Transcript of interview with Michael J. Shane by Barbara Tabach, October 26, 2016

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. SHANE An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Amada Hammar iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Michael Jay Shane is a natural musician and entertainer. Born in New York City in 1961, Shane is a graduate of the famous High School of Performing Arts, and later attend Peabody Conservatory of Music, before leaving to launch his musical entertainment career full-time. Shane has had a varied and full career ever since as a musical entertainer, working as emcee, comedian, voiceover actor, and musician, showcasing the piano, guitar, saxophone, clarinet as well as vocals. He moved to Las Vegas in 1995, and jobs have included playing the piano at Wynn?s Tower Suite Bar, Bootlegger, and currently, Italian American Club. In this interview, Shane shares about his family and a childhood filled with music. He discusses his career trajectory, and the influence Judaism has had in his upbringing and work. He details differences between working in New York City and Las Vegas, what makes Las Vegas unique for any musician or musical entertainer, and talks about changes in the local entertainment scene since corporations took over the gaming industry. He also shares stories about his career, including working with Jerry Lewis and following Andrew Dice Clay?s standup act. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Michael J. Shane On October 26 and October 31, 2016 by Barbara Tabach in Las Vegas, Nevada Preface?????????????????????????????????..?..iv SESSION 1 Talks about family history; paternal grandmother?s immigration from Russia to Brooklyn; grandmother fostering father?s development as pianist from young age; maternal grandmother?s emigration from Nazi Germany just before World War I; maternal grandfather?s career in textiles. Remembers frequent large family gatherings in household; caring for grandparents....1-9 Discusses father?s career as musician; Yiddish spoke in household; family vacations in the Catskills, the ?Jewish Hamptons,? and the entertainment scene, various activities for all ages. Reflects on his inspirations, including father, Jerry Lewis; diverse performance skills. Talks about brother Stephen and his own musical abilities and band business; brother Joseph........10-16 Reflects upon experiencing anti-Semitism; importance of education in Judaism; attending High School of Performing Arts as music student. Talks about Jewish upbringing; bar mitzvahs reinforcing passion for music for all brothers; unique attributes of percussionists. Shares about why studied music over drama; studying at Peabody Conservatory while also working all weekend, and leaving early to pursue music career????????????????.17-25 More about early music career in New York; writing breakdance music for movie. Talks about brother Stephen developing his music business, as compared to his own; the differences between a music career in New York City versus Las Vegas; evolution of live music scene in Las Vegas. Discusses his eventual move to Las Vegas, driven by a custody battle with his then-wife; adapting career to Las Vegas context; working for Steve Wynn; turning down a major show at New York New York hotel to ensure had time to raise daughter???????????.26-38 SESSION 2 Describes uniqueness of Las Vegas entertainment scene and how it developed; mentions Joe E. Lewis, Rat Pack, Martin and Lewis, Georgie Jessel, Jimmy Durante. Talks about how he fits into legacy of Vegas? entertainment culture; the changes in entertainment industry over time; Clint Holmes as example of industry success??????????????????..39-46 More about what differentiates the Las Vegas music and entertainment scene, focused on individual performer?s talent; changes over time with corporatization of the Strip. Mentions vi playing at Italian American Club, Bootlegger; working for Jeffy Tiffe. Shares thoughts of new Smith Center, how it draws different shows than before, different audiences??????.47-56 Talks about acting and comedy career endeavors, including movies, emceeing; performing at house parties, combining musical and comedic abilities. Considers why Jewish people are good comedians, have good senses of humor, from historical perspective. Recounts stories of shadowing for doing standup following Andrew Dice Clay. Talks about incorporating comedy into piano performances to create relationship with audience????????????.57-77 Shares story of shadowing for Jerry Lewis in movie. Talks about Steve Wynn as an innovator; the varying importance placed on raw talent has in getting hired???????????78-88 vii 1 SESSION 1 Today is October 26, 2016. I am sitting with Michael Shane. This is Barbara Tabach. We're doing the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage project interview. Michael, would you first spell your name for me? English? Sure. It's a Jewish thing. I didn't know if you wanted the moish. No. You can do that. What do you go by? M-I-C-H-A-E-L; Jay is the middle name, J-A-Y; S-H-A-N-E. Do you usually use your middle initial? People throw it at me out of affection once in a while, but it's not officially?oh, and I'm also listed with Actors Access and BMI [Broadcast Music, Inc.] with a "J" in it because you can't duplicate somebody else on those lists. So I'm going to add the J. So the J is in there. Then we'll have that in our database that way. Yes. It stands for?J-A-Y. I never used to use it and I never liked it, and then as I looked around that's like the favorite second letter when you're going to refer to somebody in their initials. I get to be MJ just like Michael Jordan and T.J. and R-J and all of those corporate groovy sounding things. So now I use the J more than I used to. