Strangely enough that wasn’t what killed them. And now—from straight out of my stand-up act—I’ll tell you what killed them…it was a song called “Dancing in the Dark.”
After lunch they would sit and rock on the porch, which for some of the guests was the closest they would get to the “outdoors.” They would rock and start singing. The most dangerous thing a Jew could do in the mountains was to sing “Dancing in the Dark.” Why “Dancing in the Dark”? Because they never understood the range of that song and would invariably start in the wrong key. The only person capable of really singing that song safely was Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby got it right—but the Jews didn’t. For some strange reason the Jews would start singing it in a very high key and never made it to the end of the song.
They would start with:
“Dancing in the dark
Till the tune ends
We’re dancing in the dark
And it soon ends…
And we can face the music
Together…”
When they hit the word “together” it was too high for human ears! If you could reach it only dogs would be able to hear you. And that’s what did it—Bam! Stroke! They fell right out of their rocking chairs. That’s why “Dancing in the Dark” wreaked such havoc on the porch of the Butler Lodge.
(Sorry about slipping back into my act—but I love that bit!)
* * *
—
I loved being in the mountains. When I finished my tour of duty as a busboy I would run to other hotels like Browns, the Nevele, and the most famous of them all, Grossinger’s (which I later worked at for one summer), to see their comics perform. Comedians like Henny Youngman, Jan Murray, Mickey Katz, Jackie Vernon, etc. One of my favorites was Myron Cohen. Later in life I stole one of his best jokes (but of course gave him credit!). It goes like this:
A guy walks into a grocery store and says to the grocer, “I’d like a half a pound of lox, a pint of cream cheese, and…”
Then he stops because he’s puzzled by the store shelves filled with just boxes and boxes of salt.
He says to the grocer, “You’ve got so many boxes of salt on your shelves. I’ve never seen so much salt! Excuse me for asking but…do you sell a lot of salt?”
The grocer replies, “Meh…to tell you the truth if I sell a box of salt a week I’m lucky. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt…BOY! CAN HE SELL SALT!”
It always gets a big laugh.
One day while working in the mountains I got really lucky. Fate was with me because I found out that one of the actors in the play Uncle Harry that was slated to be on that night had stepped into a gopher hole and sprained his ankle and couldn’t perform. He was to play the district attorney who questions Uncle Harry. So they called me in to replace him!
When they saw me, the social director said, “He’s just a kid! He’s much too young looking to be the district attorney.”
I immediately sprang forth with the lines that I had quickly mastered:
“There, there,” I said. “Harry, have a seat. Here, have a glass of water and tell me in your own words what exactly happened on the night of February the fifteenth…”
The social director said, “He knows the lines! Good enough. Make him old.”
So they gave me a white wig, a goatee, painted many lines on my face, and shoved a rolled-up towel on my back to make me look old and hunched over.
I said, “Do we really need the towel? I’m playing a district attorney, not Quasimodo.”
“Shut up,” they replied.
So there it was, at eight o’clock I’d be making my debut as an actor in front of a live audience. I made my way out onstage and sat behind the district attorney’s desk. The curtain went up. Uncle Harry entered.
“There, there. Harry, have a seat,” I said. Trembling with fear I sallied forth.
“Here,” I said. “Have a glass of water and tell me in your own words what exactly happened on the night of February the fifteenth…”
Unfortunately, I poured a little too much water in the glass. It slipped out of my hand and crashed in a thousand pieces onto the silver platter on the desk below.
A huge gasp followed by stunned silence filled the auditorium. Everybody was paralyzed. Nobody moved. Harry didn’t move. I didn’t move. The audience didn’t move. The band was frozen. I didn’t know what to do. So I decided to spill the beans.
I walked straight down to the footlights, took off my wig and goatee, and said, “Sorry, folks. I’m only fourteen! I’ve never done this before!”
The audience exploded in a huge roar of laughter. I felt great! I’d found my true profession. I wasn’t an actor. I was a comedian.
Unfortunately when the curtain came crashing down the social director was not amused, and he came after me with murder in his eyes. I ran. I ran! I ran past three different hotels until I was sure the social director wasn’t going to catch me and kill me. Needless to say I was never again asked to be an actor at the Butler Lodge.
I kept my job as a busboy on the sour cream station and because of the big laugh I had gotten that night, the owner of the hotel asked me to be a “pool tummler.” The job was simple; the pool tummler wakes up the Jews when they fall asleep around the pool after lunch. He goes around telling jokes, doing impressions, and keeps them amused. He’ll do anything to get the audience on his side. Instead of them drifting off, he keeps them happy and alert and that’s the job.
One of the things I did as the pool tummler was to do an act. I wore a derby and an alpaca coat and I would carry two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and go to the edge of the diving board and start yelling: “Business is no good! I don’t wanna live!”
I’d then jump off into the pool. My suitcases would take me straight to the bottom and my derby would float on the surface. It always got a huge laugh.
It was impossible to swim to the surface in a pool-drenched alpaca coat. So I was looking up from the bottom of the pool for help from Richard, the good-looking blond gentile lifeguard. I was hoping he would notice me at the bottom and dive down and save me. Unfortunately, he was still holding his stomach and laughing with everybody else at my antics on the end of the diving board. But fate was with me; I’d mouthed the words, “Richard, save me.” And he somehow remembered that I was at the bottom of the pool and brought me to the top, struggling for air. For some reason I got even more laughs while gasping for breath.
On my second or third summer back in the Borscht Belt I developed an act mostly made up of a lot of stolen jokes like, “Good evening, ladies and germs! I just flew in from Chicago and boy, are my arms tired. I met a girl in Chicago who was so skinny that when I took her to a restaurant the ma?tre d’ said, ‘Can I check your umbrella?’?”