Word: mitzi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tensions between the strikers and nonstrikers grew. Dreesen and John Witherspoon - a stand-up who also worked as a doorman and sometime manager of the club - acted as marshals on the picket line, protecting the strikers from harassment by Mitzi loyalists. One night, the bad blood got out of hand, as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Jay Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that Leno had been seriously injured. Leno gave him a wink...
...Mitzi called me ten minutes later and said, let's settle this thing right now," says Dreesen. On May 4 a settlement was reached, on essentially the same terms that Mitzi had rejected earlier - twenty-five dollars per set for all but a few specified hours during the week reserved for newcomers. After a six-week walkout, the Comedy Store comics went back to work, claiming victory...
...settlement was hard for Mitzi to swallow. "It was against my basic philosophy and the principles of the Comedy Store that this settlement was made," she told the Los Angeles Times's William Knoedelseder. "You might say I was unionized into a corner." Mitzi got a fig leaf of satisfaction three years later, when an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the comedians, as independent contractors, could not be unionized. "In my personal view, workman's comp, benefits - those were always in the back of Mitzi's mind as something that would break the Comedy...
...strike left a bitter legacy. Some of the activists, like Leno and Dreesen, never worked in the Comedy Store again. Some who crossed the picket line later regretted it. "There were a lot of personal attacks on Mitzi, and I felt protective of her," says Mike Binder, a protégé of Leno's, who continued to work during the strike. "But it was a mistake. I didn't understand the magnitude of it. She was a bad horse to back." Mitzi, complaining that she could no longer afford to keep all her showrooms open on slow nights, shut...
...Some of the strikers complained that Mitzi was taking retribution against them. One of them was Steve Lubetkin, a New York comic who had moved west and gotten close to Mitzi but wound up joining the picketers. After the comics went back to work, he complained that Mitzi would no longer give him any time slots. He appealed to Dreesen, who was getting ready to go back on the road. "He came up to me and said, Tom, don't leave; she'll retaliate. I said, she can't; it's in the contract. He said, I've called...