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to start by some sort of lowdown on your family heritage, the background of your grandparents, your parents, whatever you can tell me about your ancestry that you want to tell. 2 I'm the right guy to talk to in the family because I'm the one that paid attention. My father was one of two brothers that grew up in the Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of an Eastern Bloc refugee mother who got brought out of Russia. She was sent to Siberia twice to die. Apparently, it doesn't matter who's in power in Russia; they're going after Jews no matter what decade it is. And back in the teens she was sent there and survived tuberculosis twice. She was like a horse. She had ten or eleven brothers and six of them made it to America, and then called for her. She came in the back door; many Jews that were coming out of the Eastern Bloc?and I think she was born in Poland or had Polish blood?but many of them came in through Canada, which is Upstate New York, and then a lot of them either settled in New York or Philadelphia. That's how my grandmother came to America. And this is your maternal? My paternal. My grandfather died when my dad was nine. He was thirty-nine, I think, stupid young. Had a heart attack in the middle of the street apparently and sort of died in the day. I think my father was nine and his older brother, my uncle, was twelve. My father was the younger, more tender spirit of the two of them. My uncle joined the Marines. My uncle operated his own businesses a number of different years, was in a number of different things, a little more entrepreneurial, a little more blue collar-type provider. My dad made a very decent living as a single guy as a pianist. The story I got was that a teacher at elementary school told my grandmother, who didn't speak a word of English for years?my father didn't speak a word of English until he went to kindergarten and found out you speak English in America because it was such an enclosed space, the Jewish ghetto; everybody spoke Yiddish from everywhere; they all understood it. So they all had some version of their home language and figured out how to make a new one and that's what they all spoke. My grandmother 3 did not assimilate well. She was a survivor, but she was not intellectual by any means. She was great at repairing and sewing everything. She had thirty-five thousand uses for the newspaper except reading it; that she read the Fovitz, which is the Jewish [The] Forward, which is a famous publication, been around for a hundred and fifty years. So somebody told my grandmother that my father had a specific talent for piano. He was drawn to it kind of like a moth to a flame as a five- and six-year-old boy. Somebody in the neighborhood had a relative who had passed away, and a piano teacher who saw talent in my father got the people who had died handling the estate to give the piano to my grandmother, which they broke into pieces because it was a proper seven-foot grand and the apartment was probably maybe the size of one and a half of this room. So literally, the big master bedroom was taken up by the piano and then everything else was the kitchen and the bathroom and a form of a living room. I don't know the layout, but I kind of know what they were dealing with. The same teacher offered to give my father lessons for free because he just thought he had some thing going on. That was when the music thing became a thing. So the two brothers...My father would play; my uncle would sing. They went to the same high school as Steve Lawrence, who at the time was Sidney Liebowitz. And my father was Sidney Shinkofski. Sidney Liebowitz changed his name to Steve Lawrence; that was his performing name before he ever met Eydie. The two of them sort of became a performing team. They were living on the second floor and they used to open the window and do concerts. So here's Steve Lawrence singing out the window and my old man is playing piano behind him. It was kind of charming. Steve Lawrence's brother became one of my uncle's best friends and the two of them were the jocks. They played ball. They chased girls. They did all the tough guy stuff. 