Carson, Belushi, Murphy, Letterman, Brokaw, Brauer. After my experience at Richard Bey I found myself at the greatest building in TV, 30 Rock, NYC. When Carnie ended, two shows emerged. The first was the ratings juggernaut, multi Emmy winning trail braking show Rosie, and the second was a little show called In Person with Maureen O’Boyle. The offices for the two shared a hallway, the studios for the two were next door to each other and the two even shared green rooms but, that’s where the similarities ended. Rosie was the start of the celebrity daytime talkshow, In Person was initially a daytime show with a news bent, but soon became a daytime issue show. While Rosie would have been a blast, my destiny was In Person. Months later, we encountered Rosie at a friends birthday. We had brought Josh, he conceived during Richard Bey, born during In Person, and she was thrilled. She went to pick him up and play with him and he proceeded to scream, and scream and scream until she put him down. I’d like to think it was his way of saying screw your for not hiring my father, but I’m sure it was just gas.
30 Rock truly was an amazing place to work. Roaming the hallways I would see stars galore, especially when Rosie started to get hot. On any given day I would see Elton John, Michael J Fox, Mel Gibson (pre Jew ranting days), Bill Cosby (pre, well I guess not pre anything), most of the cast of Friends, among countess others, but none, compared to one magical encounter. Now while Rosie was interviewing celebrities, I was doing shows about a deranged man trying to hire a hitman to throw acid on the face of his estranged lover (I still have the TV movie of the week treatment if anyone is interested), a plea to help overweight relatives and New Age healing techniques to name a few. Because our green rooms were right next to Rosie’s, several times a month, a celeb might bump into one of our real people, but nothing compared to the time I was doing yet another “I Hate My Racist Relative” show; which for some reason were becoming my specialty. The show was over and it was time to get the guests out of 30 Rock before they started spewing more reprehensible crap. So there I was, escorting the most vile, racist, hateful future Tump voters back to their green rooms when a door opened and none other then Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz stepped out. You would’ve thought these Nazi idiots had seen Hitler himself they were so excited. They forgot their hatred of blacks and gays and basically everyone else and ran to get a pieces of paper for an autograph; and Henry, to his credit signed every single one. I apologized profusely and he said it was fine which only confirmed that The Fonz is the coolest Jew ever.
And even with all that, things got more interesting.
