Word: shores
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...stand-up comics who had spent years giving away their jokes for free at Mitzi Shore's Comedy Store, the Norma Rae moment came late one night at Canter's Deli. A few of the Store regulars were lingering in a booth when Jay Leno walked in and cried, "What is this bullshit...
...line had had a long setup. Ever since getting custody of the Comedy Store in 1974, Mitzi Shore had stuck to her policy against paying the comedians who put customers in the seats. In this she was no different from her counterparts in New York, Budd Friedman and Rick Newman. They regarded their establishments not as ordinary nightclubs but as workshops, where comedians could try out new material, hone their acts, and be seen by people in the industry. The comics were getting as much out of the clubs as the clubs were getting out of them; besides, the owners...
...early 1979 the comics were growing restive. For one thing, Mitzi Shore's little artists' colony was the center of a growing comedy empire. Along with her two clubs in the L.A. area and another one down the coast in La Jolla, she had started a college concert tour featuring comics from the Comedy Store and signed a creative-consultant deal with ABC to develop TV projects. She had expanded her original club as well, opening a second showroom, dubbed the Main Room, where she intended to feature (and pay for) top comics from Vegas...
...Dreesen, "Everybody's talking at the same time. Gallagher's yelling, 'Why don't we burn the fucking place down!' It was insanity." David Letterman was there, along with his good friend George Miller, who was particularly outraged because his mother used to work as a bookkeeper for Mitzi Shore - and thus knew how much money she was socking away. Leno came too, though Letterman thought he made something of a spectacle of himself. "Jay, bless his heart, couldn't sit still," he says. "He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting...
...seagoing character on its face, with tugs and barges chugging up and down the harbor a stone's throw from the skyscrapers of the banks and trading houses. London and New York, by contrast, politely hide their tattooed seafarers' muscle out of sight, downriver or on the Jersey shore. But the sense of being a blue-water place is vital to the cities' success. It has made them open to trade, with all the transformative capacity that trade has to shake up established orders and make the exotic familiar...