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By Root 1277 0

’s Broadway debut, yet! She went into St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, known for its excellence in heart procedures, in early May not long before Mother’s Day and the operation was a success and on the day she was supposed to come home she suffered a massive stroke, which paralyzed the right side of her body and heavily affected her speech. She couldn’t talk for a long while afterward, and when she did she didn’t sound much like Mommy anymore. Andy stayed on Grassfield Road all through May and would go to the hospital and pat her hand and tell her that he would find some kind of cure to make her better and she would nod and try to smile. She would be all right, he knew, but she wouldn’t be quite the same, which he didn’t want to know. All through these famous years, he had always come home as much as possible because Mommy really was his anchor and would always take care of him and make him breakfast in the late afternoon and listen to his ideas. And she was the one who had taught him about vitamins—to take lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of vitamins—and he was the one who had taught her about meditation, just like he had with Michael and Carol, and Daddy would remember driving along with the three of them meditating in the car and always said it was like being stuck in a car full of zombies. The whole family suddenly felt sort of lost, but strong at the same time. Daddy, who was lost and strong, saw that Andy was the same but maybe a little more lost. He said, “I think Andy was very affected by this.”

They gave him an installment of the PBS concert series Soundstage, for which he was invited to fill an hour as he saw fit and, since this was public television and no serious money was involved, he saw fit to contrive the most elliptical and surreal refraction of existential realities that he had ever attempted. He spent the better part of June working at the WTTW production facilities in Chicago, where the series was produced and where he plotted stratagem as he went along, with George and Lynne Margulies and Elayne Boosler as his sounding board. He would begin the show at the end and start again near the middle and utilize ideas learned as a child from watching Winky-Dink and You, wherein viewers were instructed to put cellophane on the television screen and draw on it to help him out of jams. He would have himself arrested and thrown into television court (all with cartoon backdrop) and defend whatever broadcast transgressions he had so far commited on the program. He would have an interviewing desk that was now seven feet high (calling no attention to this) from which he would imperiously interview Elayne, wherein they (candidly, no, really) traversed what had gone wrong with their relationship—“Sometimes I would wake in the morning,” he told her, “and I’d think I’d like to tell you that we’re gonna break up. I’d say, Well, I gotta tell her tonight—we’re gonna break up!” The Clifton puppet would meanwhile stalk the desktop and serve as sidekick.

After the final credits rolled (in which the absent Zmuda was wryly listed as “Invisible Man”) and Andy had sung a happy goodbye song and the studio began to empty, he became his dark, snappish incarnation—“Boy, the people out there in public are such a bunch of sheep! They’ll listen to anything I say!”—which again was basically his tribute to the duplicitous Andy Griffith character, Lonesome Rhodes, in A Face in the Crowd. At which point, Foreign Man magically confronted him—

FM: Excuse me, eh, Meester Kaufman. Can I talk to you just for one meenute please?

AK: No. Get outta here, you foreign freak!

FM: Please?

AK: No … Okay, for a minute, okay?

FM: All right … Why do you have to say these kinds of theengs? Such mean theengs about people and you’re, you’re so mean to people?

AK: So?

FM: You know, I don’t care what you do for yourself, but you, you’ve not only ruined your career, but you ruined my career, too!

AK: So what? Who cares?

FM: Because of you, everybody doesn’t like me, either. Why do you do thees? I think I know why. I think it’s because you are really,