Hannity and Levin
Posted by Randall Enos at 4:55 pm on July 18th
Two fellas we could well do without. Daily they spew their vicious propaganda on Mickey Mouse's ABC radio. They are considered true Americans by a large listenership....sadly. Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. This is sorta what they look like.
Another for PJBF
Posted by Randall Enos at 2:49 pm on March 10th
I hope Patrick won't mind that I show the recent cover I did for Rethinking Schools.
I want to belatedly jump on the Flynn bandwagon in praising one of the greatest art directors of our time.
The cover is sans masthead, headline and other cover copy of course.....just did it.
MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD...Chapter 28, "Stripping For Playboy"
Posted by Randall Enos at 6:37 pm on January 1st
I worked for Playboy magazine for fifteen years. I illustrated stories and sometimes did caricatures for their "Jazz Polls" and "New Year's Resolutions" pages. But the last five or six years was spent in doing two comic strips for them.
Hefner, who is a lover of cartoons and cartoonists decided at a certain point that he should have a comic strip section in the magazine. He already had Kurtzman's "Little Annie Fanny" but this was to be a separate comic strip section apart from that feature. Many of us were asked to create strips. Hefner asked if I'd care to create a couple of strips. I submitted several ideas and the two he chose were my "Reg'lar Rabbit" and "5-Cent Mary". They would alternate in each issue every month.
I drew Reg'lar Rabbit in pen and ink instead of my usual linocut medium and then colored it by using Pantone Adhesive colored film. He was a little Farmer Brown kind of guy and inhabited a place I called Boondock. There were only rabbits in Boondock. I thought a strip about a horny rabbit would suit Playboy's editorial requirements nicely.
In one strip, a movie company comes to film in Boondock and we are introduced to the famous movie star Rabbit Redford.
Reg'lar (as I like to call him) was always chasing and hitting on little rabbit cuties like Ginger Sue who asks him in one strip if he'd like a "roll in the hay". Reg'lar responds with, "DIGGITY DAWG...ah nevah thought you'd say THAT, Ginger Sue!"
He hustles her off to a nearby hay stack where she produces, from the picnic basket she was carrying, a "roll".
"Whut's yer pleasure,POPPYSEED or SESAME?"...to which our hero mutters to himself in a thought balloon, "Ah wuz in mind of some hot crossed BUNS!"
5-Cent Mary was actually named after a real person...a prostitute who serviced the fisherman down by the docks in my home town New Bedford. I met her once. My dad and I were sitting in a diner having breakfast early one morning before going fishing one day when lo and behold...5-Cent Mary sat right down next to me. I was just a little kid but I knew who she was because she was famous around town. She asked me if she hadn't seen me in church once. I said, "No." She must have had me confused with one of them Christians or something....I belonged to a proud Atheist household and had never graced the interior of a church. At any rate, that was the extent of my relationship with the famous 5-Cent Mary...but I always loved her moniker....hence my strip title.
Hefner loved it because he was a huge fan of John Held Jr. and when you draw a cartoon in linocut with characters in 19th century garb...it come out looking like Held whether you like it or not. When I realized this, I had second thoughts about doing it but Hefner liked it so much I complied.
5-Cent Mary spent her time fleeing from 1800's cops and popping in and out of bed with various "johns". In one strip she is in bed with a musician. We can tell he's a musician because we see his cello leaning against the chair where his pants and shirt also reside. Suddenly in through the open window comes a terrifying shriek," A-I-I-I-I-E-E-E-E-E!"
Mary says,"What's that?"
The musician, without missing a stroke says, "High C".
5-Cent Mary, Hefner and I decided, should be rendered in just black and white to preserve its antique flavor. All the other strips were in color.
Out of about ten sketches for each strip, I might get maybe three or four OK'd by Hefner who was the sole arbiter of the cartoons in Playboy. He was an amateur cartoonist himself. The art director Arthur Paul told me that Hef had put a couple of his own cartoons in the first issues of the magazine.
I would deliver my sketches to the cartoon editor Michelle Urry (who unfortunately died last year) in the New York office and then she would fly out to California once a month and have a meeting with Hefner. My roughs would come back with a little "OK" in red on the ones he liked. Twice he made a little doodle off to the side suggesting a mouth expression for Reg'lar Rabbit and once he suggested putting in a little guy holding a beer to fill an empty space in a "5-Cent Mary" panel.
These two little doodles hang proudly on my studio wall... after all, how many people have cartoons drawn by Hugh M. Hefner?
One of the Hefner doodles suggesting a character to fill an empty space.
MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD...Chapter 27, "Poster Boy"
Posted by Randall Enos at 4:28 pm on December 29th
So...there I was...wintertime...slogging through New York with my portfolio delivering and picking up jobs at my regular places, N.B.C., New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Fortune...and getting sicker as the day went on. The flu I guess. I had an upset stomach, headache and an all-over queasy feeling. I was glad when I got to my last stop...the National Lampoon. I dropped my finished job on Mike Gross' desk and turned to leave when he leaped up and said something to the effect of, "Randy...you're the VERY person I need! I've got a photo shoot in an hour...you've got to pose for us!"
