Life Is Not a Stage Florence Henderson (13 ebook reader .txt) 📖

lightning. Being in a tent is not the safest place to start off with, but water began flooding the orchestra pit with all the electrical wiring down there. A lightning bolt struck. I immediately threw the microphone down on the stage floor. Some guy from the audience yelled, “Don’t worry, you can’t get electrocuted. It’s okay.” To prove his point, he came up onstage and took the microphone in his hands, and for added emphasis he kissed it during a flurry of thunderclaps.

“Good,” I said. “You sing!”

Another time, some years later, I was doing a big production number of Bette Midler’s “Do You Want to Dance,” which we put together with another song, “Ten Cents a Dance.” I had male dancers in the act, and the guys and I played up the drama of the song in the choreography. The dancers leaned on me and weighed me down as I sang the words “ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me.” Again, I heard the audience snickering. I looked to the side to discover a guy from the audience on the stage waving cash in his hands. He was obviously very drunk. “I don’t think you can pay me enough,” I said and made a few other jokes as they escorted him gently off the stage.

The worst example happened when I played the Desert Inn for a month, opening for Milton Berle. One night a member of the audience started heckling him. No one was killed, but this incident was a reason why that month felt more like a year. I liked Milton well enough, but you had to accept him the way he was on his terms. Well-deservedly, he was a legend in the business, but he had a very abundant ego to go along with it. For example, he came to my rehearsal and, unsolicited, gave me a lecture on how I should do my show. If I happened to get a standing ovation when I finished my part, it was uncanny how fast Milton came out there to thank me and start his show.

Milton was no stranger to hecklers, so that evening he did all the putdowns he could think of. But this guy would not shut up and got even more aggressive. The sold-out audience was not happy, Milton realized. So he jumped off the stage and went over to the man. He picked him up with one hand on the guy’s shirt collar and the other by the seat of his pants and threw him out of the room. He then went back onstage and tried to pick up where he left off, but it’s hard to be funny again and get a stunned audience back to normal. What made the whole thing more bizarre and out of a Fellini movie was that Milton was wearing clown makeup at the time. No wonder some children are terrified of clowns.

There could also be other extenuating factors why you might not click with an audience every night. Someone told me once about a particularly disastrous taping of a sitcom. They had done the first taping earlier without a glitch, but the director in the booth was dumbfounded because the jokes were not getting any laughs in the evening taping. Then a production assistant solved the mystery. He told the director that they had bused in a large group from a retirement community for an extracurricular outing. The show and most of the jokes were all themed around death and dying. Timing is everything, and the audience was obviously not amused.

However, it was no fun as a comedian to go out there and not be your best before a Las Vegas audience. When a comedian is having a great night, I could be a little envious of them. When I appeared with Bill Cosby at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, I came off the stage dripping with sweat from singing and dancing. I watched for a few moments from the wings as he took his place onstage after me, sitting down comfortably in his chair, entertaining the audience like he was having a casual chat from his living room. “Something is wrong with this picture,” I remember thinking to myself and laughing.

“You don’t appreciate me—I’m sweating up here,” Shelley Berman once yelled at the audience when I opened for him. He was the first stand-up comedian to play Carnegie Hall, and he won a number of gold records for comedy, so he was and still is a true master of his craft. But no one is immune from an off night, especially comedians who stand there alone armed only with a microphone. Shelley continued moaning about the audience as he came off, and I hid in my dressing room so I wouldn’t have to say anything.

My mother happened to fly in and was a witness that night. Back in the 1960s, Las Vegas was fabulous, and I was mesmerized by it. It was a glamorous place, especially at the Sands, where everybody dressed up. You never saw people walking around in T-shirts, sandals, and shorts unless they were going to the pool. When I was at the Flamingo, I was alone, and it was a hard place to hang out by myself. So, long story short, I brought my mother out.

“Don’t ever work with him again,” she repeated. “He’s not that funny.” Neither was my mother. It had been a few years since she last made me cry, and I had decided that she would never do that to me again. Years ago, I would have been terrified of getting verbally whacked by standing up to her, but not anymore. “Oh, when you start paying some bills, then you can tell me who I can work with,” I said. In response, my mother retired to the casino for a late night and early morning of blackjack.

“Mom, it’s five o’clock in the morning!”

“Go to bed if you want to,” she yelled back at me. “Go to bed. Leave me alone.”

Speaking