by Todd Glass
Hearing my friends (and sometimes the people I looked up to) making those kinds of jokes just made me withdraw even more. I figured that as long as I stayed in the closet, those jokes weren’t about me. I didn’t fit the stereotype. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the stereotype didn’t fit me, a relatively straight-acting guy who happened to be attracted to other guys. In fact, I was so sure those jokes weren’t about me, I added a bit to my act where I imagined what it would be like to get pulled over by an overly effeminate cop with a lisp. I figured that if I was really gay and the joke didn’t bother me, then it was probably okay for me to use it.
Clearly I was wrong—in hindsight, it’s easy to see that I was guilty of perpetuating the same stereotypes that left me so confused about my own situation—but in these early stages of my career, I was still trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Fortunately, I was getting plenty of opportunities. Comedy Works was going bananas, pulling in 300 people a night. Between there and the “one-nighters”—local bars that offered weekly comedy nights—I was performing several times a week.
I hadn’t yet learned that doing good comedy means tapping into the personal, talking about the things in your life that you’re passionate about. God forbid I mention how I liked things to be perfect or clean—that might give audiences the wrong (right) idea. Jokes about dating were obviously off the table, because dating wasn’t something that I knew anything about.
Man, I was frustrated. I would see guys I was attracted to and couldn’t say a word about it to anyone. Just focus on the comedy, I told myself. You can live without the rest.
One night, after a show, I was out with some comedians getting a cheesesteak. I noticed a guy who was looking at me. I looked back at him. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Or at least I thought I did.
Nothing was discussed openly. You thought you made a connection with someone and you hoped you weren’t wrong. “Gaydar” hadn’t been invented yet, so most of the time it was just a waiting game to see who’d make the first move.
By the way, while we’re speaking about gaydar—the ability that some people claim allows them to spot a homosexual from a mile away—I think the people who say they have it are full of shit. Everyone’s quick to tell you about the time their gaydar “worked,” but I can’t tell you how many people have bragged about their gaydar to me who had no idea that I was gay. Really? I’d think to myself. You picking anything up right now? I bet yours needs new batteries. That’s the problem . . .
Back to the cheesesteak: When my friends got up to go, I told them that I was going to walk back to my car. Instead, I just sat there for another half hour, making eye contact with the guy.
He seemed normal. A regular guy. Not overly tough, not overly feminine. I remember thinking, This guy can’t be gay.
Eventually, one of us spoke. “How ya doin’?”
“Good . . . How are you doin’?”
We made small talk for maybe another half hour before he offered to drive me back to my car. If he had been more direct, it probably would have turned me off. He would have seemed too comfortable. But the longer we sat there, feeling nervous, the more I was attracted to him. His hand somehow found its way to my knee. That was it—just a quick touch, then he took it away.
“Sorry. Did that make you uncomfortable?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Are you, uh . . .” I couldn’t even say the word.
“Are you?” he asked.
The floodgates opened. While we ended up fooling around a little, mostly we just talked. I couldn’t believe I’d met someone who seemed just like me. We talked about how disconnected and uncomfortable we felt. He told me about a guy he knew who had actually come out to his parents, which sounded fucking insane—we were both hell-bent on taking our secret to our deaths. Our perfect fantasy lives involved getting married to women who developed cancer and died young and tragically. “Poor guy,” people would say thirty years later. “He never got over Karen . . .”
We sat at a diner until the sun rose, stumbling out into the sunlight with no place to go. We traded numbers—when I wrote his down in my address book, I was so paranoid that I changed a couple of digits so nobody would . . . No, it still doesn’t make any fucking sense.
We met and fooled around a few more times after that. I didn’t feel dirty afterward; I felt great. There was someone else out there who was like me, who made me feel normal. I wanted to share my good feelings with everyone I knew.
But besides him, who was I going to tell?
To be honest, I couldn’t really tell him, either. Saying anything out loud would make it seem real and no one was ready for that. So one night when we were at Denny’s and he started flirting with girls, I simply took it as a sign that he was no longer interested. I’m sure if I had asked him about it we could have talked and helped one another to figure things out, but I didn’t and we didn’t. We never did anything after that. I’d gone for years hiding my sexuality from everyone who was straight—now I had a new friend who was gay and I had to hide from him, too.
This wasn’t going in the right direction.
CHAPTER 15
NO-SHOW GEORGE
Theater in the round.
The Valley Forge Music Fair was a three-thousand-seat theater-in-the-round with a stage that actually rotated to give everyone in the audience a better view. I’d occasionally worked there in high school as a parking attendant and an usher. My regular gig at Comedy Works—not to mention the money I was saving by living at home—meant I didn’t have to park cars anymore, but I used to run into one of the managers around town, a guy named Jim. “So you’re a comedian now,” he’d say. “When are you going to bring your act to Valley Forge?”
“Not yet!” I’d reply. I knew that I wasn’t ready. Or at least I didn’t think I was, until I got another phone call from Steve Young. “How would you like to open for George Jones at the Valley Forge Music Fair?”
