During the nineteen-sixties, the five-foot-high hand-painted placard in front of the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm read “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.” The missing “n” in “entertainment” was overlooked by staff, audience, and visitors for an entire decade. I worked there between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two as an actor in melodramas. Knott’s Berry Farm began in the twenties, when Walter and Cordelia Knott set up a roadside berry stand. A few years later, Cordelia opened her chicken-dinner restaurant, and Walter bought pieces of a ghost town and moved the Old West buildings to his burgeoning tourist destination. Squawking peacocks roamed the grounds, and there was a little wooden chapel that played organ music while you stared at a picture of Jesus and watched his eyes magically open.
My first performances for a paying audience were at the Bird Cage, a wooden theatre with a canvas roof. Inside were two hundred folding chairs on risers, arranged around a thrust Masonite stage that sat behind a patch of fake grass. A painted cutout of a birdcage, worthy of a Sotheby’s folk-art auction, hung over center stage, and painted representations of drapes framed the proscenium. The actors swept the stage, raised and lowered the curtains, cleaned the house of trash, and went out on the grounds pitching the show to visitors strolling around the park. I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low.
The show consisted of a twenty-five-minute melodrama, in which the audience was encouraged to cheer the hero and boo the villain. I appeared in “The Bungling Burglar,” performing the role of Hamilton Brainwood, a detective who was attracted to the provocatively named soubrette, Dimples Reardon. Fortunately, I ended up with the virtuous heroine, Angela Trueheart. The play was followed by a ten-minute “olio” segment involving two five-minute routines in which the actors did their specialties, usually songs or short comedy acts, and here I was able to work steadily on my fledgling comedy-magic act, five minutes at a time, four times a day (five on Sunday), for three years.
The Bird Cage was a normal theatrical nuthouse. Missed cues caused noisy pileups in the wings, or a missing prop left us hanging while we ad-libbed excuses to leave the stage and retrieve it. A forgotten line would hang in the air, searching for someone, anyone, to say it. The theatre was run by Woody Wilson, a dead ringer for W. C. Fields, and a boozer, too, and the likable George Stuart, who, on Saturday nights, would entertain the crowd with a monologue that had them roaring: “You’re from Tucson? I spent a week there one night!” Four paying customers was officially an audience, so we often did shows to resonating silence. On one of these dead afternoons, Woody Wilson peed so loudly in the echoing bathroom that it broke us up and got embarrassed laughs from our conservative family audience.
The theatre was stocked with genuine characters. Ronnie Morgan, rail thin, would dress up as Lincoln and read the Gettysburg Address for local elementary schools. On a good day, he would show us young lads cheesecake photos of his wife in a leopard-skin bikini, and even at age eighteen we thought it was weird. There was Joe Carney, a blustery and funny actor, who opened the lavatory door from the top to avoid germs. Paul Shackleton was the son of a preacher and could not tolerate a swear word, but he once laughed till he cried when we sat down under a eucalyptus tree to drink our Cokes and a bird shit on my head. For days we could not look each other in the eye without breaking into uncontrollable hysterics. John Stuart, a talented tenor with a mischievous sense of humor, once secretly put talcum powder in my top hat. Onstage, whenever I popped the hat on or off, a mushroom cloud of smoke bloomed from my head, leaving me bewildered as to why the audience was laughing.
Stormie Sherk, later to become an enormously successful Christian author and proselytizer under her married name, Stormie Omartian, was beautiful, witty, bright, and filled with an engaging spirit that was not yet holy. We performed in the melodramas together; my role was either the comic or the leading man, depending on the day of the week. She wore calico dresses that complemented her strawberry-blond hair and vanilla skin. Soon we were in love and would roam around Knott’s in our period costumes and find a period place to sit, mostly by the period church next to the man-made lake, where we would stare endlessly into each other’s eyes. We developed a love duet for the Bird Cage in which she would sing “Gypsy Rover” while I accompanied her on the five-string banjo. When she sang the song, the lyric that affected me the most was—believe it or not—“La dee doo la dee doo dah day.” We would talk of a wedding in a lilac-covered dale, and I could fill any conversational gaps with ardent recitations of poetry by Keats and Shelley, which I picked up at Santa Ana Junior College. Finally, the inevitable happened. I was a late-blooming eighteen-year-old when I had my first sexual experience, involving the virginal Stormie, a condom (swiped from my parents’ drawer), and the front seat of my car, whose windows became befogged with desire.
