Time to do some flashing back. In the years after college, I fell into a group of people trying to put together a fan-zine. This was a thing back in the early 1980s; "self-publishing" a magazine which you would then self-distribute to various stores, usually record stores and hemp shops, hoping that someone would actually pick one up and pay to read it (it now occurs to me that this is actually a story for another day). Anyway, one of the members of that group mentioned to us that he was working with a "comedy troupe" that was doing a sketch show on Manhattan's infamous public access channel. Me? I didn't have cable. In fact, I don't think any of us did. So, we met with the head of the 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.
We met with the group; led by Jim Farley (no, not of the SNL Farleys, but of the former Postmaster General Farleys), his girlfriend, Bea Beavis (the one with an actual credit), Danny Migliarese, Larry Shaw, & Terry Sommer. They had done an episode for the infamous Manhattan cable public access channel. They liked our stuff. Take, for example, the below bit, Red Tape Tech. I wrote this with my friend, John Rawlins. It was just your average commercial parody, but we met an interesting dude here, Jordan Auslander, a very funny and frantic person. I wish I remembered more of the details, but Jordan got to do the sketch, a big, old, wordy sketch. It had the typical word play and back-tracking logic any piece written by Rawlins would have. So, it got taped and was put into show 2. And me? They misspelled my name in the end credits, which is actually kind of a show business tradition. Also, I apologize for the picture ratio, I digitized this myself years ago on some software and didn't realized I switched it from standard TV square to landscape. Not sure I have the original tapes to re-do them.
They used the guy Larry Shaw in the opening, along with a new "featured player" who was coming on as a writer. I'm still friends with Jordan, who does investigative ancestry searches now and would throw these wacky James Bond-themed parties. Later on, we did some theater groups together, he even did a VO for one of my book promos, Space Case. A good guy.
They used the guy Larry Shaw in the opening, along with a new "featured player" who was coming on as a writer. I'm still friends with Jordan, who does investigative ancestry searches now and would throw these wacky James Bond-themed parties. Later on, we did some theater groups together, he even did a VO for one of my book promos, Space Case. A good guy.
