by Tom Shillue
Sometimes I’d talk with a beautiful dancer named Nicole. She was quiet and kept to herself. She seemed grounded and confident. I never saw her drinking wine coolers at night, and she was always up early, sitting in the morning sun behind the motel, doing yoga or meditating, or just stretching.
I’d look out the back window of our room and see her doing her Zen routine. Her curly brown hair was lit by the morning light, and she looked like a stock photo that you’d use for a peaceful greeting card or framed poster that said “Embrace Who You Are” or “Live in the Now . . .”
My morning rite was waking up and looking out the window to see if Nicole was there. We had a little electronic hot pot in our room and I’d make an instant coffee, which I’d enjoy while watching her doing her sun salutations. It may seem like I was acting like a Peeping Tom, but I had only the purest appreciation. To me Nicole was something wholesome. I often thought about going around back and saying hello, but I knew she wouldn’t want the interruption—the mornings were her alone time. But if I’d see her at the park on break, I’d say hello, never revealing how much I appreciated her daily ritual. I kept the idea of asking her on a date alive in my mind, but never gathered the courage. Where was the cockiness that I applied to our musical group? It drained away when I saw a pretty face.
*
We used to go to breakfast at Ralph’s Place, an old-fashioned silver diner car that was run by a guy named Ralph Spencer. He would sling hash every morning at the grill, while his daughter Gretel ran dishes in and out of the kitchen. We’d line up in a row at the counter and watch Ralph work that grill full of pancakes and eggs, sausage and steaks, and no matter the hour, he had his frosty mug of beer sitting beside him. We’d mostly see Ralph from behind, working furiously as a big sweat stain ran straight down his back, spatula in one hand, reaching for his beer with the other.
Gretel was about twenty-five and very tough, but gorgeous, and as she moved through the diner in a paper-thin T-shirt, she was a sight to behold. When she’d stop by to refill our coffee, we probably looked like four golden retrievers with a biscuit in front of our faces. Every once in a while Ralph would turn his head around quickly to make sure we weren’t ogling his daughter, and our heads would snap up, suddenly interested in something on the pegboard menu above the grill. We thought we were subtle, but Ralph was totally on to us.
Once the tin of creamer that was sitting in front of us was empty. I held up the tin and asked, “Could we get some more half and half?”
Ralph drained his beer. “Go get it yourself,” he said.
“The half and half?”
“Yeah. Go get it yourself.” He opened the refrigerator and cracked open another can of light beer, which he poured into his glass as I sat there holding the tin. “Go in the kitchen and get it yourself.”
I got up and walked behind the counter, pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The dishwashers looked up at me and then went back to their work. They had clearly seen this routine before. I looked in a few doors that were filled with produce, and then behind door number three I found my half and half. I flipped up the lid and filled the tin. Then Gretel arrived with a tray full of cream dispensers. “My dad says fill these, too.”
Gretel was inches away from me. We stood there for a long moment in front of the open refrigerator, a cloud of cold fog billowing between us. I didn’t say anything. She handed me the tray and took the full creamer out of my hand. “I’ll take this one,” she said, smiling as she turned and pushed through the swinging doors.
I flipped up all the lids and filled them all to the top. Then I backed through the double doors, almost spilling the tray when they swung back in my direction. As I turned around Ralph yelled, “Who needs cream?” and the place erupted in laughter. I then had to walk around and distribute the dispensers.
After that we were regulars at Ralph’s, spending more money than we had budgeted on spending for breakfast that summer. But it was worth it for the experience of the place. One day Ralph turned to us and held out a coin.
“I’ll flip you for breakfast.”
“Free breakfast if we get it?”
“You call the coin. You get it right, breakfast is on me. Wrong, you pay double. Good?”
We lost the toss, and Ralph went back to his grill. We weren’t sure if he was serious, but when we got to the register Ralph yelled out to the cashier, “They lost, double or nothing!” and she rung us up twice. He’d obviously done this before, too. But whenever he asked we always took him up on his “I’ll flip you for breakfast” offers, winning some and losing some. I’m pretty sure we broke even for the summer.
One morning Tab joined us at the diner. Four clean-cut guys in shorts and polo shirts, and one guy on the end in tux and tails with spandex pants—I’m sure we were a sight. It was the first time we brought Tab to Ralph’s Place with us, and he seemed a little preoccupied. When Gretel showed up at the counter to take our order and saw him staring into space, she asked, “Do you need to see a menu?”
“Yes, please.”
This was strange. Tab was on the road most of his life, so had probably eaten in hundreds of diners. It seemed odd that he needed to look at a breakfast menu.
When she came back and asked, “You know what you’d like?” Tab pushed the menu back at her and said, “Yeah, two eggs any style with potatoes and toast.”
“ ‘Any’ isn’t a style.”
“What?”
“How do you want your eggs?”
“Scrambled.”
When we were all sitting there eating our breakfast, Tab got up and wandered like a zombie out into the foyer of the diner where the real estate magazines and bubble gum machines were. He clearly had something on his mind. Then, very suddenly, pushed open the door and ran down the stairs. He darted across the parking lot, tuxedo tails flying behind him, jumped into his IROC sports car, and screeched out of the parking lot. His magic trailer swung back and forth violently as he turned onto Route 24 and peeled away.
