Word: picketer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meetings and negotiations continued. But when Shore wouldn't budge, the comedians, in March 1979, walked off the job. Pickets appeared, with placards bearing slogans like NO MONEY NO FUNNY and THE YUK STOPS HERE. All but a few of the regulars refused to work. Even Letterman?though he felt indebted to Shore, who had taken him under her wing when he arrived from Indiana with his wife in 1975, making him an MC?joined the picket line after he finished a stint as guest host on the Tonight Show. "This was the umbilical cord for a lot of guys...
...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...
...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...
...engagement at the La Jolla Comedy Store (which was not affected by the strike), but he showed up late on opening night and Mitzi canceled the gig. Lubetkin said his car broke down; Mitzi was upset because he had stopped off first at the Sunset club to walk the picket line. But after his death, she angrily denied any implication that she bore some responsibility. "I was very close with Steve Lubetkin," she says. "I loved him. He was my best friend. I was in La Jolla at the Comedy Store and when I got the message [of his suicide...
...innocence, the dividing line between an era of happy camaraderie and a more complicated one of competing factions and big business. But it had a more important, if less obvious, impact around the country. Pictures on the evening news of stand-up comedians walking the picket line in L.A., and the news of their victory in the strike, raised the profile of a profession that was growing fast in popularity, not just on the two coasts, but in the heartland as well. The strike helped fuel the nationwide comedy club boom of the 1980s...