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November 17, a brief announcement on Saturday Night Live, in response to the negative mail: “So you’re trying to get me to stop wrestling on television, huh? Well, there’s NO WAY YOU’RE GOING TO DO IT! I will wrestle on every show! I will wrestle on every variety show, on every talk show! You will not be able to turn the dial fast enough! YOU’LL NEVER GET RID OF ME UNTIL A WOMAN BEATS ME IN A WRESTLING MATCH!! That’s right! But there’s not a woman who can beat me BECAUSE WOMEN DO NOT HAVE THE BRAINS!!! Shadduppppp! Shaddupppppp!!” And because Diana Nyad had never responded to his gauntlet, he now challenged all of the rest of them out there, offering a thousand dollars and the shaved head and the promise to keep his rubbing off television forever. He asked them to send photographs and statistics and the reasons they wanted to wrestle him and certain people at Saturday Night Live (who were amenable to his input) would decide which finalists would be flown in to wrestle him on the program three days before Christmas. (The photographs were imperative.) Guest host Bea Arthur then came on camera and said, “Boy, I hope somebody beats him. And beats him badly!” He screamed at her from the sidelines—“Shadduppp! Shaddupppp! I’ll take you on, baby!”

His sister and his brother collected him on Thanksgiving morning, very early, at Mimi Lambert’s Upper East Side apartment, where he had spent the night. Mimi playfully flashed her naked breasts for them as Michael and Carol dragged Andy to the elevator. The three of them rushed to Macy’s and boarded a circus float on which they rode in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Andy wore ringmaster togs and Michael attempted to be a juggler and Carol was a trapeze princess in pink and they waved at people for hours. Andy had agreed to be in the parade only if he could bring his siblings. Andy had agreed to perform two nights later at Kutsher’s Resort up in the Borscht Belt only if he could bring his family—which meant a complimentary weekend stay for Stanley and Janice and Michael and Carol and Grandma Lillie and Grandma Pearl, who would turn eighty on Sunday. He brought them all onstage as well that night, which was the twenty-fourth, and each performed acts perfected around the Kaufman dinner table—Michael sang “La Bamba” and Carol imitated Maurice Chevalier and Pearl told the one about the dog at temple and Lillie sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” with her famous grandson and Stanley and Janice wisely opted to remain silent, as did the audience, uncomfortably so, except when Andy polled the crowd as to whether or not they enjoyed his family. They did not enjoy his family. Nor did they enjoy him or any part of his one hour and forty-five minutes (elongated by the wrestling) of meandering stagecraft. He shed conga tears for them. They did not care. They were, for the most part, silver- and blue-haired Jewish retirees who came to Kutsher’s for a weekend of bingo and bridge and ballroom dancing. “A bunch of old farts” was what Stanley called them. Gregg Sutton would recall, “I broke a complete sweat. It was the worst gig that I’d ever been a part of. I was dying with Andy and the family up there. The only person who didn’t think it was that bad was Andy. He was oblivious and was just going through it. He was getting a kick out of having his grandmothers and his family up onstage, and they were dying.” The rest of the band had wanted to quit somewhere in the middle. Sutton said, “You stay right there, fuckers!” That was how bad it was.

Afterward, Andy sat for a filmed interview with Seth Schultz of the Brooklyn showcase club Pips, who was making a documentary about the history of Pips. Andy recalled with delight the free hot fudge sundaes he had consumed there years before. Then he spoke of the audience he had just left and looked tired as he did so and he seemed to be convincing himself that it had not gone well—“Maybe they thought I wanted them to boo and hiss at me, but gosh, they were so rude!” He repeated the word rude five times in two