My comrade Gordon Bressack writes…
Okay, though you didn't ask, here is my Charlie Callas story…
As a teenager I worked summers and weekends in The Catskills. There probably isn't a resort in The Borscht Belt I didn't work at, either waiting on tables or being a tummler (running Simon Says games, which is a blood sport in the mountains). The summer of 1967, I was working at The Echo Hotel in Ellenville, New York, which is the easternmost location in the resort area. Various acts would start their tours at The Echo and work their way westward doing a gig at each of the over a dozen resorts between Ellenville and Monticello. The performers were usually very gregarious and would hang out with the staff. Stars like Hines, Hines and Dad, Red Buttons, London Lee and others were very affable and would stay up late with us kids and crack jokes (some would even take a puff or two off a joint.) Mostly pretty nice people.
Then there was Charlie Callas. Charlie would bark at us, shoo us away, curse for no reason and be generally unlikeable. He was so abusive that we decided to teach him a lesson. After he had done his act at The Echo and we all knew what his punchlines were, we followed him from gig to gig and shouted out his punchlines before he could say them. After a few hotels, he got the point. The next time he returned to The Echo he was as nice and friendly as could be.
I had very brief encounters with Mr. Callas — nothing worth writing about — but he struck me as somewhat mercurial. A lot of comedians who are just out of the Big Time are like that. One moment they're on stage and everyone is howling and confirming they're funny; the next, they're going weeks without a good job and reading in the trades how someone like Gary Coleman has a hit series. A person can get very angry with a business where there seems to be that disconnect between acceptance and reward. From the anecdotes that abound, it would seem like David Frye had that kind of frustration but more so. Callas, at least, was able to parlay success on stage to some decent TV and movie roles.
Among his many other accomplisments by the way, Gordon Bressack is the author and director of a play called Missing Dick, which is described as "…a totally hilarious gender-bending sex farce for the 21st Century. It's playing for six performances only, Friday and Saturday nights starting February 4 at the Hollywood Fight Club Theater in, you guessed it, Hollywood. The theater's website doesn't list it yet but I'll bet if you call the number on that site, they'll give you more info and sell you tickets. I don't know if I'll be able to make it but Gordon doesn't disappoint so it oughta be worth attending.