“Naked Postal Zone” was written by Margot and taped by Doug. Margie’s writing is typically other-wordly and Doug did a good job of capturing a film noir quality. He later added the scratch marks to make it look aged.
Chucklehead’s “Octopus Tart” Sketch
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This sketch was one of the earliest we did, by Margot Sheehan, and it made a comeback when we were at La Mama. Margot’s skits were all twisted in a sort of whimsical way. This is like a Mary Poppins song on acid. Whenever the actors got bored with a script, they would add an edge to it. (When Michael got bored, she would play the characters as drunks, just for the hell of it.) Here, Mark (Cubby) Sarto appears to be getting increasingly frustrated with the rube played by the late, great Steve Salter that he seems ready to tear his arms off!
Marketing “Tales”
It started with a message on my answering machine. The voice sounded like that of an Indian woman, and the only syllables I could understand were “Tale o’ de Troupe,” which were repeated several times. The next time the person called, I picked up. I immediately explained that I couldn’t understand a thing that was being said, and offered up my e-mail address.
It was a book marketing company based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but I’m convinced they do a lot of outsourcing. I asked about that in an e-mail and got no response. When I finally got copies of the e-mail ad (allegedly sent to one million recipients) and the media release, I was interested in the very idiomatic English. For example, the title of the press release was “Bumping with This Tricky World’s Unexpected Twists.” In paragraph one, it says “People have their respective roles and characters to play; these characters are just beginning to learn who they are. There’s nothing in the world that lasts so everyone is responsible for making his own life precious by letting go of expectations and enjoying the joy that life brings.” These were ideas that I shared with the company, but their phrasing was quite different. I decided to go with the weird wording just for the hell of it.
My friend Helen shared an image of some woman in Nairobi, holding the phone in one hand and holding an infant to her breast in the other—and being the breadwinner for dozens of family members. I didn’t make a single sale from these peoples’ efforts.
One day in January, however, I got an e-mail from someone who had bought the book off his Website but it hadn’t arrived. I promptly looked at Paypal and, sure enough, this person had ordered a copy. I sent it to her immediately. It turns out she was someone I was drinking with at the local pub, The Black Cow, during last year’s blackout, with whom I discussed my books. So, I’ve decided that drinking at the Cow is a good marketing strategy and I plan to do it often.
“Old Friend” video by Chucklehead
This was a very early video we shot. It was one of several skits I wrote about Elliot and Deirdre, a depraved couple who loved to mess with people’s heads. (I had actually briefly met such a couple and was so intrigued I wanted to base characters on them. In this one, shot in front of the Westbeth Theater, they doing a number on some uptight, long-haired would-be Lothario, played by me! Fortunately, I got to play much more interesting characters in future videos–mostly bums.
Multiplex-1 by Chucklehead
Once again, the Multiplex concept gave Chucklehead a chance to do movie and play parodies. This was taped while we were still back at the Westbeth Theatre near the West Side Highway. We especially liked to skewer performance art, as with “Brandos Descending a Staircase.” The masks are several of Doug’s Tor Johnson masks (Tor Johnson being the big, bald Swedish wrestler in Ed Woods’ infamous “Plan Nine from Outer Space”). I’m not sure why Doug had a bunch of Tor Johnson masks in the first place.
“Casual Sex” from “Club Ted,” by Jay Martel
When the usher let us in, I saw that the space was fairly typical of off-off Broadway Theatre—that is, tiny. Inside the dark, hot, dusty room were four rows of two columns of five folding chairs arranged on a platform with four small tiers. The smell of sawdust was in the air. Natasha’s eyes widened. The last thing we had gone to see together was “Cats.”
Unlike a Broadway show, here there was no predicting what it would be like. It could be an amazing play. It could be a piece of crap. It could be an amazing piece of crap. Among us 25 audience members, there was sort of a shared anxiousness of not knowing. Going to a seedy little theatre like this one was akin to what I imagined it would have been like to visit a speakeasy in the 1920s. The cast and audience were conspiring to create a little secret society with rules of our own.
Every so often, I had ventured into one of these off-off Broadway productions at the prodding of some friend or co-worker, only to watch two or three actors in turtlenecks mime and pontificate their way through two-hour sensory deprivation experiments. Audience members would sit patiently in these folding metal torture chairs, flex their feet to avoid calf cramps, stifle their yawns, applaud politely at the end, stay long enough to show the actor or playwright that they did their duty by attending, and then retreat before having to lie convincingly about how good the show was. I hoped this wasn’t one of those.
