The Art of Audio #13: "Abbott & Costello in the Catskills!"

The Joe Bev
Experience

The Art of Audio #13

"Abbott & Costello in the Catskills!"

Joe Bev & friend doing "Who's on First?
at the 1976 Nostalgia Convention at The Staler-Hilton Hotel 

The first time I performed Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First?" was in 1975 at a high school play audition. I was a 16 year old kid with braces and a peach fuzz mustache trying to be Bud to my 17 year old friend's Lou.

Joe Bev performed "Who's on First?
on WOR-TV's Joe Franklin Show in 1976 

In 1976, after winning a contest at the first Nostalgia Convention at The Staler-Hilton Hotel in New York City, my partner and I performed Abbott & Costello all around the New York-New Jersey area and even did "Who's on First?" on WOR-TV's "The Joe Franklin Show". (I had my braces removed the day before.)  You can hear audio of my Joe Franklin appearance here.




I stopped performing Abbott & Costello after my partner and I had a falling out. That was in 1980. You can hear the NPR story I did about it here.


In 2006, I was walking down a lonely corridor during the Oldtime Radio Convention at the Holiday Inn in Newark, New Jersey--when Joe Franklin walked past me. He had not seen me in 30 years. Without skipping a beat, he said, "Bihler & Bev, Who's on First."  


This year, when I was cast as the MC of a Borscht Belt comedy show here in my home of the Catskills, I was asked to pick a character to play. I chose to host the evening as Bud Abbott. Now I needed a Costello. My old partner was out of the question.


Luckily, I found Bob Greenberg, an enormously talented comedian who has been doing Lou Costello his whole life with other Abbotts. Like me, Bob is a trained professional actor with major credits including Saturday Night Live.

Joe Bev & Bob Greenberg as Bud Abbott & Lou Costello

In 1993, Bob had also been on the last week of TV's "The Joe Franklin Show" where he did impressions of Lou Costello and Curly Howard.


For three nights, Bob & I performed not only "Who's on First?" together but wrote and improvised an entire night of hilarious audience pleasing comedy surrounding the music acts, dancers and magician. 


We had never met before and only spoke on the phone twice. Yet we BECAME Abbott & Costello on stage! We looked like them, sounded like them, we listened to each other and improvised many great moments, and worked the audience as if we had been together forever. Our chemistry together was electric! We clicked!


See us performing "Who's on First?" here.

Bob and I even created a new Abbott & Costello bit we call "Luzon Station" and gave the two-hour show a subplot and a title: "Abbott & Costello in the Catskills". 


All three nights were sold out and we had to turn people away. The success has led to more! "Abbott & Costello in the Catskills" will soon be heard on NPR stations and released as an audiobook! 


You will get to hear excepts from it when Bob is my special guest on this week's Comedy-O-Rama online radio broadcast, Saturday, April 14th at 1:00 pm (Eastern) on Cult Radio-A-Go-Go.



Now, Bob and I are ready and willing to become Abbott & Costello anywhere, anytime, for anyone!


We can custom tailor a show to any need and write new material to fit any occasion, plus deliver authentic and exciting performances of Bud & Lou's classic routines, including Who's On First, Susquahanna Hat Company, Niagra Falls, Job as a Loafer, Loan me $50, Cow's Utter, Lou Hates Mustard, and Jonah and the Whale.
         
Want to meet Abbott & Costello in person? Just give us a call at 845-647-9475, and shout, "Heeeey, Aaaaaaabbott!!!" We'll be right over! :-)

Best to you all,

Joe Bev.

Joe Bevilacqua is a veteran award-winning actor, writer, author and producer. His audio is available at Amazon, iTunes, and Audible for Kindle, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, iPod or iPad download, or CD purchase or rental. Find out more!

The Art of Audio #12 “A Valentine From Graham Nash's MAC”

The Joe Bev
Experience

The Art of Audio #12

“A Valentine From Graham Nash's MAC”

It was February 12, 1996, two days before Valentine's Day when I received an e-mail from one “Lorie Kellogg, height 5'4”, brown hair, single, living in Los Angeles”--with photo attached. It was an unsolicited singles ad from a women working for Graham Nash and sent from his MAC Laptop.




Here is “A Valentine From Graham Nash's MAC” from our "A Waterlogg Double Feature: 'The Joe Bev Valentine Treat' & The Comedy-O-Rama Hour Valentine Special 'Cupid Comes to Camp Waterlogg' Audiobook on sale for Valentines Day.

