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A young me is walking determinedly down well street on the near north side of chicago a lively strip of bars, restaurants and porn emporiums. The brutal wind whips cold enough to hurt your face and your feelings: white, snow, blankets, the street gray, slush devouring, the edges, i’m 20 and in my fourth year of college, the great maw of my future looms. It looms like a maniac enough with the looming at this point. I’Ve been writing and performing comedy mostly on the radio at southern illinois university, with my madcap friend tim thomas, the first of many comedy partners to come and after months years, really of writing short comic. Satires and curiosities, i am wondering: how does it work it being showbiz hollywood, a career making television movies?

What have you seriously? What have you i’ll take anything? It’S all such a blind guess at this point it all seems so impossible, knowing what to aim for what to commit to where to step. Next nasty gray, slush and potholes abound in fact forget what i said about white snow blanketing streets. There’S no white to be seen: it’s all gray, all foreboding a few months before that i was sitting in an empty classroom in carbondale illinois writing bits from my weekly radio comedy show the prime time special tim and i had a theme each week, but really it Was just random comedy indulgence?

I would write bits type, a few up, we’d record them. Then we’d riff live on the radio for an audience of no one, but at some point, while filling pages with comical jottings for the show it occurred to me that this is what a comedy writer does for a living fills. The page gets, some laughs fills another page. I’Ve been doing this kind of stuff since my early teens, first doing my comedy into a panasonic tape recorder, then scripting stuff on my mom’s typewriter, all through junior high and high school and now college by age, 20. I’D been steadily pumping out the blithering idiocy for over a decade, i suppose, if i’d grown up in hollywood, it would have been obvious that this was my calling, but where i was in the particular family that i was in.

It was far from obvious and making comedy didn’t qualify as a calling or a job or work, much less a career, but college was ending and a choice would have to be made. This awareness of what i’d been actually doing with my time made me curious. If i should, i don’t know, try my interior monologue was the good old, midwestern glass, half empty view, young man? What are you gon na do with your life? I could maybe be a comedy writer.

A comedy writer help me out here. I can’t see so good who do you think you are mr bill shakespeare? I scowled at these hopes and dreams. It’S how i was brought up. Scowling and coincidentally, it’s one of the keys to writing comedy being critical, skeptical even being mean at times the world deserves a swift kick in the pants.

I believed that then and still do, but it was ludicrous to imagine going into showbiz beyond insane imagining it. Yet. What the hell else would i do find work in an office honestly. I wasn’t real sure how you do that either i’d used my college radio credentials to get an interview with the great joyce sloan joyce was den mother of second city theater in chicago. She had shepherded the lives and creative choices at that legendary comedy theater for decades, and she did it with a personal touch like if your mom ran a theater, but also if your mom liked theater and if she merely rolled her eyes at the smell of pot.

Joyce was the best, and would one day give me my big break. She was so nice on this consequential day for me that she gives me an hour of her time. I sit in her office and pepper her with names asking her to tell me of paths to greatness john belushi, joe flaherty bill murray dan aykroyd, gilda radner. The list is long and i easily kill an hour with it. I want to hear a story that sounded like something i might duplicate someone coming out of nowhere, trying and failing and eventually through dint of toil and sucking getting somewhere.

I’M sure she thinks she’s giving me what i want as she reels off the legend versions of each person’s story. The fan friendly touch of magic tall tales, the one i remember specifically was about joe flaherty. I love joe’s giddy characterizations on sctv best of all guy caballero and sammy maudlin go look him up, so he wasn’t the most famous of the performers on my list, but i figured i might hear a story that might sound like something i could aspire to. Joyce’S version went like so joe flaherty joe, was in pennsylvania and he packed himself a sack lunch and got on the train to chicago. He came right to the theater and walked in and said, give me a chance and we did, and he was wonderful.

A young me is walking determinedly down well street on the near north side of chicago a lively strip of bars, restaurants and porn emporiums. The brutal wind whips

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