I told him how sick I was and I hoped to make it home before I started throwing up or something. Now..... Mike had become a very close friend of mine and therefore had seen me on the stage and had decided that I was the very "ham" he needed for this particular job. He pleaded and pleaded with me. I was his only hope....his salvation. What could I do? I relented....I said I'd do it.
He whisked me into a cab and we sped downtown to a photography studio where other Lampooners and a pretty young model and some props and a costume for me awaited.
Before I knew it I was posing for a poster for a show which was to be held at The New Palladium in the Time-Life building. It starred Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi and others (the beginning of what became Saturday Night Live"). In the poster, I was to be a little clownish guy trying to get this pretty girl to laugh by showing her a rubber chicken under my top hat, lighting matches giving myself a hot foot and smashing ice cream cones into my forehead. I end up successfully making her laugh when I open my raincoat and expose myself.
The hardest ordeal was smashing myself, in my now fevered brow, with cone after cone of Haagen Dazs ice cream in... take... after take... after take as assistants dipped into a large tub of ice cream and fashioned cones for me.
Later, after grueling hours of this, I was finally released and sent merrily off to Grand Central sharing a cab with the pretty model who was my son's age. She said, "I don't want you to feel bad that I laughed so realistically when you opened your raincoat.....I was just thinking of something....er.... funny....it's what we call 'method acting'".
In the next month, the posters appeared all over the streets and subways of New York City. I would walk past the plywood walls of a construction site and see about 20 of the posters all in a row. The graffiti artists, of course, had a field day adding little "artistic" touches to it. They would of course draw protuberances of various sizes extending out of the raincoat from my groin. One had the girl exclaiming..."IT'S BLACK"!
At that time, my wife was in a play in New York and was on the subway with one of the other actors one day when they pulled into Grand Central Station. This other actor had never met me so when they emerged from the subway car and were face to face with one of the graffitied posters, my wife nonchalantly gestured toward it and said, Oh, by the way..... this is my husband!"
MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD Chapter26
Posted by Randall Enos at 2:32 pm on December 19th
Feeling as though I needed a hobby or some diversion from my illustration work, early on in my career, I decided to try out for some parts in our local Westport Community Theater productions. It was a pretty good group, existing as it did in a town that was full of professional actors and people in related arts.
So began my small career on the amateur stage. I was in many plays over the next years until finally my freelance work got so demanding that I could no longer afford the late night rehearsals and the pressures of performances. My wife was in some of the musicals with me...she owns a marvelous singing voice. At the first illustrators' conference in Santa Fe, she joined the pianist and entertained everyone in the hotel lounge one night. Eventually though, she got tired of me always being up front on the stage while she languished in the back lost in a chorus so she promptly went professional, joining AFTRA, SAG and Equity and working in soaps, films and the stage in New York. She was once in a bus and truck tour with "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I went to see every performance when they were fairly close to home... sometimes working backstage on jobs.....cutting linocuts while the actors hovered around me.................but I digress...........back to my acting experience:
In Music Man, I played the second lead (the part Buddy Hackett played in the movie). I only went out for comedic parts. I also never tried out for lead parts because they often had extra rehearsals and I couldn't afford the time away from the slanted board. As it was, rehearsals often went into the wee hours and I would have to go home afterwards and work on jobs while the rest of the cast went beddy-bye.
I opened the second act with the "Shapoopie" song which forced me to sing solo with a full orchestra which is harder than it looks. I was supposed to be way back on the stage but I had them bring me up front so I could be nearer the orchestra and the benefit of the conductor who pulled me through the song by "mouthing" at me so I could get the timing right. I also danced in that show and worked out a few tricks like flipping my hat to the lead actor who was a really boisterous funny guy. We had fun prancing across the stage with canes and straw hats.
I was in a play called Scapino...again playing second banana (the buddy of the lead guy). Tom, the lead was a very good comic actor (he was a police reporter in real life) and saved my bacon once when he looked into my glassy stare one night and realized that I had definitely forgotten my next line. He improvised brilliantly until I finally recovered myself.
I used to like to add stuff to my part and in Scapino, I had a field day. One thing I did was during a terrific comic harangue where I rampaged around the stage waving, banging and shaking a heavy tire chain. I was supposed to be a rather meek little guy (type casting) that was trying to impress this girl with my ferocity and what I was going to do to a certain character when I found him. So I padded my part. I swung the chain around crashing it into chairs, a table and the floor....I worked it out so that the chain would end up swinging up through my legs supposedly hitting me in the groin. I doubled over feigning great pain while the audience roared. I inched my way (still doubled over) to the girl while the audience roared on. I waited...hunched over until the audience laughter started subsiding and just as it did....I slowly rose from my hunch and recited my next line to the girl.....but.....I did it in a high falsetto voice...."Scared ya, didn't I?"
More laughter.
The best thing about Scapino was the opening where I was the first to hit the stage....I mean I was the first to HIT the stage. Two big stagehands actually would pick me up in the wings and throw me through the air onto the stage. Every night I would bang the hell out of my knees. I started padding them up under my costume.