Snazzy music from a synthesizer blasted over the speakers. The lights came up on some sort of South American native pulling tourists through the jungle on an enormous cart. It wasn’t one of these jungles painted on a backdrop begging the audience to be taken seriously. There were solid vines, albeit made of plastic, that the actors had to constantly push their way through. They were singing a song about being in paradise. And so “Club Ted” began.
During this first musical number, as the tourists were arriving, Natasha began to giggle. That was a good sign. “What is it?” I whispered.
“I really like the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt!” she said. “He’s so cute!”
I could immediately spot the fat guy to whom she was referring. I had him clocked at about 300 pounds. But I saw the appeal. He had these shining, expressive eyes, soft cheeks, and an expansive, innocent smile, like some enormous baby bundle of joy. Where did he find this guy? I wondered. Did he put in a casting call for “Adorable Fat Guy?”
Dirk was playing the sleazy owner of a resort situated in an unstable South or Latin American dictatorship. Near the beginning he is complaining to the local general, a tall dark man with slick black hair, that his death squad is performing its executions too close to the tennis courts and that members have been complaining about the noise. It was an excellent premise, Dirk was good in his role, and I had no idea where he got his Latin American general.
The second musical number was something called, “Casual Sex,” in which Dirk was fondling, straddling, leapfrogging with, and everything short of dry humping two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in real life, dressed in bikinis. One of them was this curvy, breezy blonde with a sensually fleshy butt, dripping with brattiness and superior attitude. The other was a veritable Penthouse Pet of the Month—a dark-haired petite but busty Jewish or Italian girl with a sort of aggressive, in-your-face sexuality. That lucky sonofabitch. I wondered if he was fucking either one of them or both. God, I hated my stupid little desk job.
“That’s a pretty cheap laugh, if you ask me,” Natasha whispered. Though I disagreed, I nodded just to shut her up.
–excerpt from “Larger than Life, from Tales of the Troupe.
Doug, who taped this and Jay, who wrote it, were ashamed at the bad singing (so says Jay) and shoddy camera work. This footage was actually to provide close-ups for another piece of footage that showed the stage from a distance. Anyway, this was the song that inspired me to write for the theater and consort with actresses.
Alan Hale Junior’s Seafood Sauce Commercial by Chucklehead
I was deeply touched when fellow Chucklehead writer Anne said she liked this ad, because I’m pretty sure I wrote it. It was part of our last show, called “Stocks and Prawns,” a mish-mash of weird story lines barely glued together. My goal was to make the most disgusting commercial imaginable, starting with “What’s that smell? It’s shrimpy the shrimp!” and “Can I lick the bag?” Steve, as the voice of Shrimpy, added a speech impediment, and Cubby and Rose played really repulsive little kids with seafood sauce all over their faces. You can read the whole story of shooting “Stocks and Prawns” in my Tale, “Requiem for Sea Captain Frank.”
Chucklehead and “Crazy Eddie” Song
I have no idea when this was taped. It was forwarded to me by Anne, who was one of the Chucklehead writers. Jay, Michael, Ronnie, and Mark are all in it. To earn some scratch, the Chucklehead performers performed in all kinds of ads for Crazy Eddie, which was a discount purveyor of electronics. The spokesguy used to end every commercial with “His prices are INSANE!!!” Can’t wait to get to the bottom of this one.
Chuckle Triplex by Chucklehead
We used the Chucklehead Multiplex format to run three quick movie parodies. I was not around for these particular shoots. I’m guessing Cubby made the car–and got plenty of funny looks while “driving” it down the street. Since our short-lived director during that time, Randy Kovitz, was a professional fight director, it was inevitable that we would have some fight scenes, as in “Singles of Fury,” and Chandler Sante and Michael Huston had actually practiced karate. Randy didn’t last long as director only because the troupe was too large and unruly for him. I’m guessing “Sambo,” in which Steve Salter played the title role, was shot in Central Park.
Noble Oil Ad by Chucklehead
This fake ad was from Chuckelehead’s last show, “Stocks and Prawns,” written as an ensemble with mixed results. This video actually introduces Sea Captain Frank, played by Cubby. We shot it off the Staten Island Ferry in early December, and developed quite an audience doing it.
In reality, Sea Captain Frank is a terrible alcoholic, and runs the tanker into a reef. This happened right after the Exxon-Valdez disaster, and I was very wary of making Sea Captain Frank a carbon copy of Hazelwood–so I gave him the added quirk of his buggering his men when they’re at the helm. Yeah, it was a cheap laugh but an effective one.
