On Oct. 13, had he lived, Lenny Bruce would have turned 86 years old. You could joke about the very idea of him ever living that long, but the fact remains that there was nothing at all funny about him dying at age 40 in 1966.

Lenny Bruce’s preferred music was jazz, though in the last days of his life he apparently played recordings of Sousa marches at top volume on his home stereo while poring over the minutiae of court briefs related to his various arrests for obscenity.
Here’s a list of songs of more recent vintage which revere or otherwise reference Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce had a number of pop star friends, most prominently Phil Spector, who lent the impoverished comic money, produced two of his albums and paid for his funeral.
A good number of the songs listed here can be found in the admirably exhaustive “pop culture” section in the Lenny Bruce entry on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has snuffed such ephemeral sections out of its database, but the list has lived on at sites which steal info wholesale from Wikipedia.
I was able to find a bunch of items not on that list. I also sorted and cleaned the whole lot up, so it’s clearer which songs are full-scale tributes, which get by on casual mentions, and which Lenny Bruce tributes are actually covers of other people’s Lenny Bruce tributes.

Happy 86, Lenny Bruce.

Songs About Lenny Bruce
1. Grace Slick & the Great Society, “Father Bruce”: “Oh, oh, Lenny, we’re so glad you’re getting well, well, well Fuck!”
2. Tim Hardin, “Lenny’s Tune”: “I’ve lost a friend and I don’t know why.” Hardin wrote it, but the song was originally released by Nico, under the title “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce.” The Nico version (and title) was later covered by Damon & Naomi.
3. Bob Dylan, “Lenny Bruce”: This is the first Lenny Bruce song that springs to a lot of minds, but it’s not very good. Some critics have even conjectured that it’s not about Lenny Bruce at all. Stan Ridgway’s cover version at least gives it some bite.
4. Nuclear Valdez, “Unsung Hero (Song for Lenny Bruce)”: Also mentions Lenny’s ex-wife Honey.
5. Chumbawumba, Big Mouth Strikes Again.”: Revisits Bruce’s “To Come” routine, and references “Christ, judges, Lone Ranger … padres, pastors, popes, priests … critics, comics, you me…”

Songs Vaguely About Lenny Bruce

1. Balloon Squad, “Still Mad at That Lenny Bruce”: Plaintive pop tune off the band’s May Pangs and June Forays EP from 1994. Doesn’t directly mention Bruce; it’s about a guy whose girl’s gotten too hip and left him.
2. The Boo Radleys, “Rodney King (Song For Lenny Bruce)”: Just two lines of lyrics in the whole thing: “Do you know my name before you tear me apart? Do you care who I am?”
3. Elastic Purejoy, “If Samuel Beckett Had Met Lenny Bruce”: Speculative meeting of great modern thinkers. “A needle in the can killed the laughter.”
4. Juice Leskinen, “Lenny Bruce”: From the Finnish singer’s Grand Slam album, and all in Finnish.
5. John Mayall, “The Laws Must Change”: Lenny Bruce was trying to tell you many things before he died.”
6. Starpilot, “Lenny Bruce the Martyr”: Starpilot is a composer of electronic “chiptunes” with undecipherable lyrics which he performs live before a changing screen of projections.
7. The Heartsleeves, “Son of Lenny Bruce”: From the Peripheral People album, played in a blues/klezmer style: “I’m the tattooed Jew! I’m the son of Lenny Bruce!/Albert Einstein is my muse! Frida Kahlo cuts me loose!”

Songs Which Borrow Lenny Bruce Routines
1. Julian Cope, “Soldier Blue”: Samples routines from Lenny Bruce’s The Berkeley Concert album. The track was later remixed, with an added rap, by Michael Franti of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.
2. Frank Zappa. The Mothers of Invention opened for Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore West, listed him as an influence on the cover of the Freak Out! Album and referenced some of his routines in live shows.
3. Tom Russell, “Harry Partch, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce”: A track from Tom Russell’s Hotwalker album, a conceptual sound collage utilizing words and sounds from a number of ‘60s beat and counterculture icons.

