Me and Groucho Marx

A few years ago, I took my cousin and her husband to the Paradise Performing Arts Center in Paradise, CA to see Frank Ferrante in his Tony Award winning act “An Evening with Groucho”. I had seen it on PBS and wanted to see it in person. I got tickets about 8 rows back. He had a lot of interplay with the first rows, for instance, taking two couples in the front and telling them to switch partners as they looked much better that way. He put on his make up as Groucho and then picked a little boy out of the audience and, with the boy’s back to the audience, made him up the same way. He whispered something his ear, gave him a cigar like his, and had him bent over loping across like Groucho always does. He sang a lot of funny songs accompanied by his pianist who had been with him for 27 years. A lot of interplay between those two. Just before the intermission, he said that he would be in the lobby at the end to sign autographs, sell CD’s of Marx brother’s humor and “a $44 mink coat. I know it’s real because I stole it my self” which brought down the house.

After the show, when I saw him standing by himself, I tapped him on the shoulder and said to him, “Groucho, I don’t have the $44 but could you find me a good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge. He laughed and asked if he could use that in his act and I said “Sure!”.

On February 23, 2008, I went to see him again with my friend Cathy in Florence, OR. I had gotten my tickets early and we had front row center seats. He remembered me and zeroed in on us several times. He liked the fact that we lived in a converted turkey factory and returned to us several times. He had conversations with some women near us who had come there together. One of them didn’t come back from the intermission and he asked one of them to use her cell phone because he wanted to call her up and find out why she didn’t come back. Her phone wouldn’t work so Cathy handed Groucho her phone. He asked the lady for the number and she got a big laugh when she told him she didn’t know the lady’s number.

One of his characters was “Dr. Hackenbush”. At one time, he asked if their was a doctor in the house and there was one, right behind me. After getting a lot of laughs at the doctor’s expense, he came over to me, put his stethoscope on the top of my head, said “Humph” and then gave me a pill (ping pong ball) and told me to call back in the morning.

After the show, I wanted to have Cathy take a picture of me and him (above). Then I had a chance to tell him that I had found a good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge. I bought the deed for $40 from a guy but when I presented it to the bridge director, he said it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. I should have realized something was wrong when the guy I bought it from was a Joey (Bridge Man) Garafoliano. I asked the director how I could get hold of him and he said I couldn’t because the guy was in the witness protection program. He laughed and said he liked that one too.