Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [56]
Big movement now. No time to be wasted. Momentum was all and all would now have to come quickly and blur into wild masses of experience and accomplishment so that he could get to where he needed to go. Already, he had shorn the facial hair because it just got in the way of destiny and also incited acne. So he picked up where he left off. He left off in the spring with ideas flying and mechanisms in position. Al’s Place was a coffeehouse in a basement—he was very keen on basements—in a dormitory right across Beacon Street and Al was Al Parinello, an enterprising student who ran the casual venue and booked the talent, and Al had withstood repeated entreaties from Andy, who begged and begged for stage time. Finally if warily, Al allowed an opportunity for this peculiar relentless fellow whose only claim to craft were birthday routines and funny accents and an Elvis impression. There was an available night on the schedule and Al told him, “Okay we can make something happen this Friday. I can pay you five dollars.” And Al would recall that Andy said, “Oh!” “He didn’t expect the money part. But the result of all this made for one of those rare moments in life—because, from the minute he went up onto that stage, Andy was literally a star. I believe he opened with his Foreign Man character, hopeless and inept, all pidgin English, and there was nervous tittering in the audience. And he did Mighty Mouse with the phonograph—and I was astonished by his timing, absolutely impeccable. Then he had the conga, which he started banging in sync with this crying jag—he had started crying as the Foreign Man because he lost his place and said he was ashamed, but he turned this into a conga symphony banging to the beat of these big gulping sobs. The audience was going crazy. And then the way he closed was absolutely sensational because it was Elvis—and it was incredible because the coeds were screaming! I’m saying they were emotionally involved with this impression to the point of screaming! I can still hear the screams. I remember looking around, thinking to myself, Something very important is happening here….”
Elsewhere, Uncle Andy’s Fun House was happening and this was his dream culmination of all birthday acumen and sensibility and he had already gotten class credit for it in April when it was first written up as a prospectus for a fifteen-minute television show that was then shot with Grahm cameras with Uncle Andy himself producing and starring as a manchild leading children played by other students—“dopeheads who sat on the studio floor while he read to them from a rocking chair,” one dour witness recalled—through a wonderworld of happily didactic tomfoolery. Oh, but the Fun House had great promise—he often envisioned spending his entire future there, or someplace like it, with children, with puppets, with games and songs, like Buffalo Bob. Even the theme song he wrote for the show borrowed the melody of “It’s Howdy Doody Time”—
It’s Uncle Andy Time
It’s Uncle Andy Time
An-dy and Bee Bop, too
say Boo-Bee-Doo to you;
Let’s give a rousing cheer
’Cause Uncle Andy’s here
It’s time to start the show
So kids let’s go!
That fall, he convinced the Grahm faculty to let him broadcast the show semiweekly in living color over the campus closed-circuit station, WCSB-TV (for Cambridge School of Business), and he foraged through Boston day