Songs Which Mention Lenny Bruce
1. REM, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”: One of the best enunciated lyrics in a muddy list: “Lenny Bruce is not afraid.” Covered by Great Big Sea.
2. John Lennon & Yoko Ono, “We’re All Water”: “There may not be much difference/Between Marilyn Monroe and Lenny Bruce/If we check their coffins.”
3. Rent (the Broadway musical), “La Vie Boheme”: “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage, Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, to the stage.”
4. Simon & Garfunkel, Seven O’Clock News/Silent Night. Lenny Bruce’s death is one of the items in the horrific newscast which serves as a counterpart to S&G’s rendition of the carol.
5. Simon & Garfunkel, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert MacNamaraed Into Submission).” “Well, I paid all the dues I want to pay/And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce.”
6. The Stanglers, No More Heroes. “Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?” It’s presumed that this means Lenny Bruce, but I guess The Stranglers could be missing Leonard Bernstein.
7. Steve Earle, “F the CC”: “Dirty Lenny died so we could all be free.”
8. Metric, “On the Sly”: “For Halloween I want to be Lenny Bruce.”
9. Nada Surf, “Imaginary Friends.”:“Lenny Bruce’s bug eyes stare from an LP.”
10. Mighty Mighty Bosstones, “All Things Considered”: Tale of a street person who claims to have palled around with the biggest names of the 1960s, including “his closest friend, the one and only Lenny Bruce.”
11. The Auteurs, “Junk Shop Clothes”: “Lenny Bruce never walked in a dead man’s shoes even for one night. Junk shop shoes will get you nowhere.”
12. Kid Rock, “EMSP”: My name is Tino, you know, baby, let’s get funky/I’m like Lenny Bruce but I ain’t no goddamn junkie.” Bonus points for also mentioning George Raft.
13. Widespread Panic, “Tickle the Truth”: “Lenny Bruce was a prophet in the 1960s/Two shows at tonight’s inquisition.”
14. Genesis, “Broadway Melody of 1974”: “Lenny Bruce declares a truce and plays his other hand/ Marshall McLuhan, casual viewing, head buried in the sand.”
15. The Bicycle Thief, “Cereal Song”: “Being cool and looking good/Keith Richards and Lenny Bruce and all of them/Well, I give up.”
16. Nils Lofgren, “Mr. Hardcore”: “Thinks Lenny Bruce looked like Walt Disney.”

An Original Song Performed by Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce, “All Alone”: A stand-up routine about getting over a romantic break-up, wrapped in a lovely song about loneliness. Famously performed on The Steve Allen Show.

A Song Parodied by Lenny Bruce.
In an earlier post, I ran an excerpt from Kaye Ballard about how Lenny Bruce created a parody of “Autumn Leaves” at her request, which she recorded on her Boo-Hoo/Ha-Ha album. It’s right there in Ballard’s autobiography, but now I wonder if she got the album mixed up. I don’t own either record, but from what I’ve found online there’s no listing for “Autumn Leaves” or anything like it on Boo-Hoo/Ha-Ha, while “Autumn Leaves” is indeed listed as the lead track on the 1959 album Kaye Ballard Swings. Anybody record collectors out there able to clear this up?

The list is extensive. Highlights: 1981’s parody of 42nd Street (which featured then-SNL cast member Christine Ebersole, who 20 years later would appear in the Broadway revival of 42nd Street—in the same role she’d mocked on TV). 1994’s obscure Masters of Monologue battle between Adam Sandler as Eric Bogosian and Michael McKean as Spalding Gray. Jon Lovitz’ recurring impersonation of Harvey Fierstein. Last season’s Best of Both Worlds bit, with Hugh Jackman (Andy Samberg), Gerard Butler (Taran Killam) and Julie Andrews (Helen Mirren) boasting about their flexibility as performers. Plus numerous savagings of Cats.
Last night’s Saturday Night Live—the second episode of the new season—had no less than five stage-related routines, ranging from “very theatery” to “close enough.”
The host was Melissa McCarthy. I missed the first five minutes (caught them online today). Not having seen either the movie Bridesmaids or the TV series Mike & Molly, I didn’t know who she was when I tuned in. Turns out that before her TV and film fame, McCarthy honed her comedic talents onstage, in the Groundlings troupe.
Here’s the stagey line-up:
• McCarthy and Kristen Wiig doing a Fosse-esque dance routine, replete with sparkly black fedoras and bowties.
• One of those Andy Samberg SNL Digital Short videos that invariably bursts into song, about a savage battle between Stomp and The Blue Man Group.
• Rock’s Way, in which Chris Rock (Jay Pharaoh) is lampooned for having done Broadway. Even though he was in cutting-edge Stephen Adly Guirgis play, The Motherfucker in the Hat, SNL chooses to behave as if he’d been doing something embarrassingly commercial or uncharacteristic.

