Back in the early 1980s, we hooked up with a troupe who were doing a 1/2 hour comedy show called "Big B's Traveling Sideshow" (Or "Travelling." We never quite settled on that). They had a sponsor. They had four people who could do characters, impressions and seemed to be able to perform comedy. They had a music guy who wrote them a theme. They had head shots. What they needed were writers!
We watched their first show (it was okay. And they had spunk). They were trying to maintain a regular schedule but booking studio time was costly. And they needed more material. Several us submitted some sketches from our trunks, and they liked them. One of the sketches they decided to do was my Plant Store sketch.
Written during my "Monty Python" phase, it was one of those typical two-handers that involved a store owner and a customer. It starts off weird and spirals out from there. This was very much in the fashion of sketches I had written during college, like The Pet Store, or a "Rock Class," which was a geology class with a professor instead of a shopkeep. Puns and ridiculous logic abound. What fun. I wrote more and eventually dubbed the store owner Martin Storeman, but there wasn't a lot of demand for the guy.
We watched their first show (it was okay. And they had spunk). They were trying to maintain a regular schedule but booking studio time was costly. And they needed more material. Several us submitted some sketches from our trunks, and they liked them. One of the sketches they decided to do was my Plant Store sketch.
Written during my "Monty Python" phase, it was one of those typical two-handers that involved a store owner and a customer. It starts off weird and spirals out from there. This was very much in the fashion of sketches I had written during college, like The Pet Store, or a "Rock Class," which was a geology class with a professor instead of a shopkeep. Puns and ridiculous logic abound. What fun. I wrote more and eventually dubbed the store owner Martin Storeman, but there wasn't a lot of demand for the guy.
I know Jim Farley liked the character and really ratcheted up the insanity of the guy to the point where he had the plant lunge at him at the end. Weirdly, one of my strongest memories of Farley was in this time, they were renaming the main post office in Manhattan, right next to Penn Station after his grandfather, James Farley, and Jim Farley was going to the ceremony (as he should) but somehow was going to turn it into a "networking" thing to advance his career. Pretty sure that didn't pan out. And now they turned the James Farley Post Office into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall (the new Penn Station) because it was the twin of the old Penn Station, which they torn down to put up Madison Square Garden. That's the creative life in NYC.
And again, sorry about the picture ratio.
And again, sorry about the picture ratio.
