My wife and I had just taken our seats at The Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York City. It was November 2006, and we were about to see Martin Short’s recently opened one-man show, “Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me.”
Showtime was 15 minutes away. I was sitting at the end of the aisle, chatting with friends, when a guy with a headset and a clipboard tapped me on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said, “would you like to be tonight’s guest celebrity?” I asked him what that meant. He said, “You’ll go up on stage and get interviewed by Martin Short.”
As an introvert, being on a Broadway stage wasn’t exactly in my comfort zone, and I was about to say no. But I recognized that a chance like this would never happen again, so I decided to say yes. Clipboard guy jotted my name down and told me that someone would get me during the show.
As soon as the curtain went up, I fell into a deep rabbit hole, convinced I’d made a big mistake. Me, interviewed by Martin Short on a Broadway stage? Embarrassment and humiliation were sure to follow. Yikes!
About halfway through the show, another tap on the shoulder. Once I got backstage, someone gave me a short line of dialogue to deliver and told me to open a door leading on stage. Grabbing the handle, I opened the door and delivered my very forgettable line in front of 1,100 people.
Problem is, no one told me what would happen next.
At the center of the stage there was a patient lying on a hospital bed, covered from head to toe in heavy bandages, a nurse on one side of the bed, Martin Short on the other side. After muddling through that skit, one of the cast members led me to the front of the stage, where I sat down to be interviewed by Jiminy Glick, one of Short’s best-known characters.
As a clueless Hollywood interviewer who speaks in a peculiar voice while wearing a fat suit (politically correct, he isn’t), Glick is known for asking his guest celebrities, who have included Nathan Lane, Steve Martin and Jerry Seinfeld, bizarre questions about obscure matters. All while hurling zingers and insults at them.
So, I’m sitting in a comfortable chair on a brightly lit Broadway stage, a few feet away from Martin Short, whose keen wit and engaging repartee were on full display. As I fielded Glick’s oddball questions about my background, education and career, I was surprised that I was actually feeling calm and relaxed, even managing to get some decent laughs from the audience.
It was the craziest interview ever. Like being given a Rorschach test by Robin Williams. After a few minutes, Glick started asking me a series of rapid-fire non sequiturs. “Automatic-flushing toilets, how do they know when you’re done peeing? Or is it just a good guess?” Later that night, I realized I should have said “ESP”!
Glick’s eccentric questions continued. At one point, Glick said, “If Abe Lincoln was alive today, what would he think of his tunnel?” Hearing that, I asked Glick if he wanted to hear a little story about Abe Lincoln. Sure, he said.
“It’s a funny thing about Abe Lincoln,” I began, looking directly at the audience. “As a lawyer, he needed to keep extensive files on his clients. But he traveled a lot, so he kept important papers under his hat. Everywhere he went, he could refer to them whenever he wanted. His hat was like a traveling file cabinet.” Feigning complete boredom with my “story,” Glick slowly slid off his chair onto the floor and the patient enshrouded in bandages rolled off his bed and crashed to the floor. The audience roared. Short shot me a big smile.
After the show ended, I got the final surprise of the evening, when a dozen theatergoers asked for my autograph.
By challenging me to go outside my comfort zone, my first and only Broadway appearance taught me a few key lessons.
First, the only way to keep on growing is to keep enlarging our comfort zones. Change doesn’t come from the path of least resistance. Behold the turtle, a close friend advises, she makes progress only when she sticks her neck out.
Second, each of us has the capacity to be our own “guest celebrity.” How you get there is up to you, but as Oscar Wilde observed, “You might as well be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
Third, our thoughts control our emotions, not the other way around. William James succinctly said “the greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” After tumbling into a rabbit hole, my anxiety vanished as soon as I stepped onto the stage.
Last, and most important, always sit on the aisle.
It doesn’t hurt to carry a pen either.
Richard Kolodny lives in Los Angeles.
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