Wednesday, November 18, 1992

The theme for the evening was "Historical Impersonations," so I'd decided to do a rap as several celebrities would do it. I wrote it to fit with the instrumental version of Harry Shearer's rap parody, "If You Want Free speech Go to Russia." The three celebrities I chose to imitate were Rosie O'Donnell, Janis Joplin and Gilda Radner as Emily Litella.

I reached Room 273 Willard early and quickly set things up. Then I ran through the song about two times before Mark Sachs walked in.

We had a pretty decent turnout, although most people showed up late. We had the usual crowd: Mark Sachs, Cathy Nelson, Neale Lanigan, Jen Hoffman, Joe Foering, Bernhard Warg, Holli Weisman, Linda Tripp [Note: This is a different Linda Tripp than Monica Lewinsky's famous confidant. This Linda Tripp was a blonde journalism major who worked for The Collegian.], Sarah Landau, myself, Andy Wilson, Matt Pyson, Rob Lindsay, and a few others.

The theme was "Historical Impersonations," and we had a great group of skits. I started off the evening with my "Celebrity Rap," which went over very well. They really laughed at my Rosie O'Donnell imitation and my Emily Litella ("What's all this about Public Enemas?"), but they were lukewarm towards my Janis Joplin, probably because there was only one laugh line in her rap ("I've lost my faith in destiny/Now that I find out Cher's outlived me!"). At the end, after Emily Litella, I said, "Everybody dance" and got up and danced. Mark and Neale and a couple others joined me on stage, dancing.

I heard someone say, "Now's the time at the meeting when we dance," a reference to the Mike Meyers Saturday Night Live sketch "Sprockets."

Although I cannot remember the exact order of the following sketches, they were all presented this evening. Mark Sachs did a parody of Quantum Leap, where Sam leaps into the body of the Penn State Monty Python Society president (Mark, of course). Bernhard played Al: he wore a tacky vest and a tie, chomped on a cigar and tried to get information out of "Ziggy," here represented by a pocket calculator. The sketch was well-written and presented.

In it, Sam has to save the MPS from an explosion that would take place in roughly three minutes. He finds himself in the middle of a Dr. Science sketch, and Rodney the grad student (Steve Gradess) has gotten tired of grading test papers so he decides to blow up the room with a bomb (a smashed up alarm clock). Sam saves the day by agreeing, as Dr. Science, to grade his own papers and cut back Rodney's hours from 80 a week to 70 a week. Then he unplugs the bomb. At the end of the sketch, he leaps from Mark's body into Holli's, who had been acting as one of the narrators.

Incidentally, earlier in the meeting Mark had been showing off his "bomb" and I'd run up and placed it to my mouth and said, "Look! Lip bomb!" Get it?

Speaking of puns, Steve Gradess has injured himself. He has a brace on his right leg and has to use a crutch (which he used only to gesture and hit people). This is right before the Asylum comedy competition, this Friday. So I joked to Steve, "Well, I bet you got some great comedy material out of it." He told me he got it from a collision with a football game.

He's going to go up on stage and say, "Well, my friends told me to break a leg..."