Live from New York, It's ........

I spent this afternoon attempting to reorganize one of my closets. You can read this as trying to get rid of some of the treasures that I have accumulated over the course of the years. My main mission was to shred some old papers using my new paper shredder, a Christmas gift from my daughter.

In the process, I ran across a Rubbermaid storage container full of old video tapes. If you can remember, those were the things that we watched before the advent of DVD players and TIVO. Therefore I got sidetracked away from my main mission; to clean out the closet.

Years ago, I had put some great movies and television programs on video tape, both VHS and BETA. I also found two stereo BETA tapes of music videos (from MTV) taped in the mid 1980’s.

But the best discovery was of a tape that I had made of segments from the “Best of Saturday Night Live’s" first four seasons, which I taped off of the Comedy Channel before they started calling themselves Comedy Central. I couldn’t resist putting the tape into my antiquated VCR and watching this video.

All the classics were on this tape; “The Coneheads”, “Samurai Futaba”, "Cheeseburger Cheeseburger",“Two Wild and Crazy Guys”, The Land Shark, The Blues Brothers, Robert Klein’s “I Can’t Stop My Leg” and many cuts of my favorite SNL segment “The Weekend Update”.

The Weekend Update was always my favorite segment of the SNL programming in the 1970’s. I have Chevy Chase segments; with Garret Morris repeating the top story of the night for the hearing impaired and Chevy talking dirty to his girlfriend, supposedly not realizing that he was on the air.

Other of my favorites are on this tape:

Point/Counterpoint with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain doing a parody of the famous 60 Minutes segment; “Jane, you ignorant slut”. Gilda Radner as both Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna. Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello) and the “Last Brunch”. John Belushi’s commentaries on St. Patrick’s Day and Chirstmas Music.

I haven’t laughed that loud in years. Maybe I’ll get back to cleaning the closet tomorrow. Hopefully I will not find some other treasure that will sidetrack me from the task at hand.

The Beach Bum