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Pouring rain drenched opening night but stopped no one from coming and the seats filled and the people waited … and waited … while deafening roller-rink organ music pummeled their eardrums … and finally Clifton appeared and was eventually pelted with xerox paper and left not soon enough (even George said Clifton was on too long, strutting around, for my purposes) and Andy bounced out to “Oklahoma” and the show kept building in usual fashion—although, as with birthday party children, he showed them cartoons such as Thomas Jefferski—and he told them that if they were good he would have special treats for them later and he wrestled/rubbed a woman from the audience, pinning her one second before the three-minute bell, whereupon a bald-headed mammoth goon bounded onto the stage screaming, “Why don’t you pick on a man, you skinny little geek!” And this was professional Hollywood stuntman Jay York and he crushed Andy’s larynx in a headlock and twisted Andy’s fingers and lifted Andy by the neck and threw him all over the stage and Andy screamed, “George! George! Help!” and they had been rehearsing this all week, but Andy had neglected to mention such to his family, and suddenly Janice started screaming from her seat, “George! George! Help him! George!” And Judd Hirsch, who was sitting with Janice and Stanley and Carol, would recall, “I’m looking at his mother and his father, who are clawing the arms of their chairs, thinking that their son is going to be injured. His mother grabs my wrist—she doesn’t even know me—and says, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna get killed!’ I’m now truly fooled because I thought she was part of the act. I’m thinking I’m in a room with another act sitting beside me playing his family. I thought, How did he find these people who look like him? He created the illusion that anything could happen in that auditorium. And, in truth, he was even fooling them!” But then Zmuda, in referee stripes, passed a large prop can of spinach to Andy, who pretended to swallow its contents and freed himself from York, and Sutton had the band strike up “Popeye the Sailor Man” and Andy smugly strutted and began to toss York around the stage until York begged for mercy.

Then later, after Foreign Man (who told the audience “Tenk you veddy much ladies and gentlemen so far everytheeng I have done for you tonight really I am only foolink thees ees de real me”) became de Elveece, and after Andy led the audience in a singalong of “This Friendly World,” he explained that he wasn’t Clifton and demonstrated his own version of Clifton, without disguise, singing “Carolina in the Morning” and then had the real Clifton come out to sing it with him and his brother Michael stepped forth wearing Ken Chase’s makeup and Clifton’s gaudy apparel and replicated the adenoidal Clifton voice with much swagger. Then Clifton took a bow and Clifton’s wife and daughter took a bow and so did Jay York and then Andy announced, “And now direct from Radio City Music Hall in New York—the Rockettes!” And thirteen costumed high-kicking women who were not the Rockettes danced out. And then Andy said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!” And the curtain lifted and one hundred fifty black gospel singers in robes who were most certainly not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir raised their voices to the heavens and the audience was ecstatic and they stood applauding endlessly and then Santa Claus, who was Mel Sherer, whom Clifton had assaulted earlier, flew down from the rafters in a sled and styrofoam snowflakes fell everywhere and Andy told the audience that ten buses were waiting in front of the theater to take everyone for cookies and milk. “When he walked us into the street and there were these buses, it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen in my life,” said Dick Ebersol, who had put him on Saturday Night Live three years earlier and now beheld the utter scope of the absurdity that he had wrought.

At the Olde Spaghetti Factory, Andy and his family and