4 My father went the other way; he went the life of an artist. He also in later years was much more a provider for his mother, too. He wound up making sure that her rent was paid. She lived two blocks from us when we grew up. So my dad was a little more the protective, nurturing type and a lot of that, now that I look back, had to do with the focus that my grandmother had giving him a chance to be a pianist because there was no money, no buying a piano, no one is paying for lessons; it just sort of showed up and that is its own little blessing from God. That's the road he got. Anyway, my grandfather died in Brooklyn when my dad was nine. Sadly, the only way that an immigrant who doesn't speak English and has no skills can survive in that era, in the 1930s and early '40s, is you have to remarry. She chose poorly and was with an alcoholic who treated her badly, and he died when my father was sixteen. The only really awful, obnoxious thing that my father ever did that I'm aware of was to spit on his grave instead of throw a shovel of dirt in it at the burial. He just was passionately against how he treated my grandmother. And my uncle was already in the Marines by then; he went at eighteen or nineteen or something. So that's when my father really decided to make sure that his mother was okay, and I think it had something to do with what she went through to get him to become a musician because he wouldn't have had a shot in hell doing it, or at least not till much later. My mother...Two girls in the family. My mother was also a younger sister. My Aunt Helen was the older sister. My Aunt Helen was the intellectual. She went to university. She was a teacher in Jewish Sunday school. She was a veracious reader, read two or three books a day type of thing, insane. Her favorite topics were history and, of all things, the unexplained, including biblical archeology, whether or not this is really where the Ark is, whether or not this is really?they know the location of Jericho, but what really blew the walls down. Can forty shofars really do that? That kind of stuff. So she was into that all her life. A great teacher, a great woman. Provided me with a 5 couple of my?well, all the cousins are very close. We all love each other. What about her parents? My grandmother on my mother's side, her name was Evelyn. She came over to America, was not born here, was brought here with her mother and, I think, father?yes, I think so?1903, 1905; something like that. They went a different route because they were not Eastern Bloc, poor Jewish, uneducated; they were German Jews. They got out of Germany before the First World War. I was very close with a lot of people who climbed over the mountains to get out of Nazi Germany. So I know that story. There are people who have been like parents to me that went through that. But my grandmother got here before all that went on. She was incredibly fluent in English, a great writer, a phenomenal artist. Always wanted to sell her stuff, but always felt?in that era there was never enough time, never enough room; everything was just about getting the bills paid. She lived in the Bronx where there's a different kind, more of an upper crust sort of Jew where you threw yourself into debt to make sure that you kept the appearance of being in the same...And my grandfather was in the fabrics business. He could tell you what something cost, what it was made of, what country it was in; he could tell you the whole game about fabric and clothing. A pocket watch in the vest, the real New York City look for a Jew that wasn't in Manhattan and wasn't born in the country, if you're an immigrant, but assimilated. He was well-dressed. All the time. All the time. There is not a picture of my grandfather?who also died young; he's another one; he died a little older. My mother, I think, was a teenager and he died at fifty-three. I think he, too, was a heart attack, snap of the finger. But the world was interesting and different then. My grandmother on my mother's side had a parade of five or six sisters, too. At that time?6 you probably know this?people made a lot of babies because they weren't expected to live past infancy. I think the survival rate is like 80 percent; like 20 percent of the kids are not going to live. And then you want to go to the New World; you want to come to America with some roots in the ground. You want to make sure that you got somewhere to be when you grow old. This idea of the middle class putting together some sort of corporate structured retirement...Remember all this went on before FDR. There was no retirement; there wasn't any of that. You made it because of family and you didn't get divorced because of family even if there were affairs or even if the people weren't speaking, hated each other, slept in separate rooms. But for the children you stayed together so that the children would make sure you stay together when you no longer are functional. The Chinese still get that. The Jews have sort of dropped off of that because most of the country now lives. We live in an atheist-driven society. Even for people of great faith, they do it on the right days and they do it for the right amount of hours and then they go back to their day. Everybody now is a gentile of some sort or another. That's true with Christianity, too; it divides up into all kinds of factions?the Presbyterian, the Baptist, the Catholic, the Protestant, all that other stuff. But at the end of the day when you leave the house and you go out, sometimes you hug, sometimes you don't, but you're not living like a Christian; you're living like a citizen in a social