• A News Update segment about Andy Rooney leaving 60 minutes to do “a live-action version of Up,” with photoshop image of the curmudgeon dolled up as Ed Asner, holding a bunch of balloons.
• News Update again: A visit from Tyler Perry, highest-paid entertainer (who made his first fortune in live theater), impersonated by Kenan Thompson.
• McCarthy as a Mae West-like vaudeville star-turned film actress called Lulu, falling down stairs when trying to dramatize the line “Why don’t you come up there and see me sometime?” The sketch only seemed to exist in order to capitalize on Jason Sudeikis’ impersonation of American Movie Classics cable host Robert Osborne.

Sinthea Starr (right) and her dear friend, the late Patricia Neal. Starr performs Saturday and Sunday at Lyric Hall in Westville. Photo courtesy of Bernie Kaufman.

“I first met Sinthea Starr aboard the Theatre Guild ship when Joy Behar was supposed to join us but got snowed in in New York. We had 25 minutes, but needed to get 55 ready, while sailing.
“Sinthea Starr had performed before, a single number. So I had seen her perform at that time. Since then, she’s done a limited run at the Metropolitan Room in New York.”

That’s Joel Vig, whose complicated relationship with a pouty diva resembles that of Barry Humphries and Dame Edna, or Lily Tomlin and Tommy Velour, describing his long and twisted times with the celebrated diva Sinthea Starr.

What does Sinthea Starr do, exactly? She sings a bit, and talks a lot, for about 80 minutes all told, with no intermission. Live piano accompaniment is provided by Chris Muller. “It’s like what Marlene Dietrich did late in life, that sort of autobiographical show, that style of monodeclamation,” Vig riffs.

Starr also dresses spectacularly. “She loves the classic Hollywood look,” her closest friend Vig dishes. “Her favorite designers would be people like Bob Mackie, William Ivey Long. I don’t know what she’ll be wearing in New haven. She’ll be coming there directly from doing an Italian film. She’s flying in early Saturday.” For Vig, it’s a mere train ride from his New York home base.

You can experience the Starr quality for yourself this weekend, when Ms. Starr overruns the lovely Lyric Hall theater on Whalley Ave. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood for four performances, Saturday and Sunday Sept. 24 & 25 at 5 & 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance—call (203) 361-8089—or $25 at the door.

Sinthea Starr’s Lyric Hall engagement came about after the event’s producer, Bernie Kaufman, saw the diva at a National Arts Club gala. Starr somehow stood out in the midst of a crowd that included Celeste Holm (whom Vig is hopeful will attend one of this weekend’s performances), Tammy Grimes, Gena Rowlands, Anne Jackson, Elizabeth Wilson (an old friend of Vig’s), Rosemary Harris and Anita Gillette—to name only the females there.

Vig (and Starr) have trod the boards in New Haven before. Vig directed a couple of dinner theater shows for Consiglio’s on Wooster Street, and has fond memories of attending try-out runs of Broadway shows at the Shubert Theater back in the ‘60s. He even worked as a technician on a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar which came to the Shubert decades ago.

Starr’s rising star is entwined with the careers of celebrities from the golden age of American stage and film. The Theatre Guild cruises, which the noted New York theater society started in the 1970s, gave fresh and interesting new work opportunities to a host of aging thespians. Vig and Starr became particularly close friends of a frequent Theatre Guild cruise voyager Patricia Neal, who died earlier last August. Vig helped Neal achieve the overdue honor of her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sinthea Starr has yet to get her own star, but she’s had brushes with plenty. It was while visiting the Edward Albee Theater Conference in Alaska with Neal in 2005 that Starr performed for that “Land of the Midnight Sun” state’s governor—no, not THAT one; we’re talking about Frank Murkowski, who served from 2002-2006. Starr does have a comment on Palin, however: “We wear the same size, but have slightly different tastes.”

