FAME’S A BITCH
Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be famous. Actually, it all goes back to the day when I was four years old and broke my nose by getting it stuck in the back bumper of a car.
I’d been riding my tricycle on a circular track behind my apartment building in suburban Chicago on a November 1975 afternoon, with my best friend Joey Paretti (who grew up to be diagnosed as a psychotic sociopath) yelling out his best Howard Cosell impersonation from the top of the adjoining playground’s slide: “Kozlowski’s coming around the turn! Go faster, FASTER, FASTER!!!” until I pedaled so fast I careened onto two wheels and spun out of control towards my fateful meeting with the trunk of a car.
I smacked into it, falling off my now-crushed tricycle as my face slid down the trunk and locked my nose into the crevice between the back bumper and chrome that most ‘70s cars had back then. I was trapped, crying, squealing for Joey to get my mom (like SHE would know how to calmly handle this!) and watching him run away through the tear-stained reflection of the chrome.
15 minutes later, Joey was back, alright – but instead of bringing my mom, he brought every kid in the neighborhood. And it was only thanks to the commotion caused by their laughing uproariously at me that my mom noticed something was wrong and came down to save me. Actually, she called the fire department to save me, by unscrewing the chrome from the bumper, and then made sure Joey’s mom gave his butt the pounding of a lifetime.
Sure, it hurt. And because I didn’t understand what the doctor meant when he asked if I wanted plastic surgery and I thought it meant he’d remove my nose and replace it with a plastic nose and mustache that looked like Groucho Marx, I shrieked, “NO!!!! No plastic surgery!” So I still breathe like Darth Vader and talk as nasally as Woody Allen more than 30 years later.
But I was famous! Every kid knew me! I was the talk of the neighborhood!
And on one writing day in third grade, now living down South in Arkansas, I reached deep into my eight years of living experience, and wrote the story of the incident and got to read it on what became my first standup tour – in which my teacher Sister Barbara let me read the story all the way from the first grade through the fourth grade classroom of St. Edward’s Catholic grade school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
You might think that my brush with celebrity status would have prepared me for my future life mixing it up with real celebrities as a performer and an entertainment reporter out here in Hollywood. But no, sadly, it has not. I’ve gotten caught following Hugh Hefner into the bathroom at the Comedy Store (I was just trying to shake his hand, I swear!). When guitarist John Mayer asked for my name when we met on the street, all I could reply was, “I’mareallybigfan!” and when I ran smack into Vince Vaughn at the Bicycle Casino, I said “Oh! God!!!” and he snidely replied, “Nope. Just Vince,” and kept walking. Modesty – how refreshing!
I also have narcolepsy, so I’ve fallen asleep in close-up in the studio audience on live national television during an episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” I also fell asleep while listening to star comic Carlos Mencia reveal the most tragic moments of his life while riding around East L.A. in his Mercedes for an interview. To complete the trifecta, I snored so loud at a live performance of “Death and the Maiden” starring “Frasier’s” TV dad, John Mahoney, that Mahoney actually stopped cold on stage and stared me down until I was removed from the 10th row – and then refused to be interviewed by me later! The nerve!
But nothing can match my encounter with Roger Ebert, America’s most beloved – and rotund – movie critic. The year was 1999, and I was back in Chicago and got an early screening ticket to see the modern cinematic classic (okay, atrocity) “Forces of Nature,” starring Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock.
I though that there would be just regular folk in the audience that night, that critics normally saw films in a secret screening room that kept them away from the hoi polloi as they rendered their judgments. But as I took my seat, stuffing my backpack under my chair that evening, I settled in for the film and immediately noticed a nice touch in the film’s sound design: See, in the film’s opening moment, Ben Affleck is visiting his dying granddad in the hospital and they manage to make peace as the song “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafts softly, spookily in the background – or so I thought.
But then the scene changed, and the music didn’t. I thought this was odd, because now Sandra Bullock’s character had the same song playing softly in the background, at the same level – and she was outdoors and all the way across America. But it wasn’t until the Sinatra tune was wafting under its third straight, unrelated scene that I and my fellow moviegoers realized something was wrong.
As the Chairman of the Board continued to sing and swing with a big band crashing loudly behind him, people started turning around and asking each other if they were playing the song. I turned and scowled at others, still unaware of my culpability. But as the song continued into its fifth scene and people are shooting me looks that are now twice as dirty in return, I feel a tap on my shoulder from behind.
It was Roger Ebert. And he was asking me one mortifying question: “Are you sure It’s not you?”
At that moment, my jaw dropped and I leaped from my seat – only to hear the Sinatra song CRANKing at full volume! I realized now that the music WAS in fact, coming out from under my ass – and my backpack!
I picked up the backpack like I was Bruce Willis attempting to hoist a bomb out of a skyscraper and started running at full speed up the aisle, people now turning and watching my every step as the song continued to blast away.
I burst out the theater doors, threw the bag on the floor of the lobby and emptied its contents at once, in a mass of papers, books, magazines and electronic equipment that made the Unabomber look rational. The music kept playing, louder than ever, while theater employees ran up and yelled out, “What are you DOING?!” and a studio PR person for the film practically started crying, “Are you TRYING to ruin my movie?!”
I yelled out “No!” as I finally grasped the tape player in my hands and managed to stop the recording. And as silence set in, I realized it was a tape I made earlier in the middle of an acting class, as background music for a scene study. I took the tape out and removed the batteries and then asked the crying studio guy if I could go back in now. He demanded to hold onto my tape recorder but let me in from there. As I shuffled shamefully back to my seat, I looked back over my shoulder at Ebert. He looked right back at me with a look that shot through my soul, and muttered ‘Thank you.”
The rest of the movie seemed uneventful by comparison; critics savaged it and the audience sat fitfully bored as it came to its turgid conclusion. That week, I waited eagerly for the Friday paper to come out, as I imagined I’d have to be an integral part of Monsieur Ebert’s review – that surely he’d have to open by writing, “The most entertaining part of ‘Forces of Nature’ didn’t happen on the screen. It was right in my theater…
But he never wrote that. And I still await my first glowing notice from Ebert.
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