If Stormie had said I would look good in a burgundy ball gown, I would have gone out and bought a burgundy ball gown. Instead, she suggested that I read W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge,” a book about a quest for knowledge—universal, unquestionable knowledge. I was swept up in the book’s glorification of truth-seeking, and the idea that, like a stage magician, I could have secrets possessed by only a few. Santa Ana Junior College offered no major in philosophy, so I enrolled at Long Beach State. I paid the tuition with my Bird Cage wages, aided in my second year by a dean’s list scholarship (a hundred and eighty dollars a year) achieved through impassioned studying, fuelled by my “Razor’s Edge” romanticism. I rented a small apartment near school, so small that its street number was 1059¼. Stormie eventually moved an hour north to attend U.C.L.A., and we struggled for a while to see each other, but without the metaphor of the nineteenth century to enchant us we realized that our real lives lay before us, and we drifted apart.
At the Bird Cage, I formed the soft primordial core of what became my comedy act. Over the three years I worked there, I strung together everything I knew: some comedy juggling, a few standard magic routines, a couple of banjo songs, and some very old jokes. My act was eclectic, and it would take ten more years for me to make sense of it. However, the opportunity to perform four or five times a day gave me confidence and poise. Even though my material had few distinguishing features, the repetition helped me lose my amateur rattle.
Catalyzed by the popularity of the folk group the Kingston Trio, small music clubs began to sprout in every unlikely venue. Shopping malls and restaurant cellars now had corner-stage showrooms that sometimes did and sometimes did not serve alcohol. There were almost no clubs dedicated to comedy—they would not exist for at least another fifteen years—so every comedian was an outsider. Having no agent or any hope of finding one, I could not audition for movies or television, or even learn where auditions were held. I didn’t know about the trade papers—Variety or The Hollywood Reporter—from which I might have gathered some information. I lived in suburbia at a time when the hour-long drive to Los Angeles in my first great car—a white 1957 Chevy Bel Air, which, despite its beauty, guzzled quarts of oil and then spewed it back out in the form of white smoke—seemed like a trip across the continent in a Conestoga wagon. But the local folk clubs thrived on single acts, and their Monday nights were reserved for budding talent. Standup comedy felt like an open door. It was possible to assemble a few minutes of material and be onstage that week, as opposed to standing in line in the mysterious world of Hollywood, getting no response, no phone calls returned, and no opportunity to perform. On Mondays, I could tour around Orange County, visit three clubs in one night, and be onstage, live, in front of an audience. If I flopped at the Paradox in Tustin, I might succeed an hour later at the Ice House in Pasadena.
I continued to attend Long Beach State, taking Stormie-inspired courses in metaphysics, ethics, and logic. New and exhilarating words such as “epistemology,” “ontology,” “pragmatism,” and “existentialism”—whose definitions alone were stimulating—swirled through my head and reconfigured my thinking. One semester, I was taking Philosophy of Language, Continental Rationalism (whatever that is), History of Ethics, and, to complete the group, Self-Defense, which I found especially humiliating when, one afternoon in class, I was nearly beaten up by a girl wearing boxing gloves.
A college friend lent me some comedy records. There were three by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, several by Lenny Bruce, and one by Tom Lehrer, the great song parodist. Nichols and May recorded without an audience, and I fixated on every nuance. Their comedy was sometimes created by only a subtle vocal shift: Tell me, Dr. Schweitzer, “exactly what is this reverence for life?” Lenny Bruce, on the records I heard, was doing mostly nonpolitical bits that were hilarious. Warden at a prison riot: “We’ll meet any reasonable demands you men want! Except the vibrators!” Tom Lehrer influenced me with one bizarre joke about an individualist friend “whose name was Henry, only to give you an idea of what an individualist he was he spelled it H-E-N-3-R-Y.” Some people fall asleep at night listening to music; I fell asleep to Lenny, Tom, and Mike and Elaine. These albums broke ground and led me to a Darwinian discovery: comedy could evolve.