structure. Family and pride have all given way to greed. There isn't anything that can't be bought including most of the governments around the world. It's just become that and we live in that now. But back when that first wave of immigrants came, before there was a Social Security check waiting for you when you got here or a welfare check, they came here to grow roots and family was much stronger. Well, my grandmother, my father's mom, she was the oldest girl in the family; she was the only girl. They had an interesting superstition; they didn't call them by their name; it was bad luck; 7 the girl will die. The one female we have, the family womb, you don't call her by her first name. So what do you call her? It's a little nickname called altga, which translates terribly; it's old one or oldest one. But it sounds like a pretty nickname in Yiddish. So we always called her Altga. She didn't know her name. She had to double-check it when she started signing papers in America and she had to be told her name was Emily. Grandmother on my mother's side much more literal, much more hip. So my mother's dad is a fabrics guy, holding down a job, going in and out of the garment center in Manhattan, dead at fifty-three. She never remarries, but she had one she had already divorced, but the kids didn't find out about that until they were all adults because they never told. The family secrets. Well, divorce was a shame. It was a humiliation. Sure. Because you had to get a gett? I believe she divorced out of an abusive husband and there was a lot of that under the table that turns up with both grandmothers. And so she went with a man she fell in love with. She had children physically later in life than was safe, but she had two healthy daughters. I think my mother popped out when she was over forty. I think she was forty-two. That would have been unheard of in that era. Terrible idea. Too many risks. Yes. Were you close with your grandmothers? Yes. I'll tell you how close. [Laughing] My mother loved people, loved family, said "I love you" to more people more often than any other human being I ever knew, saved the souls of angry, bitter, lost teenagers. Cousins, second cousins, best friend of a cousin would stay in the house with us for two weeks ?just to be away from their parents? type of thing. She was that kind of love all the 8 time. I grew up in Kew Gardens. Queens, we never locked the door because we were in a building with a hundred and ten apartments. I had one brother two years younger than me; I had one brother ten years younger than me. All the friends came in and out all the time. It was like Grand Central in our dining room. Every night for dinner my parents had both grandmothers over for dinner. That was how we ate. My father's mom over there; my mother's mom on the other side next to my mom; parents on the ends. My mother made dinner for six for ten years and then made dinner for seven for another number of years. My father's mother?I'm hurrying this up a little bit because it's a lot of stuff?my father's mother went into very, very deep hardening of the arteries. I'm not even sure if it's Alzheimer's or not. I don't think anybody else is sure either. It's just a new groovy way to say senility. Same thing. Nobody dies from it. You can live to ten thousand with Alzheimer's. From that sense, it's still dementia. She had un-operated cataracts and couldn't see. She was deaf as a stone unless you yelled right into her ear. My father and my grandmother were yelling in Yiddish at each other. Senile, couldn't remember what happened five minutes ago. Asked the time, the day, the week, where is this one, where is that one; every fifteen minutes she had a question. We hung in there with that for the longest time. My father didn't want to put her in a home. So she was at our house for dinner. Well, my mother's mother, after she lost her husband, once my mom was married and settled in?everybody sort of settled into Queens, New York, and then some of them went to Jersey. My aunt went to Jersey, my mom stayed in Queens, and my other grandmother now lived in the same apartment building as us, across the other side of the lobby and up. So she came for dinner because you can't have one without the other and you can't have anybody sitting home 9 alone. So my mom spent a good portion of her stay-at-home career planning some kind of a dinner every day unless she was planning for Thanksgiving where we would entertain eighteen to twenty or New Year's, which always happened at our house. A lot of the roots of entertainment came from the fact that most of that party happened around the piano. My dad would play an hour or two. I would play an hour or two. Later on, when we got older and I started playing in bands and we were learning how to play private parties, learning how to play quiet for adults, stopped the rock and roll, learned a little Cole Porter, a little Broadway, then we played that party. But at the end of any event in our house?and we had them all; the only thing we didn't do was Fourth of July?Passover Seder was at my grandmother on my mother's side's house for years and then she got too old and too tired to do that and then half the family