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY

I recognized her name immediately. Six months earlier, I had given up a good job as Senior Radio Publicist for WNYC, New York City's National Public Radio station, and was now living in the Beverly Hills garage apartment of Myrtis Butler, the widow of Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi  Bear, who had been my mentor, to try my hand at animated cartoon voice-over acting in Hollywood.

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY

I was reading the Internet newsgroup la.wanted and saw a post from Lorie Kellogg, looking for a roommate. I e-mailed her that I didn't “need a roommate” but was “looking for new friends to show me around LA.”

One of the reasons I wrote her was her named, Kellogg, reminded me of the cereal company that had sponsored the original Yogi Bear cartoons. Maybe I thought she was heir to the Battle Creek fortune. (She's not.)

Four months later, no reply from Lorie Kellogg.

When I received the unsolicited ad, I remembered, “She's the one who blew me off!”I decided to punish her with an excruciatingly long e-mail with all the sorted details of my life, from my father beating me as a child to loving Buster Keaton movies.

To my surprise, she wrote back. After a few nights talking on the phone, Lorie suggested, “Let's meet at My Father's Office.”

I thought, “We haven't even met and she wants me to meet her dad already?”It turned out “My Father's Office” was a micro-brewery and bar on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

We met on February 17, 1997. Lorie wore a yellow dress with pink flowers and turquoise tights and black leather sandals with a slight heal, her medium length wavy brown hair doted strategically with yellow, pink and turquoise plastic butterfly-shaped barrettes. I wore a pale yellow short-sleeved Izod shirt, cream-colored pants and sneakers, and sported a mustache and a lot more hair than I have now.

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY

We had our micro-brew and talked passionately about art, comedy, film, music, ecology, health, and other subjects we seemed to have in common. Lorie told me she loved Robin Williams and, as a child, sat, upside down, with her head on the couch and her feet in the air, after watching “Mork and Mindy.” I told her when I was three, in 1964, I piled up the living room furniture cushions on the couch, in size order, so it resembled a tugboat, climbed on top and watched Cap'n Jack McCarthy present 1930s black & white Max Fleischer “Popeye” cartoons on WPIX-TV, New York's local channel 11. 

While Lorie was in the restroom, I thought, “This is the one.”

As she climbed into her car, she thought, “I'm gonna break this guy's heart.”

The next day, Lorie called and invited me to her house to watch Charlie Chaplin's “Modern Times” on video, which we did.


Two weeks later, she invited me to watch Graham Nash rehearse. Well, sort of. Nash was performing on stage in Philadelphia and Lorie and crew were in a building on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, in “The Valley,” as Los Angelians have dubbed it.

Nash was performing an autobiographical rock concert in which he stood before a large screen composed of a number of smaller screens, and clicked a portable mouse to bring up images, broadcast over the Internet, of his childhood attic bedroom during World War II and other pictures of his personal past.

Lorie sat at a bay of large Silicon Graphics computers, hand on her mouse, “in case” Graham's failed. (I'm sure she did a lot more than that. At the actual concert, a camera in Studio City was turned on Lorie and crew and they took a bow for the audience, who saw them projected on stage in Philadelphia.)

After the rehearsal, the crew broke for dinner and were told to be back in an hour for a second run-through.

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY

Lorie suggested we find a place to eat down Ventura Boulevard. We chose a Moroccan restaurant named "Marrakesh Express" which happens to also be a song written by Graham Nash, and performed by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, on their 1969 self-titled debut album.


No sooner had we pull up pillows and sat down on the floor when a zaftig belly dancer emerged to personally annoy me. I shooed away the wiggling stranger five times before she finally moved on to her next victim, leaving me to woo my new girlfriend. 

We returned to rehearsal to discover the second run-through had been canceled.

“Wanna come back to my place? asked Lorie.“Sure,” I replied.

Darkness fell over the Santa Monica Mountains as I followed, in my 1995 aqua blue Chevy Cavalier, Lorie's 1991 navy blue Ford Escort wagon, out of “The Valley,” over the Sepulevda Pass, to West LA.


Inside Lorie's apartment, we did “the pre-kiss dance”--I stepped forward; she stepped back. I stepped back; she stepped forward, four or five times, until I leaned in for our first kiss.We “made out” on her couch for maybe twenty-minutes, when Lorie stopped, looked me in the eyes, smiled and confidentially announced, “OK. Here's the deal. You can either shave off your mustache and stay the night... or leave now.”

