Butter Me a Chuck

When a Lemmings birthday falls on a Totie Tuesday, we give it our full attention. Today we celebrate one of the founding Totes, our resident superhero and Mighty Mouse, the menschiest mensch in all of menschdom, the one and only Chuck Hirsch. 

For the occasion, I asked the Lemmings to complete the sentence "When I think of Chuck, I ..." 


Here are their printable responses.

"WHEN I THINK OF CHUCK, I ..."

MARK

... recall how impressed I was with him from the beginning.  Not every 20-something in a suit is able to carry off David Stockman horn rims.  

... think of his precise diction, well-suited to cutting through the acoustic vastness of Chapin Hall or the hearing room of a congressional investigative committee. 

... remember the first car phone I ever saw.

"Roscoe"

TAY

…hear him saying "Michael - Can I ask a question?"

…want to shout TEX DUCKBUTTER!!

…imagine his face as he received the Penthouse & Playboy magazine cartoons that Paul & I faxed to his secure fax machine in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy.

Entreprenooah

WAYNE

... think about co-populating.

... have an irresistible desire to highlight my part in the music. (a reference to Chuck in choral society his freshman year)

... think of having dinner with Michael Jackson and Jimmy Carter at the same time, and it's not some bizarre dream!

... keep hearing "New Jersey and you... puhrfect together!"

... wonder how we ended up being scolded for singing "My Girl" at a Women in Transportation dinner.

Tex and the Totes at Wesray party

... thank him for having the stones to suggest we open for the Beach Boys at the Wesray Xmas Party!

... see a brilliant entrepreneur, a tireless humanitarian, certainly the most well-connected man I know, a wonderfully devoted husband and father, and a man who gets skinnier with age while the rest of us, um, are headed in the opposite direction.

BILL

... feel a sudden desire to whack a colander with a tablespoon.

... recall a guy who could sell an off-color joke to the whole world on a T-shirt, but not tell one to a live audience (Humor Patrol!).

... agree wholeheartedly with his immortal sentiment, "What's the SONG?"

Baritones "r" Us

FISH

...tingle where I go pee-pee.

KEVIN

...Chuck me a butter.


...butter me a Chuck.

Harry Chuck

...imagine Harry Chapin's diary from 1978 saying, "Played Williams College today. Met my match." Click here to listen.

...put on a "Helmet."

LYMAN

…smile as I visualize him doing his distinctive swivel dance (especially great when you watch Buzz at double speed).

…wonder if he really boarded that navy submarine.

…wonder where Martha Quinn is now.

…picture him calling his buddy Paul Michael Glaser to pitch Starsky and Chuck! 

Starsky and Chuck?

PAUL

…am gobsmacked by his bravado.  He is without a doubt the least sniveling Lemming.  Who else would have the courage to leap onstage to perform with Harry Chapin?  Then again let's remember his billet-doux to Martha Quinn -- but dag blammit, at least he tried.  Certainly no other Lemming would have.  And it could have worked. He could have been Mr. Martha Quinn.

…am in awe of his freedom of motion while performing.  He is the most animated tote performer.  (Least sniveling tote, most animated tote performer -- both low benchmarks for the Lemmings but sterling achievements nonetheless.)  Of course, Charlie would be a contender for most animated but his animation has the least to do with what is going on onstage so I didn't count it.  I am envious of Chuck's joie de performance.  It is infectious.

…am impressed by his generosity and altruism.  Nobody jumps faster than Chuck when a friend is in need.

…am thunderstruck by his entrepreneurial spirit.  Chuck was an entrepreneur before I knew what one was.  And he remains one today. 

AL

…think how great it is to have him as a friend.

BRUCE

Who the hell is Chuck?

TO SUM UP:

When we think of Chuck, we smile with our hearts. He's the best friend, father, husband, mentor, baritone, helmet-wearer, butter chucking, washing machine agitator, Harry Chapin upstaging New Jerseyite named Tex we could ever hope for.

We love you, you Tote! Happy Birthday.

The 3D Dog

When do fish talk about dogs? When it's today's blog and it's guest-scribed by Andy "Fish" McElfresh. Take it away, Poisson.

Something's fishy

There was a time there when I took a lot of 3D pictures. You could say I was some kind of prescient forerunner to Avatar, but really, I was nerdy, it was super nerdy, and I loved it.

Fish pix

I got into a phase where I took tons of photos of dogs. They are just the right size to show off the hyper-real characteristic of the 3D: not so big, and not so small that they get into the parallax crossover zone.

Nerdy, see?

Future fish wife

So one day, I'm walking the streets of the Upper West Side with my then-girlfriend, and future wife, Johanna. We come across a beautiful Irish Setter, who trots right up to us, nuzzling and kowtowing for a petting, pulling his walker along by the lead. The man was a very pleasant young Asian man, and I asked him if I could take a picture of his dog.