moved to Jersey, my mother's sister. So then we would have the Seder at our house. But all of these things were always with at least a dozen people. We did the right thing by the Seder; we always had somebody who wasn't Jewish at the table, just whoever the best friend was in high school, whoever the new girlfriend was, whoever the new kid in somebody's band was, because we always were starting bands. We were doing that from the time we were seven. Because you're talking about...What era were you a teenager? Oh, all this happened exactly this way until somebody died; my mother's mother died when I was sixteen. I had viral pneumonia in the living room and my grandmother had colon cancer in my bedroom and my mother went back and forth between the two of us for three weeks. She was a caregiver, yes. I can tell you my father married the girl of his dreams. He was in love with her the minute he saw her. They met because he was playing in the lobby of...What hotel was it? Famous one in the 10 Catskills. The Concord?the big one, Grossinger's. They met in the lobby of Grossinger's. My dad had the piano gig. In those days, you could make a living doing what Liberace did, half classical, half audience sing-along. But every room had a piano. There was no electric piano. There were hardly any amplifiers and half the time no microphone. But you made something out of the piano. You made every room a living room. My father did this right up until...Six months after I was born, he had one night at Carnegie Hall. Oh, wow. He had that on his resume. Yes. He was prominent as a player through the fifties. He was getting calls for studio work, getting calls to play demos, getting calls to demo different?he and a violinist, whose name I don't know because he never talked much about this. I found out a lot about him from other people. He was not a big storyteller. He liked to sit back and just be proud of what he did and watch everything else unfold in front of him. He was like sort of a quiet, sort of humble, sort of cocky at the same time, hey, look at how cool this is; what a lovely household we're running. Both my parents really loved that. At that time people were not so entrenched in whether or not they had absolutely everything perfect thing they wanted. They understood that if you give up some personal momentary satisfaction for the larger picture of making sure that you have a safe, warm, consistent, comfortable place for your children to grow up. So divorce rates went up because of all of this self-examination stuff, which has sort of become the norm, which is why divorce is the norm, which is why society is producing all of these baby daddies in all these bad areas. It's hip to sort of be alone and just have what you want for now and then dump it. But when I was a kid, the world just wasn't like that. Nuclear family. 11 So did you grow up with a Yiddish-speaking household? I only listened to a lot of it because my grandmother and my father only spoke Yiddish together. It was adorable. I picked up a lot of it. I can still understand a ton of it and I use Yiddish words a lot. If someone is a showoff, they're a macher or they're a schlemiel. I'd have to be in the situation to do it, but it was bigger than oy vey. I got a fair vocabulary of about, I would say, thirty phrases. Face, shayna punim; things like that I happen to throw around. I get Yiddish phrases thrown at me from older? I don't know as many as I used to. I don't know it, but you hear it. Some of them are part of our normal lexicon. People don't even know. They don't, but that's also because they think the word they got is from German, which it may very well may, or they think it came out of Russia and may very well be and came out of Polish. It's been sort of all meshed in together. You use as much of each one. And in a certain sense, people who are fluent in Yiddish are reasonably fluent in Polish and German and Russian. We also did the Jewish summer thing every year. What's the Jewish summer thing? One week the family goes to a Catskill hotel. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with the Catskills. I don't know if you?re a Northeasterner. I am. I looked up here at my board? If you're ever up there. ?and there are people up here who that was where they were ma?tre d's. Yes, there's a lot of that. All of the great vaudeville entertainers that went into show business and crossed over from radio into television and became stars before there were comedy clubs to work 12 out and to pick up a few bucks. Now a comedy club will employ a comedian per minute. So you do a twenty-minute set, but you do five of them a night in five different clubs in a big city and you're making a living provided that you have three other comedians that are helping you with the rent; that's the world of the stand-up comic who is not famous. Back then the way comedians worked was they worked rooms, clubs. Copacabana would have a band and a dance set and they'd have a comedian that was a showroom; even though it was a dinner dance room, it was a showroom first. So back then, you're talking about the fifties. The fifties, right. The sort of the Jewish Hamptons was the Catskills. It was price-adjusted