I have these two great friends of 3+ decades, Cheri and Bill Steinkellner. Actually, I’ve known them since a few years before they got married. Back then, Cheri was an actress and Billy was (and still is) a writer and the best director and teacher of improv comedy I’ve ever known. They wrote some things together and then they wrote some more things together and some more…and pretty soon, they were so successful as a writing team that Cheri pretty much gave up performing. Among the TV shows they wrote for (and sometimes produced) were The Jeffersons, Who’s the Boss?, Bob (the series where Bob Newhart played a comic book artist), Hope & Gloria, Teacher’s Pet and Cheers. They won Emmy Awards for Cheers and Teacher’s Pet. They also wrote the book for the Broadway musical, Sister Act, and they have a lot more impressive credits.
Cheri teaches a once-a-week class at U.C. Santa Barbara in which she introduces show business wanna-bes to the realities of the industry in which they hope to work, and she kept asking me to come up and speak to this class. That’s what I was about to do earlier this year the day my knee went kablooey on me and instead of driving up to S.B., I headed for local medical attention. Yesterday was the first day of the new semester so I went north to be her opening guest.
I can get around okay on the knee now but being the one with which I work the gas and brake pedals, it’s not great on long-range driving. So instead of trying to motor up to Santa Barbara and back, I Amtraked it. The train made for a rather pleasant ride, during which I answered e-mail, did a bit of blogging and read, via iPad Kindle, the recent autobiography of Shirley Jones. If you’re a fan of Ms. Jones, as I was and to a reduced extent still am, you might want to give this one a miss. She tells you a lot more about her life, and the lives of those around her, than you might feel you have a right to know. On the other hand, if you want to read about her and Jack Cassidy having threesomes in bed, go for it.
Cheri met me at the station and drove me to her class where I addressed about 300 bright, young students, not a one of whom had ever heard of Welcome Back, Kotter. This is in no way a criticism of them or anyone their age because I think I understand the reasons for it…but when I was in college, I was aware of TV shows and movie stars more than twenty years earlier and I think all my contemporaries were, too. Still, as I ticked off at Cheri’s request a list of my influences, it didn’t seem like a lot of those present had heard of Stan Freberg, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Groucho Marx or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Interestingly, a fair number of them knew exactly who Jack Kirby was.
The questions, from both Cheri and the students, were bright and challenging…and I had a pretty good time. I don’t think I scared anybody away from the profession, nor was that my goal. I think…I hope I gave them sound advice on attitude and how to frame their dreams. I tried to emphasize (a) never becoming or even appearing desperate and (b) not taking setbacks and rejections too seriously. One needs, I believe, to learn to roll with all punches and to understand that the business is not and never will be "fair" the way you want it to be.
After class, I stayed around for about an hour to answer individuals’ questions and then Cheri, Bill, their son Teddy and I went to dinner. Since there were no trains back to L.A. that late, I stayed over in the Steinkellner guest house, then Bill and Cheri drove me back home today. They were coming into town anyway since Billy teaches an amazing Improv Master Class on most Saturdays. On the way, we stopped off for brunch in Ventura and this cartoonist I know named Sergio Aragonés joined us.
I’m probably doing what Shirley Jones did — telling you more about myself than you care to know — but I sometimes treat this blog as a diary, jotting down things I want to remember for myself. I had a real good 24 hours. There were friends. There was great scenery. There was good food. There were fresh, inquisitive young people. Everything was wonderful except that I really didn’t need to learn how at age 79, the woman who played Marian the Librarian and Mrs. Partridge still enjoys frequent masturbation.