Ralph turned to us with a look that said, Somebody’s paying for that guy’s breakfast.
We flipped Ralph for it of course, and lost, so we ended up having to pay for ten breakfasts. On our way to the park we discussed Tab’s odd exit. Was it a dine and dash, with the joke on us? Tab was known for pranks, if you could believe his stories about his old days on the magic circuit. But just running out on a check didn’t seem to be Tab’s style. There was no flair. It was just weird.
We got to the employee parking lot and punched the clock, then walked to our dressing room the long way so we could pass by Tab’s magic hut. He was on the platform behind the hut, sitting on a trunk and staring into his hat, tears running down his face. Tab had fallen into the magic abyss.
“What’s up, Tab?” Sponsel asked.
He didn’t answer. We walked up onto the platform and crowded around him. As we got close we could see down into the top hat. At the bottom were Tab’s three white doves he used for his miraculous final trick.
This was the trick when his birds flew into the top hat, which he then flipped up to show to the audience . . . and poof the birds were gone! On the applause, he clapped the top of the hat which folded up as flat as a pancake, and took a bow. He then walked off stage, leaving the hat backstage when he came out for his encore bow, but after the show he always returned to tend to his birds, which were crushed into the flat hat. That’s the trick! The trick is there is no trick—it’s a matter of crushing birds into the bottom of a hat. White doves possess a very special quality—they don’t complain when they are squeezed into small spaces. In fact, they feel very content and secure in there. That’s why magicians love them so much; they are very willing to be stuck into tiny folds of material, where they will remain, silently waiting to be released. But you must actually release them. Otherwise they will suffocate. They only have a few minutes of air, so the first thing a magician does after the show is release his birds from their cramped prisons and put them back into the
ir cages. Tab had forgotten to do that the night before. And, now, he was crushed.
I felt bad for Tab and tried to convince him that it was a mistake that any magician could make. He was rather inconsolable—he felt that he had broken a kind of magician’s code.
I’m not sure what had made him forget his birds that night. Tab was a little disheveled with his uniform, and had sloppy eating habits, but he had always been a careful magician. He was very good at what he did. I wondered if this was going to be Tab’s last theme park. He talked about his old gigs at Kings Island as if his glory days had passed him by. I still admired him, and I wished he could be enjoying this summer job as much as I was. To me this was magic. Being in an amusement park all day with my friends, and being paid to sing songs.
*
The end of the summer was approaching. Our final show of each day was at 7 p.m. aboard the Canobie Queen, a sunset cruise as the days got shorter.
One night after the last show I was stepping off the dock and spotted Nicole walking up the hill, so I ran to catch up with her. I don’t know what came over me, but I just blurted out, “Do you want to get a coffee sometime?”
“Oh, that’s very nice,” she said. “But I’m leaving in three days. I have to go to school. I’m going to Syracuse University and I have to start early.”
“Oh, that’s great. You must be excited.”
“I’m very excited. I’ll be sad to leave, it has been a great summer.”
It had been a great summer—not just because of all the fun we had, but the world it had opened up for me. Working with people who were living their dreams, even if they weren’t necessarily achieving what they thought were their wildest dreams.
I walked her back to the employee entrance. We made small talk and the conversation flowed easily. In many instances, postrejection is the perfect time to talk to a girl because all of the tension is gone.
That twilight walk across the tree-lined park was one of the finer moments of the summer.
The circumstances that led to that summer job had come about because I’d had what many would think was a silly idea—that I could use my barbershop quartet as a way to gain mainstream fame and break into television. Like most of the good things I’ve achieved in my life, by applying a strange combination of naïveté and hubris, I didn’t achieve what I set out to do, but then, undeterred, I tried the next best thing. I got a job, I had an experience, I learned, and I grew. So, maybe the original idea wasn’t so silly.
IT IS FEBRUARY 17, 2014, AND I AM THERE IN STUDIO 6B AT 30 Rock on the evening of the debut episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Bono and U2 are on the roof of the building doing a song to close the show, and I am standing there in my straw hat watching them on the monitor. I am there on opening night to rehearse a song with Jimmy and his Rag Time Gals barbershop quartet for the following night’s show. We were called in to rehearse the song in front of The Tonight Show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels. We sing for him as he smiles and nods his head. I don’t tell him that twenty-five years before I had mailed him a VHS tape of myself singing barbershop in the hopes of getting on SNL. Remember when I said some stories have unexpected endings?
Now I make regular appearances on The Tonight Show singing with the most well-known barbershop quartet in history. The Rag Time Gals have performed with Justin Timberlake, Kevin Spacey, Steve Carrel, and Sting. Our videos have been watched 50 million times on YouTube.
Where I am in my life right now, and why I’ve jumped ahead twenty-five years in my story, is the same reason that I decided to write this book. When I think of the wonderful aspects of my life now—my family, my career, everything that brings me happiness—they are all a result of the things I learned in my early years.