NEW ON AMAZON
FOR VALENTINES DAY 

Without skipping a beat, I enthusiastically asked, “Where's the razor?”


Lorie walked her dog, Duchamp, named after the French painter Marcel  Duchamp (1887—1968), while I stared in her bathroom mirror. No sooner had I had shaved off the right half of my mustache, when I remembered that two days before, I had seen a live taping of a sitcom called “The John Cryer Show,” in which Cryer's character had a beard. In the plot, his girlfriend worries that something is wrong with their relationship, she thinks it might be the beard and asks him to shaved it off, which he does. He comes out of the bathroom, they kiss and she looks at him, says, “No, it just must be you,” and leaves. 

I bravely shaved the left side.

Lorie and I fell in love and moved in together a few weeks later and we've been nearly inseparable ever since, all because of that Internet valentine from Graham Nash's MAC.

To quote the recommendation letter Graham Nash wrote for her at the end of his concert tour, “Lorie is a rare combination of a mother hen and Einstein.”

NEW ON AMAZON
 FOR VALENTINES DAY

Best to you all,

Joe Bev.

Joe Bevilacqua is a veteran award-winning actor, writer, author and producer. His audio is available at Amazon, iTunes, and Audible for Kindle, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, iPod or iPad download, or CD purchase or rental. Find out more!

NEW for 2012, A Waterlogg Valentine Double Feature Audiobook

LATEST PRESS - what a great year, and a year to come!

The Art of Audio #4: "Another Fine Mess"

The Joe Bev Experience

The Art of Audio #4

"Another Fine Mess"

Me as Stanley. "I certainly am!"
Listen to me as Stan, Babe & Finn!

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made some great silent classics. Putting Pants on Phillip was released December 3, 1927 – their first official film. But Stan and Ollie really excelled when sound was added to film. Their distinct voices matched their physical personalities. The jazzy background music matched their comic timing.

Hear the greats talk about their work!

I've been doing my impression of "The Boys" since I was could first talk. As a young child in the early 1960s, I watched Chuck McCann brilliantly pay homage to them on his WPIX and WNEW New York TV shows.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Craig Marin the great Flexitoons creator-puppeteer who, as a mere teenager, got to work with Chuck.

You can hear that interview, plus ones with Mel Blanc, June Foray and many cartoon legends on my new audio release The Best of Cartoon Carnival Volume One.

I'll be on CULT RADIO A-GO-GO THIS Saturday, as "L&H"! Listen to me as "The Boys" here!

TUNE IN LIVE!!!

 

I am also the Vice Sheik and Ballywhosit of the “Them Thar Hills” tent 284 local of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, located in Ellenville, NY.

Me as Stan with Ollie (Grand Sheik Ray Faiola)
2010 Ellenville Fourth of July Parade.
Watch a video of our antics here!

We enjoy Laurel & Hardy on a big screen with an audience!
 
(Get the new Laurel & Hardy: The Essential DVD Collection.)

In 1987, I created a video tribute (visually) performed by Alison Nead as Oliver Hardy, Ron Willoughby as James Finlayson, and me as Stan Laurel. I am the voice of all three characters. Watch it below!

 

Get this great soundtrack CD
mastered by Ray Faiola!

JOIN US! Our next meeting will be Sunday, December 4th, 2011, at 3:00pm, in Ellenville, N Y. This will be our Holiday Pot-Luck Party and we invite all members to help out by bringing a dish, side, salad or dessert. 

We hope ALL MEMBERS will attend this Grand Buffet! Our film program will feature "Snowy Shorts", beginning with a reprise of Laurel & Hardy's classic two-reeler THE FIXER-UPPERS co-starring the Ever-Popular Mae Busch. Then we'll have Bugs Bunny in FRESH HARE;  A Walter Lantz cartune SKI FOR TWO; W.C. Fields in THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER; and the Tent premiere of Stan and Babe in their Christmas Tree classic BIG BUSINESS. 

 
Guests are welcome! Email me for directions.

My work is not all fun and games, however. I have a serious side too! Don't believe me? Well, then, tune in next time and find out!

Best to you all,

Joe Bev.


Joe Bevilacqua is a veteran award-winning actor, writer, author and producer. His audio is available at Amazon, iTunes, and Audible for Kindle, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, iPod or iPad download, or CD purchase or rental. Find out more!