Forget Paris

I pirated "Pirates of the Caribbean". The irony is awesome!

In my career, I have been very fortunate to do a lot of things that I never thought would be possible. As a comedian, I've opened for a lot of celebrities, performed in front of no one (true) and more than 10,000 people. I still love performing.

One of the highlights was being hired to do the crowd warm up for the Castle Rock film, "Forget Paris", starring Billy Crystal, Debra Winger, Joe Montegna and other celebrities like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Charles Barkley. Aside from the experience itself, the way I got the job was unusual, to say the least.

My good friend, Ron Ruhman, who is like a brother to me, saw a flyer for extras needed on the set of the film. It seemed like a perfect project for the people who were members of my comedy and improv troupes. So, we went to the first day of shooting.

The comedian who was hired to do the crowd warm up was awful. I mean Roseanne Barr singing the National Anthem kind of awful. So, during a break, I talked to the Assistant Director and told him that if he ever needed another crowd warm up that my company specialized in crowds of 10,000 or more. He took my card and I went back to my place in the stands.

I totally lied to the guy. We had never done anything like that at all. Imagine my surprise when I got a call from Cash Oshman, the guy responsible for hiring the crowd warm ups. They had fired the other comedian and wanted to hire us, but just me and Ron. I got the call on a Monday and our call time was 4:30 am on Friday.

We were both ecstatic until reality set in. What in the world were we going to do??? I had no idea. We're improv players, I thought. We'll come up with something. Ruhman is a guy who likes things planned. He's very nervous with a "fly by the seat of your pants" approach.

Ron kept asking me what we were going to do, and I kept telling him I didn't know, but I would figure it out. Tuesday turned to Wednesday, Wednesday to Thursday. Ron was now beginning to panic, because I still had no idea.

Friday morning came and as he was driving us to the Sports Arena (it was a basketball film), he was really panicking now. He asked me again, in a much louder voice, "What are we gonna do?!?!" I told him I had no idea, which was true.

We arrived, met Cash Oshman, and we were just about to get started. Cash gave us one cordless mic and told us to go. As we headed down the stairs to the basketball court and our audience (13,000) inner city people, Ron, now in complete panic mode, said "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO???? I just said," No fear, brother.", high fived him and headed for the court. It was awesome.

We completely nailed it. The shooting days were 18 hours, with a lot of down time. It was our job to keep the crowd energetic throughout the whole time. We did all sorts of things, anything we could think of. We even had them singing the Brady Bunch song in the round.

We had them do the wave as fast as they could, and they were in an energetic frenzy. So much so that Cash told us to bring them down. So we had them do the wave in slow motion, then do it making no sound at all. It was a really fun experience.

Since we were able to interact with the cast, I hung out with Billy Crystal for a while. He was also directing the film and let me watch what he was doing and even answered my questions about why he was shooting at certain angles or filming the same scene ten times. He was completely professional and kind to everyone.

The whole experience gave me the mantra that I carried with me from then on. Why not me?

See you tomorrow.

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