Speaking of getting hurt...we did Scapino in a theater without a raised stage so the audience was right in front of us...very close. As I swung the chain around one night I slammed it down right in front of the audience and I saw a guy in front jump his legs back quickly....I thought I had hit him and it threw the rest of my scene off a little as I kept stealing glances at him to see if he was bleeding. Fortunately I hadn't hit him.
In "Madwoman of Chaillot" I played the "Sewer Man", but I was also in a crowd scene at one point where we all kind of milled around on the stage. Bored with "milling", I decided I would juggle. I developed a little routine where I would stand down at stage right and juggle three balls...going higher and higher until they practically "kissed" the lights at the top of the stage...then I would bring them down, down and down...finally finishing by popping one ball up to my wife the "flower girl" on a balcony. The juggling went fine through all the performances but I admit that it was a little hairy the night my friends Alan Cober and Jerry Pinckney decided to trek into Connecticut to attend the show. As I juggled, all I could see was Alan's long legs sticking out of the first row....a little unnerving but I made it through without dropping a ball.
As the Paris sewer man, I was able to get a few laughs out of the audience with lines like, "Those newspaper reporters are crazy. They say we keep a gang of women down there in the sewer and that we never let them up to see the light of day! It's totally ridiculous....we let them up every Christmas and on their birthdays!"
I also added to my part by improvising a bit where I was putting on a pair of boots. I borrowed my father-in-law's boots that were much too big for me so that I could put them on with the toes facing the wrong way and then as a parting shot...twist them around facing front.....always got a laugh.
I went on to be in Threepenny Opera, Arsenic and Old Lace (I played an Irish cop) and others.
At an end of the year party one year We put on a little play just for the members. It was a Shakespeare spoof. In order to spice things up, I suggested to the other players that we all get stinking drunk before we went on thereby adding a little something to what I thought was a drab playlet. They wholeheartedly agreed and we proceeded to down several bottles of vodka back stage.
We had a wonderful time doing the play and were amazed at how good we were and how funny we were. My wife says it was the worse thing she ever saw. Oddly enough the rest of the crowd thought so too.
The next day....I felt very strange. I didn't have any desire for my regular 4 martinis, 17 glasses of red wine, and 2 beers that had gotten to be my daily regime..........but I had them any way out of habit. That night I experienced an overwhelming feeling of dread.....I thought I was going to die. I phoned friends and said goodbye. The next day the doctor told me I had suffered a "severe hyper glycemic episode".....a huge sugar overload to the brain or something. It was a super anxiety attack. I had never had an anxiety attack before so I didn't recognize it as such. I recited my drinking schedule to the doctor and he said, "Well....I think you better cut back a bit on the drinking." I vowed that if I was going to have any more of those attacks, I would never take a drink again and.....I haven't to this day.
Every time we'd finish a play, the cast would want to give the director a present at the cast party. It was always the same.... someone would say, "I have a great idea.....let's have Randy make a cartoon about the play and we'll all sign it!"
So I would draw a big picture usually representing everyone in the cast and crew....carefully delineating every fault and foible we went through to bring the play through.
Sometimes my whole family was involved in the play. One of my sons, my mother-in-law (who was the set designer for many years), my father-in-law (who was instrumental in set construction and even acted in Madwoman) and my wife. Sometimes we would donate pieces of furniture or props or clothing like cowboy hats etc. to the production.
Many years after I had quit the acting, I joined my wife for two years studying "The Method" in New York just because I was curious about it......but I resisted going back on stage because my illustration work was just too demanding in those years. I missed it......I missed peeking out through the curtains to see who was in the audience, the admiring fans coming backstage afterwards, the comraderie of the other actors, the gut-wrenching panic and "why do I do this to myself?", "butterflies-in-the-stomach",agony of standing in the wings about to go on when you can't remember your first line..........which comes to you immediately as you take the stage. I missed it terribly but I was an illustrator and I had pitchers to make for the peeple.
So.....years had passed and I was working on a Playboy job that had to be sent out the next day, when I was called upon to deliver a prop or something on opening night of the WCT's new play. It was in the next town over so I left my unfinished job and sped over to deliver it. As I was rushing out of the theater to return home....I was stopped by a frantic director. One of the cast had suddenly taken ill and couldn't make the opening night.....I was their only hope.
"But...I have to do this complicated job.....it's a rush....!!!"
They all begged me to go on......it was a very small part....I could learn it in a few minutes. The whole cast pleaded with me........ I said a hesitant......."OK".
I was immediately rushed into make-up....with only minutes left until the curtain, my lines were read to me for memorization....my movement on the stage was drummed into me as I struggled into my costume....and.....before I knew it I was hustled up a prop stairway in the backstage darkness....placed in front of a prop door......and left alone.......I listened for the cue......when it came, I opened the door and blinked at the splash of the lights which raked over the heads of a full house.....they laughed at my costume........a warmth spread over me.......I was on the stage once more.