Vig’s had fame on shore as well as at sea and in the icy 48th state. He was in the original cast of the Broadway musical Hairspray, nightly juggling the roles of the TV studio head, the high school principal, the dress shop owner, a security guard, and the flasher from the opening song. He also understudied several of the other roles. While he never had to go on as Edna Turnblad—both Harvey Feirstein and Michael McKean never missed a performance, he did play Wilbur Turnblad for a few weeks.

So Vig never got to wear the dress in Hairspray. He’ll be living vicariously, then, through Sinthea Starr’s antics this weekend.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon was the last bastion of a certain type of TV variety show which was wholly dependent on the mystique of live performance. The odd intros, the use of a large stage and a live audience, and especially the bookings were a welcome throwback to the Ed Sullivan Show, and to vaudeville before that. The show’s bookings leant towards performers with live stage experience: improv comics, stand-ups, ventriloquists, the casts of Broadway shows. Even the bands—country acts, Cheap Trick, Beatles tributes—were generally those who’d built up their reputations as concert attractions.

That wasn’t evident last night. The cameras came in so tight on the hosts that they might as well have been in a closed studio. The intros were perfunctory. Many of the music acts were reliant on backing studio tracks and may even have been lip synching. The old Lewis shows let acts roam free on the vast stage. Last night the performers were reined in.

So losing Jerry Lewis wasn’t all. And that was more than enough to lose. A manic marathon performer long before he entered the telethon game, when Lewis was still a double act with Dean Martin they’d do dozens of live sets a week. When the team broke up, Lewis became a breakneck filmmaker, filming his directorial debut The Bellboy in under a month at a hotel in Florida—while performing in the hotel’s nightclub every night! He was a high artist of the longform entertainment spectacle, whether as host of the 1959 Academy Awards telecast (for which Lewis had to vamp and vamp when the show ran short), in his jam-packed theater tours (just him and a big band) or in his decades as chairman and MC of the MDA show.

Outside of all-night strip clubs or the occasional Eugene O’Neill revival, there are simply no breeding grounds today which build that sort of entertainment stamina. And even when there were, Jerry Lewis stood out as one of the world’s best marathon funnymen.

Frequent shout-outs to the eminent Mr. Lewis, plus a video-clip finale in his honor, only demonstrated the vacuum now at the core of the MDA Telethon. Shortening the show from 20-plus hours was meaningless; it was boring from the get-go, too tightly composed and too earnest to be entertaining.

Nigel Lithgoe made much of having been “passed the torch” by being allowed to sit in Lewis’ chair when Lithgoe co-hosted the overnight shift at last year’s ‘thon. I remember Lithgoe making a big deal of it when it happened last year as well; was he being quietly groomed back then? Probably not—the chair was used by plenty of others, including Norm Crosby. ‘Twas not a throne.

MDA apparently raised a couple million more dollars than it did last year. But since much of that tally was simply acknowledging dollars which had been stuffed in boots and pledged on bits of supermarket cardboard for the entire year since last year’s telethon, that total is hardly a moratorium on Lewis’ service. It could be years before his absence is felt monetarily. Not so the broadcast, however—where were the jokes? The surprises? The bizarre intros and mispronunciations? The sycophantic check-handers, awed to be in Lewis’ presence? Without him on hand, watching the telethon was like watching Damn Yankees without the Devil, or a college without the Nutty Professor. Perhaps they had good cause to replace him (we still don’t know why he left), but they didn’t replace him; they just reenlisted his former sidekicks and sub-hosts.

Life-threatening illness has never been the main attraction. If they could just run that phone number and expect you to call in, they’d do it. There are a slew of reasons, whether selfless or self-serving, to do a telethon.

I direct you to this parody of a children’s primer, from the very first issue of Paul Krassner’s Realist magazine. It holds up just as well as Lewis did all those years.

http://www.ep.tc/realist/01/25.html

Colin Quinn's Long Story Short shifts from New Haven to Chicago this week. Photo by Carol Rosegg from the New York production.

