Skip to main content

The Pee-wee Herman Show!

What a break! It's been so long kids.  Let's do this!


I flew to New York over the break to see the Pee-wee Herman Show and it was amazing!  The show ended January 2nd but not to worry (if you missed it) because HBO is taping it later this week and will be airing it soon!

The show was great, he took his original stage show from the 80's and added all characters from Pee-wee's playhouse (well most of them, sorry Floory fans).  The show was at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, half a block away from Times Square.


I went to the theater early to take some pictures and to find the stage door so I could wait after the show to meet Pee-wee.  I had my girlfriend ask the box office if they had any sort of "meet and greet" opportunities available.  The guy looked at us like we asked if we could kill his dog.  He snootily told us he did not even know what a meet and greet was (obviously the name implies nothing). I decided to take my chance at the stage door after the show.  

After the show we ran to the door where a barricade was already set up.  After a couple minutes he came out.


He spoke for a few minutes thanking everyone for coming to the show and for waiting to see him after.  Then he started taking questions from the crowd.  The first was a girl in her 20's with a Pee-wee doll.  She asked if he would sign it.  Pee-wee told her he could not because it would not be fair for everyone else who wanted a signature because he could not stay out all night signing everything.  He broke this rule though for a 7 year old girl who kept screaming "PEE-WEE!!!!"  When he invited her inside to take a picture and get his autograph you could feel hatred from all the late 20's and early 30's kids crowd who had grown up with Pee-wee.  Watching this kid get an autograph she would probably lose in the next few days was a little hard, luckily she was a really cute kid.



When Pee-wee left so did most of the crowd.  It went from over a hundred to about 15 of us.  As we waited the cast started coming out and I had them sign my Pee-wee Herman Show poster.  After over an hour of waiting (in 30 degree weather) security came and took down the barricade, it was not looking good.  Then a few minutes later Miss Yvonne (from the original stage show and play house TV show) came out.  She was nice enough to sign stuff for the 8 of us still waiting even though there was a car waiting to pick her up.  The group dropped down to four, I couldn't even feel my toes anymore when a woman came out of the stage door.  "Who are you waiting for?" she asked.  One of the guys told her Pee-wee.  She told us he had left half an hour ago.  He must have left through a different exit.

It had been almost 2 hours and I did not meet Pee-wee.  This was the scene at the stage door when myself and the other 3 finally left.


We left New York and headed to my girlfriends parents house in New Hampshire.  There I wrote a letter to Pee-wee and sent along my playbill from the show.  I asked him to sign it, I'll keep you posted on how that turns out.

Even though I did not get to meet him it was a great experience and I cannot wait for the HBO special!  And if your one of those Pee-wee haters out there you might be interested to know that Prince was in the audience the night I was there.  How awesome is that!?  he played at Madison Square Garden the night before and stuck around to see Pee-wee.


WELCOME BACK PEE-WEE!!!!




Comments

  1. I would love to see his show. Back in 1999, I was Paul Rubens VIP tour guide at Walt Disney World and we had a blast. I was in heaven even though this was still at the time when no one would touch him with a 10 foot pole (I never felt that way about him).

    It's great to see the wave of popularity flow back in his favor. It's time for him to ride the wave.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tales From The College Program: Getting Fired. Part 2

Getting my job back: Since Rat Face had gone as high as possible to get me fired, I decided to do the same when trying to get my job back.   Ed Backlor was the VP of Downtown Disney at the time, I decided to email him.   A day later I received an email from Djuan Rivers (who I just discovered is a Disney big shot now ).   Ed was out of town and had forwarded my email to Djuan.   We arranged a time for him to call me the next day.   I was pretty nervous as a sat there staring at my phone waiting for him to call.   I didn’t know where the conversation would go.   Djuan was very friendly, he had read my email and asked me some more questions about the firing.   I left out the part about how everyone eating for free so I wouldn’t get anyone else fired.   He told me the typical “well, I know it’s not a lot of money, but if everyone gave away $3.25 worth of food, it would really hurt the company.”   He said I could reapply with Disney in ...

Back to the Twilight Zone: Part 2

After the clock tower, the most important set in Hill Valley is probably the cafe.  In the Twilight Zone, the area we know as being the cafe is a police station. In 1985 Hill Valley, it's Lou's Aerobic Fitness Center. The building has not changed that much since the Twilight Zone, all they really did was relocate the door and build that facade.  Funny how Lou went from owning a restaurant to a fitness center 30 years later. Mike Ferris also takes in a movie at The Savoy. The Marquee (and movie selection) was changed when this area became Hill Valley A close up shows, that those busts have been there for quite a while. One scene that really threw me off, was when Mike walked past a drug store. It looks like the clock tower is behind him, and the reflection in the window looks like the post office building, but something about the geometry just didn't make sense to me.  I looked for more pictures of the set ...

Jumanji Film Locations

While I was in New Hampshire last week, I stopped in Keene to take some Jumanji comparison shots. Let's start at the beginning of the film. In the opening scene Alan Parrish rides his bike past a statue of his ancestor, Angus Parrish.  I had been to Keene once before and knew there was a statue in this square, so I assumed they just attached a fake plaque to it, I was wrong. They  built the prop statue on top of this rock fountain.  Why not just use the existing one? Here's another statue screen shot. It almost looks like they tried to brush out the actual statue in the opening shot from the film. . This Parrish shoes ad can be seen briefly in the film and appears in the back ground of the second statue picture I posted.  Here it is today. Moving onto the stampede scenes. Turns out Frank's Barber Shop is still there too. So is this old coke mural Run Kirsten! Stampede! ...