Way back in nineteen hundred and ninety-four, when I was lad of only 23 years, I performed in a sketch comedy show called “Uncle Zeeno’s Chuckle Patch” that was staged at the West Beth Theater on Bank Street in New York City, a town which had only recently had its named changed from New Amsterdam. We were still getting used to it. Perhaps you’re thinking that the show could have used a name change too. I don’t know why it was called “Uncle Zeeno’s Chuckle Patch” but it had some funny people involved, including future Late Show with David Letterman co-head-writers Justin and Eric Stangel.
The Stangel boys had grown up in Chappaqua, NY, home of the not-so-poorly-secured-in-retrospect Hillary Clinton private email server. As it happens, their neighbor in Chappaqua was none other than the legendary comic actor Alan Arkin, whose performance in The In-Laws has meant a great deal to me for a very long time. Justin and Eric were friendly enough with their neighbor that they invited him to their strangely titled sketch show and he agreed to attend.
Naturally I was very excited to perform in front of Alan Arkin and after the show, I kept an eye out for him in the crowd of friends and family lingering in the theater to congratulate the cast and writers. And then I spotted him, standing in a group of five or six people who were talking to Justin and Eric. I made my way over to the group. I had no plan, nothing in particular I wanted to say. To be perfectly honest, I was not approaching Alan Arkin to tell him how much I admired him, like a normal fan of someone might do. I was approaching to give him an opportunity to tell me how much he admired me. After all, he had just seen me in a show and I was feeling pretty good about my performance.
My method for procuring my compliment was to stand near Alan Arkin and smile and wave and sort of, y’know, stare at him until he complimented me. And it worked! These words and the specific New Amsterdam York accented way he pronounced them, have been etched into my memory ever since: “you’re a very good actah”.
The fact that I had forced the compliment out of him at social gunpoint has, frankly, never diminished its impact for me. Those words were, honestly, weirdly meaningful at many times in my early career. There were quite a few moments when show business seemed to be telling me to get lost and I would wonder whether I had anything useful to offer, and in those moments, I would often remind myself that the great Alan Arkin had once told me that I was a very good actah, not a “great” actah or an “incredible” one or an “extremely talented” one, just “very good”. The faintness of the praise has always made it seem more believable to me. Truly I have no idea if he liked my performance at all. I basically gave him no choice but to say something nice, but I guess I felt like he saw something in me and that was enough.
I never crossed paths with Alan Arkin again but I did have the opportunity some years ago to tell his son Adam this story and he didn’t seem to care about it one way or the other, which is fair. Look, this is an odious remembrance of a great man on the day of his passing. A story about a time I made him pay me a compliment? What good is this? I don’t know but what am I supposed to do, keep it to myself? Watch The In-Laws sometime, or anything Alan Arkin ever did. He was one hell of an actor.
