30 YEARS AGO, WORKING FOR A FUTURE POLITICIAN

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

1993 started rather miserably, with me getting audited for the only time in my life, but as it turned out, so did many of my show biz colleagues. I knew it was coming as soon as my then-wife and I were called to the auditor’s office. After nearly three hours of grilling from a total corporate shill who was “just doing her job,” I felt the only way I was going to justify my tax deductions was to do my act in this woman’s cubicle. I was socked with fines of nearly $9000, but thankfully, I was taking an improv class at the time and one of the other classmates turned out to be an accountant. He was able to appeal my case, after which the fine was cut by half. Thank god for small favours!

I still had a fairly big debt to sort out, and work was way down from what it had been only a couple years earlier. I was going weeks without spots at the LA clubs, plus the excesses of the 80’s had caused many of my favourite road rooms to fold, so there wasn’t much comedy work to speak of. There was a possibility of playing a posh wedding in April, but some interventions caused that one to disappear. Even sadder for me was being expected to be at this big money wedding as a guest when I would be in a sad emotional and financial state.

Relief would come from the strangest place. In mid-March, I got a phone call from Bob Lacey, the man who managed Rick and Ruby in their near-famous days. He was working with a prominent US comic named Kip Adotta, who was slated to do a theatre gig in Denver, Colorado for six weeks. Sadly for Kip, he suffered a heart attack and would be unable to do the gig (he did survive another 26 years after that attack). So Bob was asking if we could maybe dust off the act and do the gig. Ruby was in her third year of teaching at Azusa Pacific University, while our keyboardist Raoul was gigging with everyone everywhere, but I was totally free. Still, the other two managed to refigure their schedules, so that suddenly, 8 years after we had proclaimed we were broken up, there we were on the way to Denver. The gig would start the first week of April, and I would have an excuse to miss that wedding!

The gig was great in the sense that we weren’t doing a comedy club for a change, but a place where people bought tickets to see us and no one else. We did virtually the same act that had worked for us in the 10-15 years before, albeit with a few updates, but it didn’t matter, as this was a different audience. There was no emcee, no one up there saying “You’ve seen them on blah blah blah.” The venue had done enough hype that people were led to assume “Well they wouldn’t be a crap act if they’re in a theatre!” The weeknights were a bit dodgy, but weekends we frequently had sellouts. Not bad for an act that hadn’t played Denver since 1974!

The venue was called the Wyncoop Cabaret, located adjacent to the Wyncoop Brewery, which was noted for its home-made beers. Both rooms were run by a man named John Hickenlooper, an adventurous guy with very long hair who looked like a hippie survivor, but then so did I and Raoul at that time. The name might sound familiar to US readers, as from 2003 to 2011 he was Mayor of Denver, then from 2011 to 2019 he was Governor of Colorado. Currently, he is a US Senator representing the same state, though he briefly put his name on the list of Presidential hopefuls in 2020, but he abandoned that rather quickly. He had obviously gotten rid of the hair by then. Happily, he’s a Democrat. Politics wasn’t his foremost thought back in 93, but it was interesting that there seemed to be an endless cashflow even though the venue was losing quite a bit of money. They paid our airfare, lodging, and meals, and yet Hickenlooper didn’t seem fazed. When Ruby asked to go back to California three weeks into the gig to see her husband and children, and I asked for the same to see my wife, there was no problem from his end paying our airfares.

We got good reviews from the local press, which may have helped the attendance, but it’s really hard to gauge that. One of the memories that sticks in my mind was on one of our off nights, when we were driving around in our rental car (that Wyncoop also paid for) and having the local Mainstream Top 40 station on the car radio. The station was having a phone-in contest, one of those “I’ll take the tenth caller” scenarios where whoever got through with the correct answer to a trivia question would win a prize. We were floored when the woman who called in was told, “And you’ve just won two tickets to see The Rick and Ruby Show at the Wyncoop Cabaret, a fantastic show,” and she responded with a very fey, “Oh, sounds great.” Clearly she had no idea who or what we were, and who knows whether she actually used the tickets?

I was also reminded of this whole series of events last weekend when Trump held the first of what will no doubt be many Klan rallies masquerading as Presidential campaigns in Waco, Texas. The press pointed out the similarities between this cult and that of 30 years ago, when megalomaniac David Koresh had his quasi-religious Branch Davidian cult holed up in a complex near Waco. It was during our third week in Denver where the news had come that the FBI had swarmed the complex, and shots were fired from both ends, though the FBI was better equipped, and 85 people died in that siege on April 19. I doubt that we addressed that issue in our show that night. Happily, that was the only down moment of our six weeks there, though we would find out later in the year through other comedy gigs that a Rick and Ruby renaissance was not in the offing.

March 30th, 2023



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