I did a phone interview with Quinn a few weeks ago. “I like to talk,” he said. “I like to provoke. The world is so politically correct. I want to bring out what’s undiscussed…. Though I wouldn’t say business has been clamoring for my point of view.” He means the TV business, which embraced him briefly as the anchorman on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update (his tag: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”), and as the host of Comedy Central’s Last Call With Colin Quinn.

Club dates could be frustrating for him too. “Stand-up audiences get drunk. The way they set the clubs was just bad. In clubs, people are facing each other.”

When I observe that’s his routines are smart, Quinn sighs “That doesn’t help either.”

But in the theater, his mannered, structured, longform common-sense commentary on current events (and eons-ago events) plays beautifully. Bolstered by Jerry Seinfeld’s active involvement as director (“This guy spent more time on this, for nothing”) and strong reviews from the original New York run, he’s found audiences reliably receptive everywhere he’s played. “Sure, I did it in the Hamptons, Philly and Montreal. The Hamptons, it was a more politically correct audience than the other places, but they were all pretty much the same.”

Describing the act as concerning “Richie Rich, Poory Poor” and international conflicts, Quinn’s working off a tight script but will add new current-events jokes as necessary. Some key material about the Arab Spring and the U.S. deficit near-default was jumped in since the New York run.

The rehearsed rhythms can actually be comforting. Or as Quinn puts it, “Spontaneous can be great, but it can also be smoke and mirrors.”

But he also clearly thinks well on his feet. He deflected a mic glitch at the Long Wharf deftly, even though technical problems could really skew the flow of his mock-irritable oration.

When I ask specific questions about the difference between his theater and club performance experiences, Colin Quinn quickly considers the question, then spits out a marvelously articulate thought-through response about how he felt trying to break through to stand-up audiences with his heavier concepts and material. He describes his frustration, how the set-up of the clubs was an obstacle, how it was an uphill battle. He ends with a metaphor drawn from the same militaristic vocabulary with which he smartly peppers Long Story Short: “I’m not gonna not do stand-up, but it got hard doing what I wanted to do.”

“ I was like an arrogant colonialist. I’m gonna civilize these people!”

Right after this bravura answer, so eloquent he could have been reading it off a page, he says “Congratulations. I’ve done a lot of these [interviews], but nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

I’m beaming, of course, but moreover I’m just impressed. This is the essence of Colin Quinn: fiery, unfiltered, concise, clear, to the point, in your face and unfailingly polite.

Your friend who fills you in on the tough facts: Things have been bad for a while. You have irrational rage problems; we all do. Life’s not fair. Hollywood gets it wrong. You should have paid attention in history class. Your country may be cheating on you. We need a few more drinks to get over this.

This is the guy I want to talk about the fall of civilization with. Long may he reign.

Colin Quinn in the New York production of his Long Story Short. The New York set has been downscaled a bit for his current run at the Long Wharf Theatre, which closed Aug. 21. Carol Rosegg Photo.

