Sheriff Sam's Saloon, Adventureland, Des Moines, Iowa
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Those stirring words launched six sweaty, high-kicking shows a day, seven days a week at Adventureland's orange-and-creamsicle-hued Sheriff Sam's Saloon in the summers of 1986 and 1987. And for the vast majority of the performances, I was shaking my bony ass right up there on the stage, squished into my slim-hipped, high-waisted jeans held firmly at my ribcage by a snappy pair of suspenders. I have no idea how I still have working testicles 20 years after I last peeled myself out of that costume, but I carry with me to this day the ugly personal truth I learned that summer: I look really, really, really bad in orange. And I was half of the orange couple that summer (the others being red, yellow and pink … and thank goodness I wasn't the poor guy in pink), so millions of audience members and seven other cast members are still working to focus their eyes after watching me flail around on stage in a blur of jangly elbows and knees, marzipan skin, and orangy orange-orange plaid.
January 1988: Disney audition roadtrip
Somewhere in Oklahoma
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The hair: Sun-In is a friend to nobody. Least of all a dark-haired scarecrow with ghostly skin.
The shirt: I was a Manhattan Transfer freak in the '80s. And not just because I thought Alan Paul was totally dreamy. I saw them in concert only once, and I came home with a pale neon pink (because confident men wore pale neon pink in the '80s) batwing sweatshirt emblazoned with that forced-perspective tuxedo image from their eponymous 1975 album. In teal. And since there wasn't a natural fiber in it, the thing never faded!
The jeans: Reverse tie-dye! With bleach! At wacky angles! Like what a bar mitzvah clown might wear! In prison!
The curtains: Totally not my fault. We were poor college kids in a cheap Oklahoma motel room on a roadtrip to Disney rejection. What the hell do you want from us? Toile?
1989ish: Kennedy Center lobby
Intermission, Tyne Daly's tour of Gypsy
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