Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (18 page)

The interview was with Harry Smith, and it ended up fine. Collins was charming and chirpy, but nowhere near as entertaining as she’d been backstage. I went for it and got a quick photo with her on her way out, though I knew it wasn’t going to be any good right after it was taken (sometimes you can just tell). I didn’t dare risk suggesting we try it again. Years later I got to know Joan Collins socially and found her to be disarming and totally charming, with a great sense of humor about herself and the world.

I’ll tell you about one other idol-meet, and this one went a little differently. For one thing, it was only tangentially work-related. For another, it was in front of several thousand people and was the cause of a major, summer-long odyssey fueled by ridiculous expectations.

I’ve always loved a stage. In 1996, Graciela and I learned that our favorite group, the B-52s, were allowing “friends of the band” to be go-go dancers onstage during their summer tour. We immediately took action. I’d met the band’s manager a couple years before when they recorded the music for the
Flintstones
movie, and since then he had very sweetly set us up with concert tickets. In all, Grac and I had seen the B’s probably twenty times.

The band’s manager told us we could pick any date on the tour. We chose Graciela’s thirtieth birthday, July 19, when they’d be playing outside Chicago. We told every single person we knew that we’d be dancing with the B-52s. In fact we didn’t talk about anything else all summer.

That’s not strictly true. For a few weeks I’d been nervously monitoring a massive reddish welt on my stomach, with something of a bull’s-eye in the middle. It changed size and shape every week and was sensitive to the touch. Berated by my mother’s constant nagging to “GET THAT DAMN BITE CHECKED OUT!” I finally showed it to the
CBS This Morning
doctor, a woman who gave medical advice on TV every day to a few million Americans.

“Spider bite!” she proclaimed. Relieved with the diagnosis, and maybe even hoping that the spider had somehow imbued me with super dancing powers, I went on with my summer and concentrated on the only thing that mattered to me. Graciela and I would meet anywhere and everywhere to practice our moves. We danced in Sag Harbor, we danced on sidewalks, and we turned her den into a stage. Graciela had incredible natural dancing talent; I, on the other hand, had only blind confidence and a love of what I was doing—a common theme with me.

When we had our dance moves down, we took the next most important step and rented stage outfits at Odds Costume Rentals on West Twenty-ninth Street. Grac rented a yellow dress with billowy transparent sleeves and a matching yellow vest with fringe. I got myself a pair of blue sequined pants—which I’d always wanted—along with a green metallic shirt and silver sequined shoes. Those shoes, as you will see, would become forever tainted in my memory.

Meanwhile, my spider bite was not going away. Of course my mom was relentless in her quest for information concerning its size, and she was especially hysterical about its endlessly changing shape. She finally made me consult (in her words) “an ACTUAL doctor. A real medical PROFESSIONAL.” I went to a doctor who asked me to raise my shirt, took half a look, and said, “Lyme disease. I’m a hundred percent sure of it.” This doctor, despite never having been on television, was correct.

You may have noticed that TV doctors do about nine hundred segments a year about Lyme disease, about the telltale signs (the bull’s-eye!) and symptoms. While
I
go to the bathroom during these segments, is it too much to think that the TV doc is paying attention to the words coming out of her own mouth? I was furious, but I had no one to blame but myself—who else but a man hopelessly devoted to television would receive a serious misdiagnosis from a TV doctor? The real-world medical professional prescribed an array of medication, including—hold your breath and cover your nose—suppositories.

“You want me to dance onstage with the B-52s with a suppository up my butt?” I asked. The mood of the summer quickly morphed from B-52-phoria to a
Hope over Heartbreak
movie-of-the-week dilemma. While I wasn’t about to let a little case of Lyme disease get between me and the B’s, I also had no intention of using those suppositories.

On the weekend of Graciela’s thirtieth birthday, we flew to Chicago. The night before the gig, we danced around the Ritz-Carlton like banshees, rehearsing moves we’d made up à la the Molly Ringwald (think
Breakfast Club
): the Stand-March-Jump, the Freeze, the Honeybun, the Right-Armed Lasso, the Strobe Light. We anticipated nothing less than the best time of our lives.

It wasn’t easy, but we’d made arrangements with the Jumbotron people at the venue to give us the footage of the concert afterward, so we had to look great. Graciela spent several hours of her birthday afternoon getting her hair done, and the effort paid off. Her hair was blown out into a high Jackie Kennedy flip with bangs, and she put on big spidery Twiggy eye makeup, exaggerated for the stage, which I thought was an especially smart touch. As far as my look went, I was in crew-cut mode and happy to let Grac’s hair be the main attraction.

When we arrived at the stadium, the parking lot was strangely empty. I don’t mean the lot wasn’t full, I mean there was
nobody
there. At all. We finally found a parking attendant who told us that we were the last people in Chicago to discover that the concert had been canceled. We were speechless. We were devastated. We would never have been able to articulate it at the time, but it was a measure of how blessed our lives had been to that point that this was the single worst thing that had ever happened to either of us.

