Good One, Kid
A snow storm has come up from the south. I sit in front of what my grandson calls my ghetto fireplace. It has a log facade of stone, behind which are two cans filled with a sterno like jell. The flame dancing behind the façade relaxes me. My imagination can turn it into the great fireplace at San Simeon if I want it to. I stare at it not thinking of a damn thing. I have always had this ability to blank the mind out. I don’t even have to think about it, and I am there. That is the trick of it you know.
My Daughter, Margie, stops in. She wants to know if I am alright. Why wouldn’t I be? She doesn’t answer. She sits there and stares at the flame. Blanking the mind out is not something that comes easily to her. Just when I think she got there, she asks me where it all began. Where did what all begin? You know, Grampa and Grandma and Vaudeville. Well, I didn’t know, but it is a rare question from my Margie that I actually have an answer for, so it makes no sense to lose the momentum, so I tell her the story that I think my father would have told her.
My Grandfather had purchased tickets to a great theatrical event by local standards. An altercation between him and my Grandmother was designed to ruin it for my Grandfather, but he told my father he would take his mother’s place and they hitched the buggy and headed into town to see George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The year was 1905, and my father was fifteen years old. He once told me that when the signal came from the ship that Yankee Doodle had been acquitted, and George M went into his dance from one end of the stage to the other for the tune “Give My Regards to Broadway,” he told his father that he could forget about that apprenticeship at the mill, where the old man was superintendent, because he knew what he was going to do with his life. Within weeks he was off to Boston, where after a time he met Gertie Wiedeman, my mother, and the two ventured to New York, and the rest is history as they say. So you see my Margie, if it was not for your Great-Grandmother’s nasty temperament, I probably would have never seen the stage.
Well, my Margie got me on a roll, and I told her a bunch of stories, but the one she seemed to like the best was of the two times I conversed with the great Jack Benny. I might have been about ten the first time. I was sitting on a crate back stage at the Broadway in Springfield Mass, holding my cornet. The future great one walked by without a look or a word my way. Then after a brief look back he says while walking away “when you going to learn how to play that thing kid?” Without missing a beat, as he continues to walk away, I say “when you learn how to be funny.” That stops him cold. Just when I think he is going to turn around, without so much as a look back, he continues walking and says “good one kid.”
The second and last time I saw him was after the war in a New York City club I got a rare pickup gig in. During a break I walked by his table not having the slightest reason to believe he would remember or care who I was. As I walked by I stop and look back, making eye contact, I say to him, “when you going to learn how to be funny?” I turn and continue walking and hear him say “when Frankie Houlihan learns how to play the cornet.” It stops me cold. I was going to turn, but something told me it would ruin it. So I keep walking and say loud enough for him to hear, “good one kid.”
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