Word: picket
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late March of 1979, with the talks at an impasse, the comedians went on strike. A picket line was assembled in front of the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, the strikers carrying placards with slogans like no money, no funny and the yuk stops here. The spectacle of stand-up comedians, many of them well known from television, recasting themselves as extras in F.I.S.T., was an irresistible national story. Johnny Carson made jokes about it on The Tonight Show. Some of the more established comics were scornful ("This strike is the biggest joke I've ever heard come...
...area of the club and continued to operate, promising to abide by whatever agreement the comics reached with Mitzi. Meanwhile, with most of her talent on strike, Shore shut down the Comedy Store for a couple of weeks, then reopened it, using the few loyalists who crossed the picket line, like Hamilton and Maynard, as well as several neophytes who saw the strike as an opportunity to get stage time. But she was shocked and hurt that so many of the comics she had nurtured, and in some cases helped out financially, were now turning against her. "The people...
...crushed the night Letterman - one of her favorites, the kid from Indiana whom she took under her wing and, she claimed, had talked into staying when he wanted to go back home - showed up on the picket line. "I watched him in the bay window here," Mitzi would recall years later. "I was taken aback. I was crying. Three and a half years working with him, every night. I called him that night at his apartment. I was totally choked up. And he said, 'Those comedians are my friends. And they'll be my friends for the rest...
...Shandling's decision to cross the picket line came as a blow to the strikers. The other comics who had kept working were mostly close friends of Mitzi's or young kids who didn't know any better. Shandling was different. "This wasn't a hick off the street," says Letterman. "You could tell that Garry was a real talent." Dreesen calls his move "unconscionable." Shandling says he felt the strike had simply dragged on too long, and claims he got private support for his position from other striking comics, who felt the same way but were afraid to cross...
...That brings us to Saudi Arabia, another soldier in our Iran picket line. The $20 billion in arms that Bush agreed to sell Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states is meant to deter the Iranians from taking the Gulf. All well and good. But the question remains, as always, whether the Arabs will figure out how to use them. They didn't in the last war in the Gulf (1990-91), when the Kuwaiti army collapsed in a blink. As the Saudi army did when Saddam attacked Khafji. Both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at the time were armed with...