On campus, I experienced a life-changing moment of illumination, appropriately occurring in the bright sun. I was walking across the quad when a startling thought came to me: to implement the new concept called originality that was presenting itself in my classes in literature, poetry, and philosophy, I would have to write everything in my comedy act myself. Any line or idea with even a vague feeling of familiarity or provenance had to be expunged. There could be nothing that made the audience feel that they weren’t seeing something utterly new.
This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy—at all. But I did know that I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, pilfered from gag books or other people’s routines, and consequently lose a major portion of my already strained act. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.
I added poetry readings by T. S. Eliot and Stephen Vincent Benét to fill time, but I was desperate to invent new material. Sitting in a science class, my wandering mind searching for ideas, I stared at the periodic table of the elements that hung behind the professor. That weekend, I went onstage at the Ice House and announced, “And now I would like to do a dramatic reading of the periodic table of the elements: ‘Fe . . . Au . . . He .’ ” That bit didn’t last long.
In logic class, I opened my textbook—the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration—and was startled to find that the author Lewis Carroll was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way:
But Carroll’s were convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:
And,
These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical—yet they were still funny. Lewis Carroll’s clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, “I’m not going home tonight. I’m going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: one, all chairs are green; and, two, no chairs are green.” Not at Lewis Carroll’s level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction.
My college roommate, Phil Carey, was an artist and musician. He sang bass, not in a barbershop quartet but for a sophisticated chorale that favored complicated rhythms and mismatched twelve-tone arrangements. Phil’s contagious enthusiasm got me excited about art, particularly the avant-garde, and we quickly noted that the campus art scene was also a great arena in which to meet girls. We loved reading magazine reports of New York galleries stuffed with Warhol’s Brillo boxes and giant flowers, Lichtenstein’s cartoon panels, and throngs of people dressed in black. Phil had a developed sense of humor: his cat was named Miles, and when asked if the cat was named after Miles Davis, Phil would say, “No, it was ‘and miles to go before I sleep.’ ”
Working on a college project about Charles Ives, Phil landed an interview with Aaron Copland. However, he would have to drive from Los Angeles to Peekskill, New York, to conduct it. I jumped at the chance to go along. In the summer of 1966—I was still twenty and proud that I would make it to New York City before I turned twenty-one—we installed a homemade cot in the back of my coughing blue windowless VW bus and drove across America without stopping. I was trying to write like E. E. Cummings, so my letters to my college girlfriend Nina, all highly romantic, goopy, and filled with references to flowers and stars, read like amateur versions of his poems.
Three days after we left Los Angeles, Phil and I arrived at Copland’s house, a low-slung A-frame with floor-to-ceiling windows, in a dappled forest by the road. We knocked on the door, Copland answered, and over his shoulder we saw a group of men sitting in the living room wearing what looked like skimpy black thongs. He escorted us back to a flagstone patio, where I had the demanding job of turning the tape recorder on and off while Phil asked questions about Copland’s creative process. We emerged a half hour later with the coveted interview and got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn’t quite comprehend it.
After a detour to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to cruise the home of my idol Cummings, we drove in to glorious Manhattan. Saucer-eyed, we hustled over to the Museum of Modern Art, where we saw, among the Cézannes and the Matisses, Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, the shockingly tiny “Persistence of Memory.” We were dismayed to find that Warhol and Lichtenstein had not yet been ordained.
Before we left Cambridge, I sent this postcard to Nina:
Then I added:
I’m not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.
