Word: pritchard
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...while, it looked as if he would. After Pritchard won the comedy competition, he scored every funny man's fantasy: an appearance on the Tonight Show. That led to more TV. A 6-ft. 6-in., 300-lb. grizzly of a man, Pritchard danced with Judd Hirsch in an episode of Taxi, and two networks had a bidding war over him. But nothing in Hollywood interested Pritchard as much as the homeboys back at the hall. "If Mother Teresa had a kid with Jesse Ventura," says Robin Williams, who worked the same clubs as Pritchard back then...
...Today Pritchard, 49, stands in front of 500 students in the Martinez Junior High School gymnasium, just east of San Francisco and not far from his home in San Rafael. For nearly 20 years, he has melded his comic gift with his passion for social work and has somehow made a career of it, taking his act to schools from Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska. And never has he been in greater demand than since the school shootings at Columbine. Nowadays, he books appearances and sells videos on the Web at SavingOurSchools.org...
...sane person would attempt to hold the attention of five adolescents, let alone 500, for nearly an hour. Pritchard, however, has the advantage of being able to rattle off a thousand sound effects and voices, including the Ewoks he has done for George Lucas' Star Wars films. And once he hooks the kids, he sneaks doses of medicine in along with the candy...
Everyone in the gym at Martinez snickers at the names that Pritchard and his lunkhead pals used to call a heavy girl named Gina when he was a third-grader in St. Louis. But they mummy up when he says, "Nobody wanted to be there...when she was home, with all her pain locked up." Pritchard tells how, years later, he ended up in an emergency room after a gang member conked him on the head. And guess who was his nurse? Gina, who took note of the fact that while she had slimmed down nicely, Pritchard was the size...
...Pritchard leads them down this path, touching on the ways kids divide themselves: by the clothes they wear, the color of their skin, the cars their parents drive. "Lack of respect is the root of all evil" and "Pain shared is pain divided," he preaches, building to where he demands honest answers to a few questions. "How many of you have seen fights start here at school for something silly?" The hands shoot up. "How many of you have heard the words homo, faggot and dyke used in school?" A sea of hands again, just as when he asks...