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schools to recruit wee peanut-gallery members and designed a set with big happy faces slapped on the walls and inflated many balloons and set up a puppet theater where Mr. Bee Bop, a beatnik puppet, dispensed with cool proverbs. Al Parinello came aboard as puppeteer and occasional sideshow barker (there were freak puppets) and also played the role of Mr. Pumpkin, who wore an orange slightly crushed cardboard refrigerator box—“my head was the stem”—and did as he was told. (For a public relations course project, Parinello designed an Uncle Andy’s Fun House press kit which included a two-page biography of the star—“ANDY KAUFMAN, CHILD IDOL: The name Andy Kaufman may not mean much to you, but to some lucky kids who have had the pleasure of seeing him perform, the name Andy Kaufman is Godlike….”) Uncle Andy, meanwhile, had greatly benefited from studying with the meditating bliss people because on camera he was very very blissful and very innocent as he urged children to “dance crazy” and drink vast quantities of chocolate milk and brush teeth in rhythm to songs like “That’s Amore” and “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” and “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” and peers and instructors alike could barely believe that he had not ingested various pharmaceuticals in order to perform as such. Said Don Erickson, “We just didn’t think anybody normal could be this abnormal.”

Another weekly WCSB-TV program of note was The Grahm Spotlight, whose host and creator, a student named Burt Dubrow, fancied his forum as a wisenheimer Tonight Show wherein guests paraded through while Dubrow wryly presided behind a desk and skewered school administration. “One day I got a knock on my door and it’s Andy,” Dubrow would remember. “He said, ‘I’ve been watching what you’re doing and I’d love to come on.’ He was very—I wouldn’t say shy, but … innocent.” He was also purposeful and Dubrow needed to fill air time and it soon became their routine to meet in Dubrow’s dorm room the night before each Thursday Spotlight broadcast and work out just what Andy would do next to unhinge Dubrow on live closed-circuit television. Elvis came first and then the meek wide-eyed Foreign fellow turned up as a regular foil and began to say tenk you veddy much so often that it became his signature and there was also the Mighty Mouse lip-synching phonograph bit plus “Old MacDonald,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel” (he assumed the voice of a stentorian father singing the song in nonsense rhymes with a precocious daughter, as the record spun and scratched beside him). “One week we worked out the following: Andy would come out after I introduced him as Andy, which was kind of rare. He was usually somebody else. And he would do a terrible stand-up comedy routine, just horrible unfunny jokes like ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ So he did this and, of course, nobody in the studio audience was laughing. One joke was worse than the next. Finally, Andy looked up with those eyes and got very upset with the audience—‘Look, all I’m trying to do is make a living while going to college and help pay for my tuition and you people don’t have the decency to laugh at me! I don’t know what you want, but I’m trying and trying here, but you!—you don’t care if you ruin everything for me!’ And he began to cry and get hysterical and there was this question in everyone’s mind—Was he or was he not sincere? Finally, after crying crying crying, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun! Then he put the gun to his head and just as he was going to shoot himself, I ran over and tackled him to the ground and—commercial! And then when the show returned, we just sat at the desk talking as though the gun incident never happened—we never mentioned it in any way. Which was the whole idea. People asked me for days afterward if I knew he was going to try to kill himself on live television. And I just said, ‘Of course not!’ He saw this as a remarkable triumph.”

And so the Grahm Junior College experience continued apace in just this fashion, with performances coming whenever and wherever possible, as he seized any spotlight