He started laughing. "The dog?"

So I launched into a complicated explanation of how it¹s 3D, I'm into dogs, the parallax crossover zone, etc. etc. until he finally interrupts and says, "sure."

I took out the light meter, dialed the settings, and pointed the camera.

"You don¹t want me in it?" the man asked.

"Nope, just the dog." I said.

I took the picture, had it developed, carefully mounted it -- and it was awesome. It went into the coffee table box, the one with which I would bore guests on the rare occasion that someone would come over and didn't pretend to be blind in one eye.

Sorry. Had to.

A couple of months later, I went to my first Williams sing-along at the Horner¹s apartment. As soon as we came into the kitchen ("come see Mrs. Horner's purple Chicken!"), I saw the dog.

Eph foul

"I know that dog!" I said. "I have an awesome 3D picture of that dog!"

Jack Horner looked at me, and the penny dropped.

"You're the guy..." he said. And laughed.

For a moment, I was hoping that being "the guy" meant that somehow I had gained notoriety among the Manhattan intelligentsia as an avid 3D dog photographer. A paralyzing moment later, that didn't strike me as all that likely. Plus the laugh was hard to explain.

"My son-in-law told me somebody took a picture of the dog!" Now his voice had the tone that asked, "how clueless are you?"

And then I saw the refrigerator. And the nice young Asian man. And the articles proclaiming another triumphant performance. And that the nice young Asian man was none other than Yoyo Ma.

Jack's son-in-law

Now, I have an unusually large capacity for embarrassment. Whereas an Olympic speed skater, for example, has large, tree-trunk-sized thighs, I have a similar muscle, somewhere in my cerebellum, that spasms into action like it was jettisoned from the dying planet Krypton as the last hope of a race of people who are prone to extreme embarrassment. And that brain muscle came to life like Frankenstein's monster on the slab.

In other words, I was stunned.

And Jack, God bless him, just nodded and said, "you'll have to show me that picture sometime."

Thank you, Fish. Your story left me not only wanting to see the picture, but hungering for purple chicken and yearning for some Jack vocals. Here's the man himself, Yoyo's father-in-law, with Malcolm, Bill and the boys doing "I Love the Ladies." ("When I'm in London, Paris, or old Vienna....")

The Ballad of Can Man

Andy "Fish" McElfresh writes:

Here¹s a story about a little side project I did with Kevin.

I¹m not sure anyone else in the group has heard the song, and it really falls under the category of deep Lemmings trivia, but I thought about it the other day and decided to share.

The one and only Stasia

In 199_, I had just broken ties with that miserable fat man, Tim Zagat, and was freelancing at MTV. I had been brought in by Anastasia Pappas, who had worked at Zagat for a brief time before going to work across the street in Columbus Circle with Kevin on a sketch comedy/stand-up show called "Comikaze."

Anastasia has been a friend of the Lemmings over the years, but I also owe her a personal debt of gratitude, since she was always calling on me to do things that I had never done before. I created graphic elements for her, wrote scripts, painted sets, whatever. But of all the odd jobs I did for her, one stands out as having been the most fun: doing a song to accompany a little 3-minute piece she had shot for "Comikaze". And best of all, I would be doing it with Kevin Weist (I say "best of all" now, but at the time I was extremely nervous).

Do I make you nervous?

The segment was about some idiot kid who made a suit out of empty aluminum cans, which made him look like a metallic Koosh ball. He rode around on a unicycle (something I used to do before I realized I could talk to girls), and the whole thing was supposed to raise everyone¹s awareness that recycling is good.

Fish in the early 80's (reenactment)

Those of you acquainted with "Love Slave" know my fondness for Western-style ballads. They¹re great because the lines are short, and if I was to fill three verses about this jerkoff in a can suit, the lines would have to be very short.

Look what I found

Kevin, as usual, took the lump of dirt I brought him and, pretending it was clay, sculpted it into something fun and entertaining. I never realized how much I muttered when I sang, until Kevin produced this thing: his crystalline enunciation, pitch-perfect, um... pitch, and overall enthusiasm made it work.

I was very unsure of myself back then. Here I was, actually trying to pursue my dreams of being a writer and making TV, and this little project, along with my inclusion in the Lemmings, were two disproportionately large votes of confidence that gave me a momentum that I can still feel.

At its heart, it is dumb. Consider it a little bonbon from our past, one that dissolved quickly from memory, but that also came at the just the right time in my life.

