilliant idea. I had seen a very funny comedian on the Steve Allen Show. His name was Jack Sheldon and he was much better known as a trumpet player and character actor than he was for comedy. He had an album out called “Oooh, But It’s Good” He was hilarious. I wanted to be hilarious. I memorized everything on that album. The bit about thermo-nuclear jazz, the four for a quarter photograph booth, World War II and falconry. In short, I was incredible. Night after night I killed them, channeling Jack Sheldon. I actually started to get a bit of a reputation as a comedian. I even got some gigs without the group. I was feeling great about my comedy career. That’s when the trouble really started. I thought that if I was this good with someone else’s stuff; I would be unstoppable doing my own material. I had a series of commercials I had written for everything from tongue depressors to waterproof toasters. I’d crack myself up as I put the bits together. I started slowly slipping some of my own stuff into what was Jack Sheldon’s act. Even someone who had less than perfect hearing could tell by listening to the crowd response, where Sheldon’s stuff stopped and mine started. My material received, shall we say, a somewhat more restrained response. Still I persevered. Such as it was my act went on for several months, until the night the Brits landed. Hendra and Ullett were a very slick English comedy team. They had as polished an act as anyone had ever seen. In the years to come they were destined to appear on a host of network television from Ed Sullivan to Tom Jones. Tony Hendra ultimately became the senior editor of the National Lampoon. I was waiting to go on at the Bitter End, when the stage manager said, “These two guys are auditioning tonight, so let them go on ahead of you, OK?” It was Hendra and Ullett. I agreed, and in so doing sealed the fate of my comedy career. Hendra and Ullett went into an hysterical, well-timed medley of some of the funniest material I have ever heard. The Englishman and the New Yorker at the Met game, the Shaggy Dog tribute, the United Nations translators, and so it went. As they thanked the audience, they received a standing ovation. As I took the stage, that standing ovation turned into a standing migration. Three minutes into my act, as I was doing a bit I had written about the Tenement Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, the place emptied out like a ballpark. I finished my monologue with 6 people left in the audience.I ended with, “Why don’t we all get in a cab and go some place nice?”, and walked off the stage. I never did stand up comedy again. When you are playing next door to, or on alternating weeks with the likes of Cosby and Pryor, it is easy to think of yourself as being a member of the comedy fraternity. When your act is being watched in direct comparison with a couple of real pros, the contrast is over powering. Stand up comedy is like skydiving. Everyone should do it once. But don’t try it with borrowed equipment.
March/03
Celebrating Celebrity
When I was a college freshman, I worked tending bar in my father’s tavern in New York City. Two of the “regulars” there were Teddy and Harry. Teddy Larson and Harry Molloy were two bookmakers. They were wonderfully Runyonesque characters, who played off each other like Abbott and Costello. Harry would regale everyone in the bar, whether or not they were listening, with stories of his brushes with greatness.
A particular favorite of his involved the legendary Hollywood Canteen. It seems that, when he was in the Army, Harry went to the Hollywood Canteen. The Canteen was a club set up for service men visiting Hollywood during the war years. Bette Davis and John Garfield had the idea, and under the guidance of Jules Stein, the club took off. Hollywood stars frequented the club, serving coffee and donuts to members of the military. There was also music and dancing. That is where Molloy’s story began.
It seems that Molloy, then a young corporal was dancing with none other than Jane Russell. As Harry and the beautiful Jane danced cheek to cheek to the music of an MGM orchestra trouble started. “As we were dancing’”, Molloy said, “in walks Bob Waterfield”. Waterfield was the quarterback of the L.A. Rams and Jane Russell's husband.
He objected, said Molloy, to how close he and Jane were dancing. “He grabbed me by the shoulder, I spun around and nailed him with a right hand lead. He was down and out. I kissed Jane good night and said that I would be outside, if Waterfield wanted to continue this. I waited for a half hour but the bum went out the back door”.
All the while Molloy was talking Teddy Larson stared into his beer glass. Finally, upon completion of the Hollywood Canteen saga, Larson looked at me and said, “Did I ever tell you I once walked past Radio City Music Hall? No kidding, it was the week of the Christmas Show”! That was Teddy’s only counter to Harry’s great story. For comic effect, Teddy relegated himself to the most distant of reflected glory.
Things today are much different. Reflected glory and manufactured celebrity are the orders of the day. Boxing matches between convicted felons are the stuff of which television “specials” are made. People are famous for being famous. Reality television has divided like an amoeba. People with no discernable talent are chosen to co-exist and become famous for co-existing.
Television audiences fell in love with shows like The Real World. Seven strangers are picked to live in a house together and have their interaction filmed for the exhibition to and edification of the MTV generation. Beyond their time of cohabitation, these people participate in contests. Shows that pit “casts” of different reality shows against each other. The process goes on as these people host retrospectives of their shows, and retrospectives of the competition shows. This incestuous display of self -importance culminates in marathon weekends featuring back-to-back episodes of an entire season.
Broadcast networks,since imitation is the sincerest form of television, followed suit with their own reality shows. People trapped on islands, or racing around the globe, or confined to a house together, all with two things in common. Each is an intrinsically uninteresting person and each begins the adventure under contract to an agent. They are reality show templates.There is the gay person, the naïve country type, the angry young man, and so it goes. From show to show and year to year, they simply plug new people into the roles, and off they go.
We have spawned a whole generation of voyeurs. A country full of people peeking through curtains at self important, manufactured celebrities living under a microscope. It’s real life, or as real as you can get being followed by a phalanx of steady-cams. Unholy alliances, back biting, open hostility - put them all together and they spell boring. We used to fear Boris Karloff. We loved Doris Day. We laughed with Martin and Lewis. Now we try to figure out, who has angered whom enough to be voted off the island, or out of the house. Personally, I couldn’t care less. None of these people were important before I met them and the fact that they survived the run of a reality series and all it’s ancillary programs does nothing to change their status with me.