At first I thought he was joking. So did my former coworkers when they saw me at the theater and asked what I was doing.
“I’m the opening act for George Jones,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up!” they replied.
I arrived at the venue four hours early, chewing on a couple of pills my mother gave me to keep my stomach from twisting in knots. I was about to perform for ten minutes in front of the biggest crowd I’d ever faced. Ten minutes of material was all I had, and only seven of them were any good.
I paced around backstage. Jim walked over and patted me on the shoulders. “It’s going to be fun!” he said. “You’ll do, like, ten or fifteen minutes . . . It’ll be great!”
“Fifteen minutes?” I repeated, trying to sound sure of myself.
“Sure! Just have fun with it,” Jim said cheerfully. He thought he was doing me a favor.
I dug around in my brain for anything that could fill more time. A few minutes later, Jim came back around and delivered another blow to my confidence.
“You might have to do twenty.”
I was speechless.
“We’ll see,” he added. “Hopefully he won’t be ‘No-Show George’ tonight . . .”
That’s his nickname? Are you fucking shitting me? First it’s fifteen minutes, then maybe twenty, and now he might not even show up at all?
“. . . We’ll put you on once we know he’s en route from the hotel. It’s all going to be great.”
What the hell am I going to do? I could get the audience to sing the theme to The Brady Bunch with me . . . That might take up three minutes, especially if I tell them they did a shitty job the first time. And there’s always crowd work . . .”
Crowd work—improvised interactions with specific members of the audience—is a great way to stretch for time if you don’t have enough material. It’s not hard to do and most crowds will enjoy it.
Save your material, I told myself as I stepped onto the stage. I think I told one joke from my prepared set before shifting my focus to the audience.
&nbs
p; Which would have been fine, had I been dealing with a crowd that was sitting in one place. I’d completely forgotten to account for the rotating stage—by the time I came up with a joke, I’d lost sight of whatever audience members I’d been interacting with.
“Where is that couple from Florida?” I asked, scanning the crowd for two people I talked to a few seconds earlier. “We’re over here!” I heard from somewhere behind me, forcing me to turn around in order to deliver the joke. I repeated the bit over and over again, twisting and turning, struggling to make it work.
But despite my panic (or maybe because of it) the crowd had a good time. Thirty seconds into the set, I knew I was killing. By the time No-Show George arrived twenty-five minutes later, Jim almost had to drag me off of the stage.
I ducked into the underground tunnel that led back to the greenroom, where George Jones was preparing to go on. George was friendly and we exchanged a few words, but one thing he said stood out above all others. “How is the crowd?” he asked.
How is the crowd? I thought. Why do you care what the crowd is like? You’re George Jones. They came to see you! I couldn’t believe that someone that famous would still care what the crowd is like. I wondered if you ever stopped caring.
I didn’t have to wonder very long. Later that year, I opened for George Benson, Luther Vandross, Tammy Wynette, and the Temptations. All of them asked me the same question when I came offstage: How is the crowd?
I guess you never stop caring.
CHAPTER 16
THE PERFECT ROOM
Todd goes to Broadway.
About eight months later, I got another call from Steve Young: “How would you like to open for Patti LaBelle? She’s doing a month and a half at the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway and she wants you to be her opening act.”
I was excited. I didn’t know a whole lot about Patti LaBelle, but I knew what Broadway was. “Of course I will. Not that it matters, but what do I get paid?”
Steve laughed. “I’m going to be honest with you. When they asked me how much, I told them one thousand dollars. Thinking per week. Well, they came back and told me a thousand a show sounded fine.”
“A thousand a show? How many shows?”
“Seven or eight a week.”
For a kid with a severe learning disability who had never understood math, I managed to do the arithmetic pretty fucking fast: I was rich! Seven grand a week is a lot of money for an adult today, but in the ’80s, for a kid with no bills or expenses, this was like striking gold. Of course I burned through that money like Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions. I bought dinners and picked up bar tabs, threw catered parties at my parents’ house, rented a new apartment, and spent $4,000 fixing it up. If Suze Orman saw how careless I was back then she would have had a heart attack long before I did.
But I didn’t care. Why would I? I thought this was going to be my life from now on.
Every Sunday, after the matinee show, a limo would drive me back to my parents’ house. Sometimes Patti’s son Zuri would catch a ride as well. He was about thirteen—more or less my mental age—so we found plenty of common ground, laughing and doing bits along the way. Sometimes we’d pretend to fight over a seat. “I’m her opening act, so I should be able to pick where I want to sit,” I’d say.
“But I’m her son. Son is more important than opening act!”
I could tell Zuri understood my sense of humor and it wasn’t hard to figure out why: Patti had a great sense of humor, too.
At every performance, when she sang “Lady Marmalade,” Patti invited people from the audience to dance with her onstage. One night, her backup singers thought it would be funny if I joined them—wearing the same sparkly, sequined dress they wore. I stood on the wings in the dress, fighting my nerves and second-guessing the decision. “What if she doesn’t think it’s funny?” I asked one of the singers who peeked backstage to see if I was ready.
