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By Root 1221 0

and break that fourth wall and “come down off the stage”; one night, in desperation, she offered gum to an audience and heard better laughter and she knew she was onto something. No one really understood their relationship, the yin and yang of it, the fire and ice cream of it, although Silver Friedman would note, “I think he released the child in her.” And everyone saw his influence when she took to arriving onstage while humming “The Way We Were”—just as Barbra Streisand did at the very beginning of the hit record—except Elayne never sang a word and kept humming and hummed the entire song; it got big, if unusual, laughs.

And they were together, more or less, until he had to leave for California a couple of years later and often he taped their conversations before and afterward, because he had recently begun taping conversations with everyone—street people, cab drivers, old people—and he gave her one tape they made together on which he lectured to her about the semiotics of a performer’s fortitude in the face of defeat and she would poignantly play a piece of that lecture (which was a piece of him) near the end of one of her HBO stand-up comedy specials many years hence when she was famous and there was his voice, insistent and helpful—“… You’re on a railroad train, you go through a tunnel. The tunnel is dark but you’re still going forward. Just remember that. But if you’re not gonna get up onstage for one night, because you’re discouraged or something, then the train’s gonna stop. You’re still in the tunnel, but the train’s gonna stop. [So] you [have to] just keep going…. It’s gonna take a lot of times going onstage before you can come out of the tunnel and things get bright again. But you keep going onstage—go forward! Every night, you go onstage.”

Every night, he went onstage and most nights received no pay other than spotlight and, with luck, applause—for this was policy at the Improv and at Catch a Rising Star, although Rick Newman graciously permitted performers to order from the menu, which in Andy’s case meant dessert, preferably chocolate. And because he went onstage every night on as many stages as would have him, he was pitifully broke most of the time and was forced to consider a life in the theater and began filling up his daybook that spring of 1974 with times and locales of open casting-call auditions for chorus members and male lead singers and male dancers (he was, after all, a song-and-dance man) for such Broadway and road-company and dinner-theater productions as Grease and Pippin and Kiss Me Kate and South Pacific and I Do, I Do—and he was, of course, uniformly dismissed as hopeless in each instance. He also failed at an Equity chorus call for The Music Man, even though he was every bit the blithe and sly con man that Professor Harold Hill was—had even been deeply inspired by Professor Hill as played by the actor Robert Preston; had even taught himself two years earlier all five parts of Act One, Scene One, the convoluted multivoiced “Cash for the Merchandise” number, in which the traveling salesmen in the train car natter on in oddball synchopation about their desperate racket. (He had practiced all five parts with congas and thought he might at least put the piece in his act one day.) Meanwhile, Foreign Man was now getting so much exposure in the clubs that he needed fresh inept material to provide further journeys into the pathos, so he came up with new, um, jokes—like the one about a little boy named Jesus —not the same Jesus that live in de church, you know—whose mother sends him to the market for a quart of milk and a pound of butter but Jesus he say but Mommy I don’t know how to go to de market and she say don’t worry just follow de people but it was Sunday so de people was going into de church so Jesus followed them into the church and he see de man on his stage go, “Oh Jesus! What do you want?” (So, vait-vait until de punch!) So de little boy he say, “A dozen eggs and a pound of butter—” (Oh, oh no I am sorry.) He say, “A quart of milk and a pound of butter!” (You know, because he thought