Pee-wee, Fall Guy, and Class Warrior

It is an odd coincidence, in a way, that I have just today learned that Pee-wee Herman and his entire TV show cast of characters are headed back to the stage for live shows in L.A. — while learning very recently that Heather Thomas, one of the two fabulous babes from Fall Guy (the other being Markie Post, also seen on Night Court), later went on to write forty screenplays, selling only one — called School Slut — which was never produced (sadly).

I say it is a coincidence because if you combine Pee-wee Herman and pin-up girl Thomas, you sort of get multimedia comedy sensation Jen Dziura, who performed her one-woman show about What Philosophy Majors Do After College this past Friday, as fellow theatre-goer Michel Evanchik and I witnessed.

SPORTS SECTION: After the performance, Michel talked me into watching baseball, despite my complete lack of knowledge about sports, and it ended up being the game in which the Yankees beat the Red Sox — apparently a rival sporting franchise — with the game’s only run, after fifteen innings. My games-watched to games-worth-recounting ratio is thus pretty solid. With luck, this will enable me to go through another decade or so of conversations with the masses without having to watch another game.

And if my sports section sounded a bit elitist, it may be because I am a product of the Ivy League. Or at least, a huge element of Jen’s show was coping as a rural poor kid from the South with immersion in the upper-crusty Ivy League (Dartmouth in her case, but not so different a setting from Yale, where North Carolinian Helen went, or Brown, where I went, albeit from nearby rural Connecticut). The performance was a great, funny blend of autobiography, class analysis, and a capsule history of Western philosophy, which happens to have been my major as well. Here’s hoping Jen is able to take it on the road to colleges (and philosophy majors) across the land, including the targeted Ivies.

And as if Heather Thomas weren’t enough 80s iconography for one week, tomorrow I’m off to Coney Island to see Pat Benatar and Debbie Harry (plus the Donnas) in a free concert, along with fellow 80s buff Michael Malice, whose off-the-record social gatherings for media folk New York Times recently declared the cure to Twitter (whereas the Manhattan Project gatherings for right-of-center folk mentioned in my right margin are only the cure to, like, the DailyKos).