Hysterical, we called our band contact, who told us that Cindy Wilson’s father-in-law had died. Poor Cindy! Poor Cindy’s father-in-law! And to an admittedly lesser extent, poor us. The band was doing a shorter set the next night—without Cindy—in Wisconsin. We pondered driving there, but in the end we went back to the hotel to look at the band’s tour schedule and choose another date. We scrolled through a summer full of complications but at last found a date we could both make in Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheater one month later. I was so excited—or relieved and/or possibly still discomposed from the letdown—that I got on the bed and jumped up and down like a six-year-old. The rented silver sequined shoes I was still wearing were so slippery that I fell off the bed, which would have been bad enough. But in the cramped hotel room, on a night that was already steeped in terrible luck, I fell violently and landed on the sharp corner of the bedside table. Taint first. I injured myself so badly that I could barely move for the rest of the evening, and poor Graciela spent the remainder of her milestone birthday fetching ice. For my taint. (For those of you who don’t know what a taint is, it’s the area between one’s butt and one’s balls. As in: “’Tain’t your balls and ’tain’t your butt.” Now you can say you learned something from this otherwise breezy tome.)

Moments before I fell on my taint!

By the time the date for the LA B-52s concert rolled around, we were almost over the whole thing because we’d exhausted ourselves—and everyone we knew—obsessing over it all summer. We checked in to the Mondrian and dragged out our stage costumes, and Graciela reimagined her hair into a classic bouffant, a real B-52.

Meanwhile, I’d had another setback. My newest undoing came in the form of watching a video of myself practicing dancing in Chicago. Based on the footage, I’d deemed myself not only unfit for the stage but also possibly neurologically unsound. Did my body move like that because Lyme disease had affected my brain function?

Before the concert, diseased and newly insecure, I calmed my nerves backstage with Jack Daniel’s and Pop Rocks (which, if you think about it, should be the official snack combo for the B-52s) when the Pretenders walked right past us to get onstage. And just like that, all my sorrows and self-pity were erased by a nod from Chrissie Hynde.

Before we went on, I was told that Kate (Pierson, the divine) would at some point be joining me on my pedestal and that whatever happened, I should just do my own dance and not imitate Kate’s moves. I assured him that this would not be a problem for a versatile dancer like me. Apparently, I’d suffered acute temporary amnesia about the dreaded practice video.

Graciela and I hit the spotlight—we were on pedestals on either side of the stage—for the third song, “Dance This Mess Around.” From behind the band, without a monitor in my ear, the music sounded like a mashup of nothing I could recognize, and I had a hard time finding the beat. To complicate matters, I’d done one too many shots of Jack Daniel’s before the show to calm my nerves. The Jack had calmed them so effectively that I felt like I was swimming in a pool of molasses. I was also, within seconds of going onstage, sweating like a pig. My silky green shirt was not breathing with me. Was it the alcohol/candy combo—or was I totally Lyming out with fever?

I looked across the stage, and Graciela … was a beautiful gazelle. She looked so perfect, she could’ve been
in
the band. This did not help my flailing, drowning feeling.

To further rattle me, within a minute or two of our first song, I saw Kate approaching my ramp. “Do NOT imitate Kate,” I repeated to myself like a mantra, as I attempted some kind of a lame, modified, Jewish-boy Swim. Sure enough, Kate was on my ramp and I was dancing with her in what felt like slow motion. Imagine my shock when she started doing MY lame, modified, Jewish-boy Swim! I was horrified! Also confused, upset, and drunk. I tried to come up with a new move on the spot, but to no avail. Kate left the ramp—wondering, I’m sure, how the hell I got onstage with them.

The rest of the show was a blur. I sweated like a whore in church through it all. I’m pretty sure we kicked ass during “Summer of Love,” and I still feel good about my performance in “Strobe Light,” despite losing my way a few times. Surely the “bang bang” during “Love Shack” was a highlight? And my aborted somersault during “Rock Lobster” might’ve, frankly, saved the show. But it was all over so
quickly
. And thus arriveth the lesson: No matter what happened that night, it could never have borne the hype we piled upon it. But I’m still glad I did it.

A few years later, Graciela was working at VH-1, and the show
Rock and Roll Fantasy
approached us about dancing with the B-52s again. We said yes. Duh. This time we were sober, and disease- and injury-free. Total pros. I had a number of moves prepped and ready should Kate Pierson subconsciously feel the need to bite my style again. And clearly, my dancing had improved, because the Go-Gos, who were on tour with the B’s at the time, saw us and asked us to join
them
onstage during
their
set. They made Grac dance in a bra and me shirtless, because we had no change of costume. And while I’m sure that seeing myself doing a lame modified topless Pony to “Vacation” would be totally cringe-inducing, I’m kind of sad that there’s no videotape of that performance, for it was my last one. After that, I hung up my blue sparkle pants and my sweaty silky green shirt and those slippery silver sequined shoes for the last time. But all this reminiscing has got me thinking—if you’re in a band and you find yourself in need of a go-go dancer, I still know where I can rent them. Call me!

T
HE NINE COSTUMES THAT GUARANTEED I’D NEVER GET LAID ON HALLOWEEN

A Hobo/Bum—This was my go-to costume as a kid. In retrospect, dressing as a homeless person seems a bit crass. PC hadn’t been invented then.

Greg Brady after raiding Carol’s closet—I accomplished this by wearing a jumpsuit that Graciela found in her mom’s closet and wearing my hair down (when it was long). The jumpsuit was passed between Graciela and me for a period of ten years.

Elroy Jetson after realizing he’s gay—This was in the same family as the above Greg Brady costume, and it didn’t dawn on me that high-concept costumes with long explanations didn’t really work. Graciela found some sort of unitard with the Jetsons on it. I added a blue Speedo and became Elroy.