At the Ice House in Pasadena, I had met the comedian George McKelvey. George had an actual career and was quite funny. In reference to radio’s invisible crime fighter the Shadow, he would ask, “If you could be invisible, what would you do? [long pause] Fight crime?” He was in Aspen, Colorado, during spring break, about to work a small folk club, when he broke his leg skiing. Could I fill in for him? he asked. He generously offered me all his salary—I think it was three hundred dollars for the two weeks, which would be more than I had ever earned, anywhere, anytime. I was twenty-one years old when I headed for the freewheeling ski resort.
In March of 1967, I arrived at a prefab house just outside Aspen. Visiting entertainers were bunked there, and after I made my way through the crunchy snow and stowed my suitcase under my bed several of us introduced ourselves. One was my co-bill, John McClure, a lanky guitarist with an acute sense of humor. Wandering in later was a pretty waitress named Linda Byers, who, I assumed, would fall for me because of my carefully designed, poetry-quoting, artist’s persona, but who, to my surprise, chose John, and they formed a long-term relationship. Also in the house was one of the few English comedians working in America, Jonathan Moore, who played a bagpipe to open his act, scaring the audience with its ancient howl as he entered the club from behind them. Jonathan was older than the rest of us. He had been around, wore sunglasses indoors, and had the charm of a wellspoken cynic.
The night club, the Abbey Cellar on Galena Street, was a basement in the middle of town and hard even for us to find. John and I, in order to drum up business, left little cards on the tables in the upstairs restaurant that read “Steve Martin / John McClure, Entertainment Ordinaire,” which to me was hilariously funny but never seemed to be noticed as a joke.
Aspen was no place for poetry readings, and they were stripped permanently from my act. I was now doing my triptych of banjo playing, comedy, and magic. One evening at the Abbey Cellar, I had my first experience with a serious heckler, who, sitting at a front table with his wife and another straight-looking couple, stood up and said, “See if you think this is funny,” and threw a glass of red wine at me. The problem for him was that, at this point in the evening, the employees outnumbered the audience. A few seconds later, John McClure and the rough, tough Irish bartender appeared like centurions and escorted him out. Eventually, his friends slunk out, too. The expulsion had a downside: the audience was now smaller by two-thirds and in shock, and sat in stunned silence for the rest of my show. Later, I developed a few defensive lines to use against the unruly: “Oh, I remember when I had my first beer.” And if that didn’t cool them off I would use a psychological trick. I would lower my voice and continue with my act, talking almost inaudibly. The audience couldn’t hear the show, and they would shut the heckler up on their own.
My experience at the Abbey Cellar was important to me, but not as important as what was going on after hours. John and I shared a room, and Linda would join us for lengthy chats. What we discussed was the new Zeitgeist. I don’t know how it got to this bedroom in Aspen, but it was creeping everywhere simultaneously. I didn’t know its name yet but found out later that it was called Flower Power, and I was excited to learn that we were now living in the Age of Aquarius, an age when, at least astrologically, the world would be taken over by macramé. Anticorporate, individual, and freak-based, the new philosophy proposed that all we had to do was love each other and there would be no more wars or strife. Nothing could have seemed newer or more appealing. The word “love” was being tossed around as though only we insiders knew its definition. The vast numbers of us who changed our lives around this belief proved that, yes, it is possible to fool all of the people some of the time. But any new social philosophy is good for creativity. New music was springing up, new graphics twisted and swirled as if on LSD, and an older generation was being glacially inched aside to make room for the freshly weaned new one. (The art world, always contrarian, responded to psychedelia with monochrome and minimalism.) It was fun trying to “turn” a young conservative, which was easy because our music was better. I remember trying to convince a visiting member of the Dallas Ski Club that “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy)” was not really a good song, no matter how much he liked it. After two weeks in Aspen, I went back to Los Angeles feeling like an anointed prophet, taking my friends aside and burping out the new philosophy.
I continued to pursue my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher (teaching is, after all, a form of show business). I’m not sure what the purpose of fooling myself was, but I toyed with the idea for several semesters. I concluded that not to continue with comedy would leave a question in my mind that would nag me for the rest of my life: Could I have had a career in performing? Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense. A classmate, Ron Barnette, and I spent hours engaged in late-night mind-altering dialogues in laundromats and parking lots, discussing Wittgenstein, whose investigations disallowed so many types of philosophical discussions that we became convinced that the very discussion we were having was impossible. Soon I felt that a career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.