for middle-class Jews. If a classic comedian hears or sees what I'm telling you, they'll immediately know Grossinger's and the Concord and the Homowack and twenty others. The Pines, not as famous, but still a place where all these guys worked out. They would book them and they'd book a band who read the shows and they'd book a different act every week so that people who stayed two weeks didn't see the same show twice. Then one night a week were the nights that the parents could bring the kids because to them a clarinet player playing in the direction of your crotch that's a blue show. Now you can put it on the Family Channel; it's nothing. But at the time a clarinet summoning up someone's genitalia was too dirty for the children. So the kids got one show every week that was clean enough for them. Listen to my story. I'll tell you this one. This one is funny. That's a riot. So the one night?oh, this is how it went. And every hotel had a host. By emcee host, I mean a stand-up comedian who was on contract to the hotel to be available to shake hands and schmooze with everybody at all three meals and at the pool and emcee the show every night. So you get the 13 biggest entertainers in show business, like Don Rickles and Jerry Lewis and all of them, come and do a set in those hotels on a Saturday night, but their opening act is like Phil Carter, whose big thing was he was fat and he couldn't wait till breakfast and it's one in the morning; that sort of stuff; that was his whole shtick. But it was Homowack's house emcee, gave that to a comic. So you knew if you liked a certain comic, you went back to the hotel to be around this guy's energy. They all had a lake, they all had rowboats, and they all had daytime camp for kids, just like a summer camp where you report to breakfast, you're put in a group, and they have activities for you every day when you're young. Then you get older and become a teenager, you get about eleven, twelve years old, then you're off on your own. Then you start hitting on girls and you go into the rock-and-roll room where instead of playing big band swing stuff and the mambo and the cha-cha for the older parents who want to dance, now they're playing Beatles and they're playing Rolling Stones; that was another room for the kids. Now, did you experience this firsthand? Oh, we went every year; we went to the Homowack Hotel. Phil Carter is a real guy. That was the layout. That was how they entertained. The Catskills, they called the Jewish Hamptons; they called it something like that. But it was driven by a Jewish population primarily although occasionally you got a couple of strays. I remember that the punch lines in many of those rooms were in Yiddish. So if you're watching a stand-up?that's where I saw Freddie Roman for the first time. That's where I saw Phil Carter for sure. Jackie Mason did that whole circuit. Georgie Jessel earlier in the fifties. I went '67-68; that kind of thing got started. But that was what you did if you had the money; you'd take your family up there for a week. Of course, that's all the money. You do it because?there's, again, no profit sharing, no 401(k), no savings plan, no nothing, good luck with retirement, stayed with 14 the company long enough if it worked out. That's why my father went into a Manhattan job daytime; he just wasn't big enough to make enough of a living as a pianist, but he did all the big rooms. He did all of the East Coast. He played in Florida certain months of the year. He was in every hotel in the Catskills. This is before he met my mom. They used to do a thing called the Exhibicion, which was a crossover R-rated, X-rated sort of festival in Havana before Castro took over. My dad played the Exhibicion as a gig every year for a year or two. Oh, how fun. Which is kind of cool. As a musician, he'd seen it all. He really did get inside. And he was contracted to play stuff, read stuff cold, all that in the center of Manhattan where at the time music publishing was sort of happening between Broadway and around Eighth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, ballpark in the mid-fifties. That's where the Carnegie Deli became popular because the Carnegie Deli was there before the Stage Deli, so far as I know, and those kind of lunch places were also in the middle of where young people were starting out at the time, too, guys like Tony Orlando and those type of guys, [who] were starting to write and hawking their stuff right in that fifteen-, twenty-block radius in the city. So my father was on the contracting list for a lot of people there. So how did he inspire you to?? Well, we were around it all the time. First of all, he wasn't the only inspiration. I have to admit that I was enamored?and my mother was a big fan?by the presence and the power and the comedy of Jerry Lewis. It was a house tradition; we made sure we saw enough of the telethon because the lesson for my mother was here is somebody who is silly and funny for a living who knows when to be serious and why, always know the difference. Jerry Lewis knows the difference. If you're going to laugh, you also need to go with him when it's serious. And so that became a huge thing for me 15 to be a