It was just another, dreary, chaotic, backstabbing, life-sucking day on “Thicke of the Night” when I first espied the one and only Theodore L. Zeigler bounding into view. He was loping down the hallway of the production office in his rainbow suspenders, looking for all the world like a 3-D Robert Crumb cartoon. Little did I suspect that this lanky, eccentrically attired, grey-haired curiosity would one day change my life forever.
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I became a professional scribe at the tender, pre-Tinder, age of 18. Since the halcyon days of my humble, date-free youth, words have fed my family and made it possible for me to accumulate a record collection that would sink most medium-size boats. While I have enjoyed an unreasonable amount of success through the decades, armed with only pen in hand and the dictionary in my head, in show business there is forever a micro-thin line between gainful employment and having to mug a giant-arrow-spinning condo clown for his Subway coupons. This is the harrowing, tongue-swallowing tale of how a couple of simple words almost cost me my entire Hollywood career, just as it was breaching the birth canal.
Very few enterprises begin their days with as much jocundity and hubris as Thicke of the Night at its inchoation. Fred Silverman’s latest blockbuster proclaimed itself to be a new and bold spring morning that would lead moribund late-night entertainment out of its dark and dreary winter. The talk show format had become stale and uninteresting. A pallid and tiresome visitor in the sexless bedrooms of America.
Part One can be found here.
When poised, teetering precariously on the very edge of a vast and black eternity, most of us will gaze back reflectively upon those pivotal moments in our brief time on this green Earth. The roads taken and the byways left untraveled. The friends made and the bastards who stole your girl. The victories briefly celebrated and the losses bitterly mourned and gone over and over and over again in your head until foul and ugly thoughts begin to rage like a demonic Jovian storm within you. Your cranial synapses start to explode like overcooked popcorn and all sense and reason is frantically cast aside as you are sucked down, flailing and screaming into a soul-shredding vortex of irreversible madness…but I digress.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” If this were true, I would have been able to lift Kim Kardashian’s ass over my head with one hand by the time I had survived Thicke of the Night.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 