Big hair, satin jackets, Italian frames!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 9th, 2006

It’s The Female Half and The Male Half (Photo credit: Chris Coccia) in a photo taken backstage at Philadelphia’s Comedy Works, circa 1985. It was in one of those black frames that the clubs put all their 8 X 10’s in.

That’s a Comedy Factory Outlet jacket that The Male Half is modeling (note “Brian” embroidered over the heart). The Female Half is wearing… those might just qualify as pantaloons. (What are pantaloons, anyway?)

The above was attached to the glass in the frame. Trust us, it’s totally ironic– The Halves bonded early on over their purple hatred for Bil Keane’s obnoxiously sweet family cartoon. (The Male Half even had a rather sick bit in his act that centered on his irrational dislike for Billy, Dolly, Barfy, et al.)

Some of the more astute among you may have sensed a slight drop in the number and frequency of our postings lately. You’d be correct.

We run these pieces of art here today because we’re involved in an ongoing and sprawling operation to cull our worldly possessions. The new owners of our building (a snazzy, four-unit, mint-green deco number on a busy boulevard in South Jersey’s suburbia) are converting it to a 55 and older complex. We’ve gotta bug out in the next 75 days, so we’re plowing through years of accumulated memorabilia. Erected just after WW II, this building’s two-bedroom apartments are larger than most modern apartments. We’ve got two large BR’s and a storage unit crammed with an intimidating amount of papers, pics, chachkes and assorted oddities, some of which were carried with one or both of us, from location to location, starting in 1981.

We also discovered a couple dozen framed 8 X 10’s that formerly hung in our bathroom. We solicited signed headshots from comics and told them to sign their pics with the knowledge that their puss would be displayed in the head. The resultant scribblings ranged from the ridiculous (“I can see you!”) to the obscene (“You piss on my face, I’ll piss on yours.”). The entire experiment was curtailed when it was determined that we could never allow any old folks or children to use our facilities, as it had become R-rated.

One of our original ideas for a website, in the days and weeks leading up to April 1, 1999, was one where we could scan and display the comedy memorabilia that we had squirrelled away in boxes and folders over the years, most of it necessarily centered on Philadelphia and surrounding area. While inspecting some of the materials, our conversation turned to standup in general and we realized that a site devoted to standup comedy, in the modern era, would have a wider appeal.

Now we just hafta get rid of all this crap.

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