I’ve turned my old-fashioned upbringing into a career. Of course, I spent a long time trying to break into show business by twisting myself into whatever I thought the entertainment industry wanted or needed. Those years were frustrating, and there were a lot of false starts after my stint in the theme park. I had a lot of really bad, sad, and lame jobs. But then I settled on doing what I do best, and the industry eventually caught up to me. Or, I guess when I started doing what I do best is when the industry realized that I had something to offer.
Nothing really happened for me until I got married. It was the love of a great woman, and the responsibility of raising children, that gave me the focus I needed to put my career into motion, for real. I had been working in show business as a comedian, but not really with any kind of momentum until I had a family. It was that change in my life that changed everything for me.
I’m always telling stories. If I’m working out a family issue with my daughters, I usually start with a story from my childhood. I must be good at it because at bedtime my daughters always say, “Dad, tell us a story from when you were a kid!” The fact that they are fast asleep within three minutes means I’m really boring or a genius. I once fell asleep during the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, so I’m going to go with genius.
Gradually, in front of audiences all over the country, I began to use my stories as the framework for the material in my stand-up act. It worked. People started to respond to my brand of humor—jokes that were spun out of nostalgic stories, PG-rated at most, and rooted in core values of family, respect, and patriotism. I spent several years touring the country performing my decidedly clean comedy act. I was opening act for the “King of Clean Comedy” himself, Jim Gaffigan, and got to perform for theaters full of Americans of all ages, in forty-six of the fifty states. Sometimes the tours were a fun-for-the-whole-family experience. During the summer months I would take my family along with me, and Jim and his wife, Jeannie, would bring their five kids along, too. The eleven of us were a sight to behold at the hotel pool. One Thanksgiving we were in Las Vegas and Jim and Jeannie treated us all to a performance of the Tournament of Kings at the Excalibur hotel, the “show and dinner experience of Medieval proportions.” There we were, Eleven Lords and Ladies eating eleven chickens, screaming at the top of our lungs as our appointed knights battled with jousts and swords. I felt so lucky to be with my family and my friends, doing the thing that I wanted to do for a living since I was a teenager.
Those tours were such a blast, but I had to leave it all behind for the chance of a lifetime when I was given the opportunity to host my own nightly show on the Fox News Channel. That was something I never expected—being on television almost every night with a massive audience (Fox News has one of the biggest audiences in all of television) and being allowed to offer my fresh yet distinctly traditional take on the political issues of the day. Five days a week on Red Eye with Tom Shillue, I performed monologues with titles like “We don’t need successful kids, we need happy ones” and “Is less now more in today’s world?” and “Good parents are willing to wait a few decades for a ‘Thanks Dad!’ ” Now, where do you think I got the ideas for those? My job at Fox puts me in front of millions of eyeballs, where I often spout the ideas of my dear old dad, William T. Shillue, and the notions I heard time and time again years ago in Norwood, Massachusetts.
Raising a family in New York City is much different than how I grew up, but I do my best to try and bring a little of what I had to my kids’ lives. Our Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx has lots of outdoor spaces, parks, and ball fields. I, like most of the parents in the area, enjoy taking the kids out to the park. We just let them go. We keep watch over them, for sure, but try not to hover. Instead of being a helicopter parent, the trend of the day, I try to be more of a golf-cart security guard, circling the perimeter but staying out of the way. We let them go a little way into the woods to explore and pretend, and to play games without any interference or assistance. Sometimes if there’s a little rumble, the kids run to the adults to intercede. I always send mine on their way. “Work it out!” I yell. That’s my favorite phrase. I’m famous for it in the neighborhood—“Oh, boy, here comes the work-it-out-guy,” I hear, but I will continue saying
it. My parents never had to say it to me, because they were never around for any of the rumbles. Running to them to intervene in every little argument wasn’t even an option.
Sometimes when the kids are out of sight but not earshot, I can tell from their conversations that they think we adults can’t hear them and they are saying things they shouldn’t be saying. Sometimes the other kids are not being nice to my kids, and sometimes my kids are the ones being mean. I stay out of it. Most of my childhood was spent in the middle of these name-calling battles. I learned to work things out. In these ways, and with my stories, I try to teach my kids the same values that I learned as a kid.
When I see my kids embodying my old-fashioned ideals, I beam with pride. One wet, overcast day when my daughter Agnes was five, I took her down to the nearby park to play. Because of the weather that day, there was only a little boy and his dad there with us. As our kids started playing together, we dads started checking our iPhones. (I am always telling my kids to “go play together” and “don’t be shy,” but when it comes to other dads, I don’t really follow my own advice.)
At some point I heard my daughter say “Bang!” and I looked up to see her pointing at the little boy from behind the slide. Then the little boy pointed at Agnes from behind the monkey bars. “Bang!” he said back. Then she scooted to the side, spun around, and pointed again, “Bang.” He returned fire, “Bang! Bang!”
The other dad jerked his head up so quickly, he almost dropped his phone. He took off running toward the monkey bars yelling, “Dean . . . No! No guns!” The boy dropped his arms to his side, and the father bent down to address his son. “I’ve told you,” he said softly, “no guns.”