The quintessential Colin Quinn is the gruff- sounding yet genial and reflective persona he perfected as the Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live. That gig began auspiciously, with Quinn hurriedly summoned to replace Norm Macdonald, who had just been fired by an NBC exec under the specious reasoning that Macdonald was “not funny.” the firing hadn’t even made the papers when Quinn had to naked his Update debut. He turned the awkwardness into one of the most profound and heartwarming moments in the history of Saturday Night Live, introducing the news segment with a tribute to norm Macdonald, surrounding the experience in terms of working in a bar and having to suddenly take over for the bartender who’d trained and mentored you and then abruptly been dismissed.
For those of us who cherish that gracious, generous, bar- mentality side of Colin Quinn, his one man show Long Story Short has the perfect ending. After an hour of loosely connected verbal vignettes about the rise and fall of great civilizations and the origins of longstanding international and religious hostilities, Quinn brings the show into the present day with a lengthy bit presenting world relations as a bunch of guys in a bar at closing time.
It’s a brilliant bit, full of current- events detail and finely wretched characterizations. As with the whole Long Story Short show, Quinn delivers it matter-of-factly. He doesn’t punch the jokes, overly the characters or otherwise oversell the material. His steadiness, and the complexity of the concepts he’s playing with (
Arab Spring! Israel! British colonization of a quarter odd the world!) makes you listen in closer. Bits that might easily bomb in a stand up sweet in a noisy nightclub play just right on the long wharf mainstage, with Quinn in jeans and black polo shirt standing before an austere arrangement of stony golden steps and a large projection screen.
He also throws in theater- friendly routines like the one about how ths Greeks developed live drama, and soon “the average Greek child stats watching 40 hours odd theater a week.” He follows this with an imaginary meeting between Oedipus and Sophocles, with the aggrieved ruler wondering if the hero of the playwright’ s tragedy was based on him–” because, you know, my name’ s Oedipus and I fucked my mother and killed my father.”
Theater- smugwise, Quinn’s show- opening local-reference gambit is pitch perfect: “All my life I was ‘Ooh, Long Wharf!’ And notes here I am.” When the audience laughs at what may come off as deprecating– Quinn’s show comes to us, after all, after a long and successful run in his native New York, and has previously toured to Canada and Washington DC– Quinn chides the crowd. “I’m serious,” he says, and starts singing the praises not just of the Long Wharf Theatre but of the Long Wharf loading dock.
Colin Quinn is not a clown or an aggressive joke teller. He’s not a natural mimic (though his impression of Tony Bennett is pretty impressive considering that Quinn’s lack of singing skills was the basis of an ongoing routine on the game show Remote Control). His fortune is his working stiff demeanor and delivery. He paces Long Story Short as if he’s pulled up his stool at the bar, signaled a few friends, gotten comfortable, and plans to expound for a while. The 75- minute monologue is smartly broken up with black- outs where Quinn leaves the stage, the projections change, and the audience can applaud or exhale. It’s the equivalent of bathroom breaks or interruptions at the bar. The only thing missing from the loquacious, thought provoking late night mood Colin Quinn has conjured up in the theater is this: You really want to buy the man a drink.

Colin Quinn still making a Long Story Short. Carol Rosegg photo.

Two Quotes About Lenny Bruce… plus recently rediscovered photos of Gary Cavello as Lenny Bruce in a production of Julian Barry’s play Lenny that I directed for New Haven Theatre Co. in February of 2000. (Other actors in the photos: Kim Mikenis in red, Rob Rocke in purple and Craig Gilbert in yellow.) Photos by Kathleen Cei.

In the early sixties I gained inspiration from two red see-through discs pressed by Fantasy Records. The first, Lenny Bruce’s Picnic in a Graveyard, will make me laugh for a hundred more years. For a long time I found myself imitating his nasal whine and sharp barbs. There’s not enough space here to talk about Lenny Bruce. In ’61 I hitched to New York to see him at the Village Vanguard. Chuck Isreals, a Brandeis classmate and bass player sharing the program with Lenny, introduced us. Even knowing his routines by heart, his spontaneity amazed me. Once, during one of his monologues, there was a loud thud on the floor above; he jumped on a chair, pounded on the ceiling, and screamed out, “Hey Frankenstein, quit jerkin’ off!” He completely cracked me up. Of all today’s comedians, only Richard Pryor can top the Bruce on quick-draw humor. ‘Tis a pity Lenny’s gone. I dedicated Woodstock Nation to him. We all know Lenny’s story. Mother fuckin’. Shit. Piss. An Anglo-Saxon hero.

—Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (Perigree, 1980), page 123.

Back then, the Bay Area was just surging with bohemian-type artists and performers; they blanketed the coastline like the city’s famous fog. Raw, new talent emerged—people who were willing to push the satiric envelope just a little further. I became friends with emerging talents Ronnie Schell, Jorie Remus, and a young talented housewife-turned-comedienne, Phyllis Diller. They were all performing at another great club in San Francisco, the Purple Onion. I was so impressed with the talent of these people that I called Herbert Jacoby at the Blue Angel in New York. “Herbert!,” I told him excitedly, “you must book these people, they are all fantastic!” Eventually he did, along with another struggling unknown, Lenny Bruce.

I wish I still had that piece of cardboard. I recorded his parody on an album called Boo Hoo Ha Ha, and Lenny received a royalty check for the sum of fourteen cents. When he showed it to me, I said, “So, you gonna cash it?” “No, he said, gleefully, “I’m going to keep it and fuck up their books.”

—from How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years—A Memoir, by Kaye Ballard with Jim Hesselman (Back Stage Books, 2006, $24.95)