Word: stores
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Their conflicted roles in the current strike hark back to a less well remembered labor battle of nearly three decades ago. Letterman and Leno were key figures in one of the strangest and bitterest labor-management disputes in show-business history: the Comedy Store strike...
...rabble rousers; they were intimate, populist artists who got their power by convincing us that they were ordinary folks, with the same gripes and anxieties as everyone else. They joked about furnishing their tiny apartments and riding the subways and trying to get girls. The strike against the Comedy Store, the leading comedy club in Los Angeles, reinforced their real-life status as working-class crusaders. For both Leno, who ostentatiously took doughnuts to the picketing writers on the first day of the current strike, and Letterman, who more quietly assured his staff that he would pay their salaries...
...issues and adversaries were much different from today's, but the dispute was perhaps more rancorous. In the 1970s, the stucco box on Sunset 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...
...When she saw Letterman picketing, Shore was crushed. "I watched him from the bay window here," she would recall years later, frail and shaking from a nervous disorder and sitting in the empty showroom at the Comedy Store. "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 of my life.' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that, David.'" Says Argus Hamilton...
...EXTRAS AT TIME.COM To read more on the Comedy Store strike from Comedy at the Edge, click here