OPEN ON: EXTERIOR, A CHICAGO STREET, FEBRUARY, 1983.
A young me is walking, determinedly, down Wells Street on the Near North Side of Chicago—a lively strip of bars, restaurants, and porn emporiums. The brutal wind whips, cold enough to hurt your face and your feelings. White snow blankets the street, gray slush devouring its edges. I’m twenty and in my fourth year of college. The great maw of my future looms. It looms like a maniac. Enough with the looming! I’ve been writing and performing comedy, mostly on the radio, at Southern Illinois University, with my madcap friend Tim Thomas. And after months—years, really—of cranking out short comic satires and curiosities, I am wondering: How does it work?
“It” being show biz. Hollywood. A career making television, movies, what have you. Seriously, what have you? I’ll take anything. It’s all such a blind guess at this point. It all seems so impossible, knowing what to aim for, what to commit to, where to step next. Nasty gray slush and potholes abound; in fact, forget what I said about white snow blanketing streets. There’s no white to be seen—it’s all gray, all foreboding.
So what was I doing on Wells Street? I’d used my college-radio credentials to get an interview with the great Joyce Sloane. Joyce was the den mother of Second City theatre, in Chicago. She shepherded lives and creative choices at that legendary comedy venue for decades, and she did it with a personal touch—like if your mom ran a theatre, but also if your mom liked theatre and if she merely rolled her eyes at the smell of pot. Joyce would one day give me my big break. Back in 1983, she gave me an hour of her time.
I sat in her office and peppered her with names, asking her to tell me about their paths to greatness: John Belushi, Joe Flaherty, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. . . . I wanted to hear a story that sounded like something I might duplicate.
“Joe Flaherty? Joe was in Pennsylvania, and he packed himself a sack lunch and got on the bus to Chicago. He came right to the theatre and walked in and said, ‘Give me a chance,’ and we did, and he was wonderful!”
All the stories she told involved the performers’ innate self-confidence and undeniable talent. Success on this renowned Chicago stage seemed to have been a three-step process, at most:
- Enter Second City theatre.
- Ask to be put on the stage.
- Be gifted.
“John Belushi? He showed up to the theatre one day and said, ‘Put me on that stage right now!’ and I said, ‘You get up there, Mister!’ and he was absolutely a riot and just tore the house down!”
“Billy Murray? He was here with his brother Brian, and he was making everyone laugh, and we said, ‘Get on that stage right now, you!’ and he went up there, and we all said, ‘Yay!’ ”
“Wow,” I sputtered, as our time wrapped up. Inside, I was dying, thinking, “Shit. O.K., I can’t do this. I’m just a regular person. I’m not ‘gifted’ or ‘special’ or ‘worthy.’ ” After all, I’d been sitting in her office for an hour already, and no one had said, “You get up on that stage right now, Mister!” I thanked Joyce and tried to keep my chin up as I walked out into the February day that had somehow got even colder, grayer, more Chicago-y than it already was.
I walked down Wells Street, past a cigar store, past Zanies comedy club, with head shots of someone named Jay Leno, a standup comic with a prank oversized chin for yuks. I pondered my fate and the question of how cold a city should be. (Not this cold, I can tell you.) I ducked inside a bookstore because I liked books and there was less wind inside.
I browsed the Theatre section, not that I felt comfortable there—I was years away from feeling comfortable with “the theatre,” or with calling myself an actor without giggling in embarrassment. I thumbed awkwardly through books on something called “improvisation,” which, in my limited understanding, was related to sketch comedy, the thing young me loved most in this world beyond my brothers and sisters (all six of them).
At this point in my life I was in love with all things sketch comedy. And improvisation seemed a way into the world of sketch—a swift way in, by simply learning some exercises. A shortcut! I’d take it. Except I should give up on this whole thing—wasn’t that what the universe had just made abundantly clear?
I leafed through two books: Viola Spolin’s hefty tome “Improvisation for the Theater” and Keith Johnstone’s slimmer, idiosyncratic “Impro.” I was leaning toward the shorter, more soulful of the two when into the store ambled a jabbering mound of clothing with a human being inside. He appeared to be some kind of down-on-his-luck wizard, muttering incantations. And, actually, I would find out, the man was a witch, and he would change the course of my thinking and even my life on that very day.
A witch, ladies and gentlemen. He called himself that with pride!
The woman behind the counter called him Del. “No, Del, that book isn’t in yet.” “Yes, Del, you can use the washroom, but please try to hit the inside of the toilet.” I don’t remember exactly what she said to him, but she kept saying “Del.” Del . . . where did I know that name from? I’d seen it before, maybe twice. In the program for a Second City revue that I’d attended when I was fourteen, six years earlier. Or possibly as one of the final credits on the long scroll at the end of “Saturday Night Live,” where Del Close had briefly worked as an “acting coach.” I did not know what Del Close looked like, and I certainly didn’t know his legendary status as a guru of sketch-comedy performers, because that hadn’t happened yet.