“Oh, trust me, she will.” Before I had a chance to offer a rebuttal she literally pushed me onto the stage.
Panic spread throughout my entire body. If Patti didn’t laugh, I was going to be fired for sure. Luckily for me, she cracked up the moment she saw me. “Folks, I did not know about this!” she said, as soon as she could breathe again. Patti turned to her backup singers. “Girls, you’re just jealous that he looks better in that dress than you do!” She brought me front and center and we danced for a few seconds, bringing the audience in on the joke. Patti was a great dancer. I remember thinking how amazing it was that she was able to move like that at her age. (Her age, of course, being only forty.)
Every night, when I was done with my set and she was about to start hers, Patti stopped by my greenroom to say a few kind words (and yes, sometimes to ask me how the crowd was). These greenroom visits were so routine that I never thought of them as a big deal—until I mentioned them to my family.
“Shut the fuck up, Todd!” Corey said incredulously.
“I’m telling you, she comes by every day and we hang out.” No one believed me, but since they were all coming to a show soon, I figured I’d let them see for themselves.
The night of the show arrived. I’d done my set and was sitting in the greenroom with my brothers, waiting for Patti’s visit. “You’ll see,” I promised. “She’ll stop by in a second . . .”
Just like clockwork, Patti turned the corner and . . . walked right past the door without saying a single word.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever been more embarrassed. How could this be? The one time I really need her to drop in, she decides not to?
I tried to come up with an excuse—any excuse that might sound reasonable. But before I could open my mouth, Patti turned around and walked into the room. “I’m sorry, guys, I just can’t do that to Todd!” Somehow my brothers had gotten to her before the show and put her up to it.
Sometimes we would hang out after the show. Patti took me to restaurants or to see other musical acts that she enjoyed. I blame my obsession with “the perfect room” on one of these outings.
I am obsessed with the perfect room. (A serious, crazy obsession, as certain club owners might tell you.) A room that’s perfectly lit, with the right-sized stage and the right-sized audience—not too big, not too small, but intimate enough to be great. I know that this room exists because I saw it once in 1984.
Patti took me to a club where a friend of hers was playing. Unlike the Minskoff, which had 2,500 seats, this place only had room for 125. Electric candles sat on top of tables covered in black cloth. The maître d’ escorted us to our table through an elegantly dressed audience, using a flashlight to see where he was going.
A small walkway lined with lightbulbs led from the tables to a tiny stage. As the houselights dimmed, the band quietly took their positions, wearing suits that were so well fitted they might as well have been painted on. From somewhere in the room, an announcer with the deepest voice I’ve ever heard exclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to a night with Sarah Dash!”
The band let out a two-count with a thump of the drums. When the second drumstick came down, every candle in the house went out, leaving only the barely lit stage. Another heavy thump of the drums and all the lights on the stage went out, leaving only a single candle on top of the piano. “It’s showtime!” With another heavy drumbeat, the piano player leaned in and blew out the candle. The room was now completely dark—I mean pitch black. The audience sat there in anticipation for at least ten seconds before the announcer said the words everyone was waiting for: “Sarah Dash!”
A single spotlight hit the back of the room where she was standing. The maître d’ guided her to the stage. The band played a soft and steady beat that came to an abrupt stop as she turned to face the crowd. “LET’S DO THIS!” she screamed.
The band took off like a missile. The energy built and built for the entire show. Everyone in the room knew they were participating in something special.
Ever since then, I’ve been on a quest to re-create that
feeling at a comedy show. If you’re one of the club owners I’ve been driving up a wall for the last twenty years, I’ve only got one thing to say: Blame it on Patti LaBelle.
But when I think of Patti, the memory that stands out most was the night my parents came to see me open the show. Every performer dreams of succeeding in front of his or her parents; thanks to Patti, I got to do it on Broadway before I was twenty. When Patti found out they were in the audience, she extended a level of kindness that went far above and beyond what any opening act could ever hope for. She shined a spotlight on my mom and dad and introduced them to the applauding crowd. “I’d like to dedicate this next song to Todd,” she said, then launched into “There’s a Winner in You.”
This was, I imagine, comforting to my parents in a way that went beyond pride. A couple of years earlier they were worrying about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. About what was going to happen to a kid who had failed almost every single grade. I think that night they were able to experience some peace of mind: I was going to be okay.
It was a moment that became even more poignant when my dad died a short time later.
• • •
I watched Patti give, no bullshit, 100 percent of herself at every single show. She had a way of interacting with the crowd that always felt real. Even though she was a singer and I was a comedian, she taught me everything I needed to know about respecting the audience.
I’ve done a lot of cool things in my career since then, but nothing has impacted me more than the six weeks I spent with Patti. I’ve always wanted to let her know how much the experience meant to me. There’s a poem—I think it’s by Ralph Waldo Emerson—that perfectly captures my feelings. I’ve thought many times about sending it to her, but I always wimp out, thinking, She’s Patti LaBelle and she probably gets letters like this all of the time. If, by some small chance, you’re reading this book, Patti, this is for you:
