We got profiled in the Neighbors section of the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. Rusty Pray is the byline. It’s a nice hit, and it coincides with our upcoming weekend at Rascals in Cherry Hill, NJ, this Thursday through Saturday. Color photo on the front page of the section, and a B&W pic accompanying the text inside. If this doesn’t pack the house, we don’t know what will!

However, there are two big, fat problems.

One was in the 13th paragraph, where The Male Half of the Staff is quoted thusly:

Then came the 1990s and the bottom dropped out of the comedy club business, a development many industry observers attribute to comedy shows on cable television.

“Why pay for stand-up when you can see it for free?” McKim said.

Beware of the reporter who doesn’t use 20th century technology, like a tape recorder. We did utter the above sentence, but we were characterizing the logic of the folks who put forth the exact opposite of our argument! We have always maintained that the “Why pay for standup…” position was one of the most boneheaded on the planet. Now, thousands of Delaware Valley Inquirer readers are treated to the spectacle of one of the editors of SHECKYmagazine uttering that which is 180 degrees from the magazine’s editorial stance. It’s like the Pope quoted as saying that he’s a little skeptical about this God thing. (Although TMHOTS hastens to point out that he’s no pope. And he’s reasonably certain that Pope Benedict XVI couldn’t scrape together a decent ten minutes if his life depended on it.)

The other big, fat problem is the pic. And “big” and “fat” are appropriate modifiers in this case. The Female Half of the Staff in particular is profoundly unhappy with the way the pics turned out. She likens them to those tabloid shots that they run of Britney with a screaming headline that reads, “Time For REHAB?” She wonders how, since she has dropped 25 lbs. in the last two months, can she look 25 lbs. heavier than before she dropped the 25? (For those scoring at home, she’s look at a net photographic weight gain of 50 big ones.) We are guessing it was the wide angle lens. We spent an hour at Rascals last Tuesday smiling gamely and alternately giggling and grimacing through the session, which had to have resulted in hundreds of images. We’re stunned that those two pics made it into the publication. Somewhere along the way, we theorize, we must’ve pissed off the photog. We now understand why celebrities insist on photo approval. (And don’t go thinking that we’re always complaining about bad photos, that we’re never happy about anything that anyone snaps of us. We run all kinds of pics of us in these pages– the good and the bad. These two are particularly hideous, though!)

If this sounds like two people complaining while getting a hit in a major American daily, it is. The Female Half is “mortified” by the pic. And it is painful to see eight years of crusading blunted by a misquote. Fortunately, we have the magazine to set the record straight.