Word: shore
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Boulevard that housed the Comedy Store was a nightly practice field for up-and-coming comics who would troop onstage to hone their material, try out new jokes - and hope to get seen by the agents, managers and talent scouts who were regular clubgoers. The club's owner, Mitzi Shore - a pretty, petite brunet with a whiny, Roseanne-like voice who had inherited the Comedy Store in a divorce from comedian Sammy Shore - viewed the place not as a traditional nightclub but as a "college" of comedy where newcomers could learn their craft and grow as artists...
...comics put up with this for years. For one thing, they felt they were getting as much out of the club as Shore was out of them. She had helped many of them by lending them money, even giving some places to stay. Plus, no one wanted to antagonize the woman who was the gatekeeper for their show-biz dreams. But after Shore opened a second, larger showroom at her club, where she paid big-time headliners - but not the younger comics who also appeared there - the comedians rebelled...
...labor movement was born. The issue wasn't today's relatively abstruse one of payments for DVDS or Internet downloads; it was simply getting paid. Tom Dreesen, a comedian and former Teamster from Chicago who became a spokesman for the comics, pleaded with Shore to give them at least a token amount. "I told Mitzi, 'You pay the waiters, you pay the waitresses, you pay the guy who cleans the toilets. Why don't you at least pay the comedians?'" says Dreesen. Many of the struggling kids who were helping her club thrive, he pointed out, couldn't even afford...
Former Gov. Ned McWherter and much of the state's Democratic establishment have rallied to Clinton's side and she has striven to shore up her early lead, attending events in Memphis and Nashville on the weekend she lost South Carolina to Barack Obama. Clinton's appearances in Tennessee were tailored to African-American audiences; in Nashville she spoke at historically black Tennessee State University and in Memphis at an African American Church. Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton spoke at Fisk University, a historically black private institution...
...club boom of the 1980s. All of which was part of laying the groundwork for a culture in which comedians turned TV hosts help set the national agenda and have would-be Presidents as guests. Letterman and Leno may look more like management than labor these days?more Mitzi Shore than strikers. But they haven't forgotten the old grievances. They know all the lines...