I recently stumbled across the photo below on the Internet and it triggered some nice memories. It's Art Carney and Barbara Barrie in the national touring company of Neil Simon's play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue.
The play, directed by Mike Nichols, opened on Broadway in November of 1971 with Peter Falk and Lee Grant in the leading roles. In June of the following year, Mr. Carney and Ms. Barrie replaced them and did the show there until the end of September when Hector Elizondo and Phyllis Newman stepped in. Carney and Barrie came out here to Los Angeles and performed the play at the Ahmanson Theater, which is where I saw it in, I believe, early November.
This would have been November of 1972. I was 20 and I was still living at home with my parents. I took Karen, who was my then-current lady friend and we both got somewhat dressed-up, which is what seemed appropriate for going to "The Theater" in 1972. Over the next decade or so, it became a lot less appropriate…and now when I go to a play, I wear the same thing I wear when I go to a Ralphs Market.
I took Karen to dinner at my then-fave Chinese restaurant, a place called Wan-Q that was down on Pico Boulevard one block east of Robertson. The building is still there and it houses my current favorite Chinese restaurant, which is a completely different Chinese restaurant called Fu's Palace. Eleven years ago, I bought the place out for an evening and we held my 60th birthday party there.
Wan-Q was the first place I ever had Chinese Food and to this day, my concept of the right way to prepare certain dishes is rooted in how they were prepared there. It was where my family went when we wanted that style of cuisine. The waiters at Wan-Q were great and they really did fit the Great Chinese Waiter Stereotype of all looking alike…but you could tell them apart by the loud Hawaiian-style shirts they wore. There was one who thought the funniest thing in the world was to ask, when a family ordered something with pork in it, "Are you Joosh? Are you Joosh?" That was how he pronounced "Jewish."
For some reason that evening, Karen and I drastically over-ordered. We stuffed ourselves to capacity with Moo Goo Gai Everything and there was still enough food on our table to feed a family of four. The waiter offered to box it all up but we decided it wouldn't keep in the car 'til after the play. We were sitting there, feeling it was a shame to toss out all that grub when I noticed my parents walking in with my Aunt Dot.
They were seated on the other side of the restaurant and didn't see us, which was fine with me. My folks and Aunt would have thought it was "cute" to see me there with my date…and if you're 20 and out on a date, the last thing you want is to be "cute" the way you're "cute" to your parents. I figured out how we could get out of Wan-Q without being spotted but before we left, I told the waiter, "Box all this food up and after we're gone, give it to the people at that table and ask them to take it home for Mark."
We slipped out and headed down to the Music Center for the play…which was a complete delight. Art Carney was wonderful and I'll bet not one person reading this who knows who Art Carney was would doubt me. You know he was wonderful in just about everything he did. In a supporting role was an actor named Jack Somack, who I knew from one of those commercials that ran incessantly on television.
As I later learned, Mr. Somack was relatively new to the acting game, having started at a much later age than most do. It was that commercial that got him the kind of attention that got him steady work as an actor. You can see that commercial here and I'll bet most of you remember it.
After the show, I took Karen to a Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor in Beverly Hills. I parked on a residential street nearby, we went and got ice cream and then we got back in my car and had as much bodily contact as was possible in a 1966 Buick Skylark…which, believe me, was not much. Then I took her home and I went home. When I got in, it was after Midnight but my parents were both still up.
Neither one of them said anything about seeing us in Wan-Q but my mother smiled and said, "If you're hungry, I could heat up some Chinese food for you! We have plenty!"