Timid woodland bon bons

Click here to listen, then shut up.

p.s from Kevin. I love everything about this song. Fish's lyrics are perfection. You might have to listen twice to catch all the soda references he makes throughout. It was a blast to record, partially because we were accompanied by the great David Barnes on harmonica and Franklin "Cooler in the Shade" Micare on guitar. In fact, it's Franklin who hits that high B at the end.


p.p.s. The Lemmings crossed paths with the lovely Anastasia Pappas on one other occasion. She was the mastermind behind the promos for MTV's Winter Lodge, featuring Winthy.

Go Fish! - or - The Whim of the Wheel

Andy "Fish" McElfresh is the King of Over-Delivery. Ask him to build you a tree house, and he makes an airborne Swiss chalet. Ask him to write a song, and suddenly there's a full-length album with cover art and a world tour in the works. I asked him for one story from our collective past for this week's blog, and he submitted three along with ideas for a dozen more.

So, where to start? With the one about the man who covered his body in aluminum? Or the one about the famous person Fish accidentally ignored so he could take a 3-D picture of his dog? Or the one about why (he thinks) Warren Hunke hates his guts?

In the end I chose one with blood, guts, yelling, embarrassment, and the giant spinning wheel of fortune that Fish built for our first annual farewell concert in 1992, twenty years ago this year. That's as good a place to start as any, don't you think? 

Take it away, Fish.

Le Poisson

I know this blog is a forum that refreshes our memories of past greatness, but I would like to take up some space here by revealing a deep, dark secret that some of you may not know.

It was the 1992 Wheel of Fortune concert at the Westside Arts Theatre in NYC. Knowing I had little to contribute musically to the group beyond my usual breathy murmurings in what approximated a baritone, I volunteered to build the Wheel.

Still a newlywed, I didn't have much in the way of tools in our London Terrace apartment, so I turned to the handyman in the Zagat office where I worked. His name is Karol Stein, a Polish ex-pat who had become mentally unbalanced after losing 100 pounds in a 4-month bout in a Krakow tuberculosis ward.

TB, or not TB? That is the congestion.

His wife was Margaret Sophie Stein, a well-known actress at the time, having just starred in Paul Mazursky's "Enemies, A Love Story." However, things between Karol and Margaret weren't going so well, since he had gotten drunk and tried to push Mazursky down a flight of stairs after a screening.

Have a nice trip, Paul.

Karol made me draw up detailed plans of the wheel, and wouldn't let me borrow his jigsaw until he was satisfied that the schematic was structurally viable. Knowing his tendency to hover on the edges of psychotic episodes, I should have just ponied up the cash for a jigsaw, because I knew I would eventually own one. But publishing wasn't the big money world it is now, and his jigsaw was just sitting in his toolbag, right there outside my office. He signed off on the plans, I took the saw, and asked him what he wanted in return. 

"All I want," he said, "is ticket to concert."

Big money! Big money!

So. I made the wheel, returned the saw, and went on with my life, in preparation for the big day. My whole office (except for the Zagats) was turning out for the performance, so I didn¹t see any problems. And then the show started. The first couple of songs went fine, considering the timidness of my own contributions to the music. And the wheel, God bless it, didn¹t break, careen off the stage and kill the Hornors. But by song three, I heard that familiar battle cry, uttered with a thick Polish accent: it was Karol, drunk and furious at who-knows-what. I was convinced he would ruin the concert. All of the blood instantly drained out of my body. 

It took the combined efforts of David Latham, Paul Boocock and Karen Mulligan to haul him out of there before he got in a fist fight. In the lobby, he punched David in the stomach and ran out into the street. They followed him, but let him alone when he started screaming at a cop on horseback. They came back into the concert.

 
Later, when we watched a tape of the concert, I could hear Karol losing his mind after taking down (what turned out to be) a pint flask of vodka.

And to this day, if I am ever called upon to play a character who is instantly paralyzed with embarrassment, all I have to do is think of old Karol and the Wheel. And the blood, (maybe these days, only about half as much) just drains right out.

Thanks, Poisson. I couldn't find Karol's outburst on the video, but I did put together a little montage of your handiwork in action. Check it.

And here's a bonus clip. You may have blocked this out, Fish, but that was also the night we debuted "Concrete and Clay," your  first big solo with the Lemmings. And lest we forget, you and Mark did that arrangement - a much bigger contribution to the group's legacy than, say, a spinning wheel or a deranged Pole.

Finally - here are the other subjects Fish pitched for future blogs: Adventures at Sapporo, My First Salad Bowl at Chez Tey, Vern and the Jambalaya Incident, The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Vicki's Valentine Thing, The Amazing Transcribing Woman, Rehearsal Lyrics,

The Unmentionable Compendium, or Warren Hunke Hates My Guts.

Are you as excited as I am?