Page 39 - MN

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The Great Comedian Fight in Butte, Montana:
Brian and I, under the name Mike and Brian, an Act as Exciting as its Name, were playing the Golden Bell bar in Billings, Montana. As I remember, the stage was on the back bar, so between us and the crowd was the bar, the bartenders, etc. Our act was kind of a poor man's Smothers Brothers, with Brian as the comedian and me as a straight man who didn't want to be a straight man. Brian could do dialects, physical comedy and improv--all the things I couldn't do. I could write and perform stuff. Songs, bits, and so on.
Anyway, after a good night some of our friends invited us to a party in Butte. For those of you not familiar with Montana, Butte was a mining town, to the point where they actually moved downtown so they could dig for copper. It was known as tough, because miners are tough.
A digression here.
Oscar Wilde, the immensely talented, flamboyantly gay, author/playwright, once toured the mining camps in Montana, Wyoming, and other wild west states giving lectures. People worried he'd have a terrible time with the rough, fight- loving miners but not only did his lectures go well, he won the miners over by drinking them under the table.
Digression two.
I spent three or four years working in ice shows. The first was with Peggy Fleming, called A Concert on Ice, and I would walk out onto the ice (usually in a theater in-the-round) and do 15 minutes of comedy. We toured the east coast, then went to Sun Valley, Idaho, to do a couple shows before we did Christmas at Harrah's Casino in Lake Tahoe.
At the time I lived in Ketchum, Idaho, which is two miles down the road from Sun Valley and was home to cowboys, skiers, and tourists. The bars were basically cowboy bars and people like me wearing jeans and Pendleton shirts pretending to be cowboys. Lots of drinking, swearing, smoking, pool shooting and so on.
We did the show in Sun Valley at the outdoor rink, and the boy skaters announced they were going bar hopping in Ketchum. Except for one ex-hockey player who found he could make more money figure skating, the boy skaters were quite gay and really fun to be with. Astounding senses of humor, very bitchy. So