The Comedy Store, People!
It was the 50th anniversary of The Comedy Store last week. There was a party. The vortex was opened.
I don’t know if I can explain the current that I locked into at The Comedy Store but it is real. It connected the day I walked into the place when I was 22. I became a doorman there. The combination of bad boundaries, anger, undefined sense of self, nebulous parenting, desire to be funny and cocaine made me vulnerable to all the ghosts that had passed through that place. They knew I would be among them eventually and chose to light me up. Just reading that last sentence makes me realize it's very easy to tap into the mystical chaos that my mind manufactured as I slowly devolved into cocaine psychosis. It was kinda real though. As real as most things that have to pass through the head to be understood however any particular head is going to understand those things at any particular time. There were no cell phones. My imagination was richer and more menacing.
Now, understand, I am at The Comedy Store most nights of the week now if I’m in town. There was a dark, haunting, mystical tone that I felt in the place for years. No more. Oddly, I think it’s gone in a general sense. I am not the only one that felt that. There are others like me. The comics that belong there. That shit was real.
In terms of comedy, when I was a doorman, I lived at the place. It was my whole life for almost a year. I was absorbing. My brain was wide open. Sadly, a lot of dark weirdness got in there. It helped at the time and maybe even now but it was a lot to process. It took years. Most of the people I saw there were comics people don’t really know. Whatever my judgement of them was at the time doesn’t matter. They were doing what I wanted to be doing and it was all electric to me. Obviously, being under the mentorship of Sam Kinison made me prematurely bitter and very weird. I loved it though until it went bad and I had to leave quickly, get my passport renewed and stay ahead of the ghosts and dark forces (and get sober).
All that said, I was excited to go to the party. I didn’t know who would be there. It turns out not many of the big stars, either current or past, showed up. It was a lot of the working comics who were regularly on stage when I was a doorman and general staff, past and present. Joey Camen, Joey Gaynor, Steve Mittlemen, Cathy Ladman, Barry Sobel, Larry Scarano and Barry Sobel to name a few. I don’t think anyone has been as excited to see Joey Camen as I was, maybe ever. All the old faces just lit me up. It was like I was on coke working the door again. I was a twitching appendage of the place that grew me, part of me. The beginning of me as a comedian.
Bill Kinison was there. I can see and feel his crazy brother in the way he talked and laughed. I have fairly conflicted feelings about my time with Sam. In the end he was a monster but it was exciting and wild and I got a little of that juice from his old ass brother. Wild.
The highlight of the night in terms of interaction and comedy had to come when I asked a server a question. All the hors d'oeuvres were classic Jewish food. Potato pancakes, knishes, little bagels and lox, tiny bites of pastrami sandwich, etc. I wanted to know where they were from, what caterer. So I asked a woman who was holding a tray of the little pastrami sandwich pieces, “Where are these from?” She looked at me and like someone who just learned something hours before said, “They’re Jewish!”
Hilarious. She clearly wasn’t.
Today I talk to the amazing Bonnie Raitt about music. Thursday I talk to the amazing Harvey Fierstein about his memoir. Great talks!
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
Old Faces.