I was living several lives at once: I was a student at Long Beach State; I still worked at the Bird Cage Theatre; and at night I performed in various folk clubs with an eclectic, homemade comedy routine that was held together with wire and glue. I was still an opening act, and one of the clubs I played was Ledbetter’s, a comparatively classy beer-and-wine nightspot a few blocks from U.C.L.A. that catered to the college crowd. Fats Johnson, a jovial folksinger who dressed to kill in black suits with white ruffled shirts and wore elaborate rings on his guitar-strumming hand, often headlined the club. One night, I asked him about his philosophy of dressing for the stage. He said, firmly, “Always look better than they do.”
Now that most of my work was in Westwood, Long Beach State, forty miles away, seemed like Siberia. I transferred to U.C.L.A., so I could be closer to the action, and I took several courses there. One was an acting class, the kind that feels like prison camp and treats students like detainees who need to be broken; another was a course in television writing, which seemed practical. I also continued my studies in philosophy. I had done pretty well in symbolic logic at Long Beach, so I signed up for advanced symbolic logic at my new school. Saying that I was studying advanced symbolic logic at U.C.L.A. had a nice ring; what had been nerdy in high school now had mystique. On the first day of class, however, I discovered that U.C.L.A. used a different set of symbols from those I had learned at Long Beach. To catch up, I added Logic 101, which meant I was studying beginning logic and advanced logic at the same time. I was overwhelmed, and shocked to find that I couldn’t keep up. I abruptly changed my major to theatre and, free from the workload of my logic classes, took a relaxing inhale of crisp California air. But on the exhale I realized that I was now investing in no other future but show business.
Overnight, there were dozens of new people in my life. Pot smoking was de rigueur—this being the sixties—and even though I was armed with only a comedy act that was at best hit-and-miss, I was fearless and ready to go. Among the crowd of singers and musicians whose local fame I assumed was worldwide was a sylphlike figure, a nonsinger and nonmusician, who nonetheless seemed to be regarded quite highly in this small showbiz matrix. Her name was Melissa, but her friends called her Mitzi. She was twenty-one years old, with a Katharine Hepburn beauty and a similarly willowy frame. She was intelligent, energetic, and lit from within. Her hair was ash brown, and always at the end of one of her long and slender arms was a Nikon camera with a lens the size of a can of Campbell’s soup.
When her current romance withered, Mitzi and I became entwined. After several weeks of courtship, I was ready for family inspection, and she invited me to her parents’ house for dinner. Mitzi’s last name was Trumbo. Her father was the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were blacklisted during the Red scare of the late forties. During his congressional hearing, Trumbo vociferously challenged the right of his inquisitors to interrogate him, prompting a frustrated committee member to yell, “This is typical Communist tactics!” in a futile attempt to get him to shut up. It was Trumbo who wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for “Spartacus,” “Lonely Are the Brave,” “Hawaii,” “Exodus,” and “Papillon”; whose personal letters read like Swiftian essays; who had to flee to Mexico and stay for several years, writing under pseudonyms such as Sam Jackson and James Bonham in order to escape McCarthyism; and whom, at this stage in my tunnel-visioned life, I had never heard of.
From my perspective, Mitzi was a sophisticate. She had travelled. She was politically aware and had attended Reed College, in Oregon, a bastion of liberal thought. Her intelligence was informed by her family history. When I went to dinner at her home in the Hollywood Hills, I did not know that the months I would spend in this family’s graces would broaden my life.
My first glimpse of Dalton Trumbo revealed an engrossed intellect—not finessing his latest screenplay but sorting the seeds and stems from a brick of pot. “Pop smokes marijuana,” Mitzi explained, “with the wishful thought of cutting down on his drinking.” Sometimes, from their balcony, I would see Trumbo walking laps around the perimeter of the pool. He held a small counter in one hand and clicked it every time he passed the diving board. These health walks were compromised by the cigarette he constantly held in his other hand.
