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afforded him: He worked regularly at Al’s Place honing his material and also tried other local coffeehouses and meanwhile kept producing the Fun House even though it was often difficult to get children to come to the studio (milk and cookies and chocolate cake always helped) and he remained a fixture on Dubrow’s program and then, after the first reading of God in the women’s dormitory, there were more and more readings of God and his parents and sister attended one such reading and claimed to like it very much even though it made no sense and then a group of black performance students asked him to do Elvis in their Soul Time Review, which was an interracial first—“They said I would be the, uh, comedy relief and the token white buffoon. They thought it was really gonna bomb. But then they liked it!” So he moved forward and maybe it was because things had been going so well that he began to expect another downturn because the downturns always came about a month after his birthday during such productive periods whereupon he would plunge and lose his way again. It was a curse that he believed in, so he meditated hard to stave off the plunge, then learned not long after his twenty-first birthday that he would not have enough credit hours to graduate on time because he had been so consumed with building his future in show business that classwork had fallen aside. To complete his associate’s degree in broadcasting he would have to stay in Boston through the summer and fall of 1970—about which he felt disconsolate and his father felt bitterly disappointed, what with tuition squandered due to apparent lack of academic diligence (“plain laziness,” said Stanley), all of which meant that his show business career would have to wait a bit longer.

Fortunately, the Transcendental Meditation people were there to stoke his confidence and help him maintain his innocence and provide evenings of enlightened discourse. It was after one such evening—which had buoyed him somewhat—that he led a group of fellow bliss devotees to a Harvard Square ice cream parlor and, as they waited on line, which was very long, he was no longer him but became the other one with the vague Mediterranean heritage and the hopeless demeanor and at last it was his turn to place his order and it began—Ehhh … I would like to have de ice cream but you have so many of de ice cream kinds how do I know vich vun ees good? Can you tell me vich vun ees good to order? Maybe I try taste each of de ice cream please? “The people behind the counter were trying to be very nice because they thought this foreign person needed help,” said Phil Goldberg, a TM friend who watched with astonishment. “Then they started getting impatient because he wouldn’t make up his mind. He began to taste every flavor, one after the other, and the line was getting longer and longer, and people were starting to say things and getting more exasperated. I’m thinking, Enough, Andy-cool it or someone’s gonna hit you or something. But at the same time I was amazed by his persistence and conviction.” I know! I will have de mocha cheep, with de mocha and de cheep! “Mocha chip was, of course, the only flavor they didn’t have.” No, but-but I vant de mocha cheep! You know? De mochacheep? “And he never stopped, for twenty minutes, took it to the absolute brink where someone was about to jump on him, and then finally—” Ehh, all right … I will have … ehhhhhhhh … de vaneella! Tenk you veddy much. “—he chose vanilla. That was it. We left and laughed. And that was the first time a lot of us realized that he was serious about becoming a comedian.” That July, he met the Maharishi at last—and, apparently, in the nick of time. He had gone to Poland Springs, Maine, on what would be the first of many many TM course retreats that he required himself to attend. His dedication to the replenishing deep silences and the quest for enlightenment/innocence had, of course, fully overtaken him. (It kept his eyes from taking on the hard glint of cynicism, he thought, which he disliked in other eyes, especially in the eyes of certain show