Dalton Trumbo was the first raconteur I ever met. The family dinners—frequented by art dealers, actors, and artists of all kinds, including the screenwriters Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, Jr., and the director George Roy Hill—were lively, political, and funny. I had never been in a house where conversations were held during dinner or where food was placed before me after being prepared behind closed doors. It was also the first time I ever heard swear words spoken by adults in front of their offspring. Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam bombing policy dominated the conversation, and the government’s ironfisted response to war protesters rankled the dinner guests, since the Hollywood Ten were all familiar with oppression. Trumbo had a patriarchal delivery whether he was on a rant or discussing art or slinging wit, but nothing he said was élitist—though I do remember him saying, as he spread his arms to indicate the china and silver serving ladles, “Admittedly, we do live well.”
The Trumbo house was modern, built on a hillside, and extended down three floors into a ravine. The walls in the living room give me my most vivid memory of the house, for they were covered with art. Political art. I had never seen real paintings in a house, and this might have been where my own inclination toward owning pictures began. In the dining room was a William Gropper, depicting members of the House Un-American Activities Committee grotesquely outlined in fluorescent green against a murky background. There was a Raphael Soyer, a Moses Soyer, and a Jack Levine painting of Hindenburg making Hitler chancellor. These artists are obscure today but not forgotten. Gropper’s art depicted politicos as porcine bullies, and Jack Levine’s well-brushed social realism had a biting edge that fit the politics of the family perfectly.
One afternoon, on the way to the Trumbo house, Mitzi warned me, “Pop’s in a bad mood today. He’s got a screenplay due in four days and he hasn’t started it yet.” The screenplay was for the movie “The Fixer,” starring Alan Bates. Eventually, the work got done and the movie was ready to shoot. Trumbo encouraged Mitzi to join him, and she was whisked off to Budapest. After I’d received several charming letters from her and then noticed a lag in the regularity of their arrival, Mitzi sent me a gentle and direct Dear John letter. She had been swept away by the director John Frankenheimer, who, twenty years later, tried and failed to seduce my then wife, Victoria Tennant, whom he was directing in a movie. Mitzi was simply too alluring to be left alone in a foreign country, and I was too hormonal to be left alone in Hollywood. Incidentally, Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.
By now I had ingratiated myself with enough folk clubs that I wondered if I could possibly support myself without the security of my steady job at Knott’s Berry Farm. Bumping up against age twenty-two, I looked around the Bird Cage and saw actors who had been working there fifteen years and counting, and I knew it could be a trap for me. With some trepidation, I gave notice. Stormie was gone, John Stuart and Paul Shackleton were gone, too, so there were no actual tearful goodbyes. Handshakes with George and Woody. Three years after I had started at the Bird Cage, I slipped away almost unnoticed.
A few years ago, after giving in to a sentimental urge to visit Knott’s Berry Farm and the little theatre where I got my start, I found myself in the deserted lobby of the Bird Cage, long since closed. It looked as though time had stopped the day I left. On one wall were photos from various productions, some of them including me as resident goofball. I tugged on the theatre door; it was locked. I was about to give up when I remembered a back entrance in the employees-only area, a clunky, oversized wooden gate that rarely locked because it was so rickety. I sneaked behind the theatre and opened the door, which, for the millionth time, had failed to latch. The darkened theatre flooded with sunlight, and I stepped inside and quickly shut the door. Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness.
I went backstage and had a muscle memory of how to raise and lower the curtain, tying it off with a looping knot shown to me on my first day of work. I fiddled with the sole lighting rheostat, as antique as Edison. I stood on the stage and looked out at the empty theatre and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.
Driving home along the Santa Ana Freeway, I was unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my mind, as though I had asked the question of a Magic 8-Ball: I wanted to be there again—if only for a day—indulging in high spirits and high jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious. ♦
This is drawn from “Born Standing Up.”
