Our living room plays host to an inherited Steinway baby grand piano. No one in the family plays it. Hardly anybody played it when the instrument resided at my parents’ apartment for six decades. And when they did play it – typically my brothers and me when we were taking piano lessons -- you wished they hadn’t.
But the piano does serve one useful purpose. Its shiny mahogany surface is the perfect platform for family photos. And among those photos resides one outlier. It’s a silver-framed picture of Pee-wee Herman. “Hi Ralph!” the inscription reads. “Your pal, Pee-wee Herman.”
Pee-wee, whose real name was Paul Reubens, died this week at the unfairly youthful age of seventy. I can’t pinpoint the year when I became one of the comedian’s many fans but I can the circumstances. I was watching some sort of awards show on TV and Pee-wee, with whom I don’t believe I was previously acquainted, was working the red carpet interviewing arriving celebrities.
Pee-wee’s hyperactive send up of the typical unctuous red carpet host, as he careened from one arriving star to another, his skills perhaps honed as a member of the Groundlings improv troupe in the 1970’s, was far more amusing than the show itself, and his questions a whole lot funnier than the answers he elicited from his befuddled guests.
Since Pee-wee died I’ve tried unsuccessfully to find a clip of the show. It’s not easy to do, both because I have no recollection of the date or the name of the event but also because there are just so many videos of Pee-wee online, including his frequent appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and trailers for 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
The movie’s plot – involving the theft of Pee-wee’s beloved souped-up Schwinn DX cruiser bicycle and his eventful road trip to get it back – was the inspiration, or at least the excuse, for an interview I conducted with him in 2003. I also have a highly accessorized bike and wanted to compare notes.
By then I was a fan. Not only did I watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse, his creative, norm-bending Saturday morning CBS children’s show with my children, I also bought them the entire 45-episode DVD box set for Christmas one year. Lucy, my older daughter, this week confessed she’d found the show, “disturbing.” My talking Pee-wee Herman doll, a gift from my wife, still enjoys pride of place on my bookshelf, albeit on a very high shelf.
Like other trailblazing children’s shows Pee-wee’s Playhouse wasn’t for children, at least not for children alone. And in the case of my immediate family, perhaps not for children at all. With a cast that included talking furniture and appliances, a disembodied Genie’s head in a box, a cowboy with luscious curls, and the lovely Miss Yvonne, I don’t think I’d watched anything that subversive and innuendo-laden since Soupy Sales starred in my favorite mid-1960’s afterschool show on WNEW-TV in New York City.
The Soupy Sales Show featured guest stars like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, as well as Black Tooth and White Fang. Those were Soupy’s dogs, one sweet, the other surly, represented by giant paws that would swoop down from the ceiling to swat or pet the host.
Soupy and Pee-wee had more in common than comic genius. Soupy was briefly suspended after encouraging children to slip into their parents bedroom and send him those funny pieces of green paper with pictures of the Presidents. Pee-wee was arrested for enjoying himself too much in a pornographic movie house while visiting relatives in his native Florida. He wasn’t doing anything especially novel, given the venue, but it wasn’t a good look for a children’s entertainer and his career went into eclipse.
I wasn’t completely shocked by Pee-wee’s fall from celebrity grace. His silly brand had always been to grant permission to our own, less brazen, weirdness. Because with his childish mannerisms, cackle chuckle, rouged cheeks, two sizes too small plaid suit and red bowtie he was so unapologetically weird himself.
Pee-wee told me that his bicycle obsession dated to his Sarasota childhood when he put playing cards in the spokes of his bike’s wheels. “I had the loudest bike on the block,” he boasted.
The conceit for the interview, which appeared in the New York Observer, was to game out strategies for getting off Manhattan Island in a hurry. The specter of 9/11 still hung over the city a year-and-a-half later. Pee-wee – anticipating the age of pedal-assisted electric bikes -- suggested I look into installing a motor. “I’ve seen them in catalogues,” he said.
But that would defeat the health benefits of biking, I countered. “But not if you’re trying to get out of Manhattan,” he wisely observed. The engine could be reserved for moments of maximum panic. Or in case you just wanted to show off. “You can switch over to the motor and leave everyone in the dust,” he said.
Pee-wee surprised and disappointed me by admitting that he spent more time on his treadmill in those days. Were he in the market for transportation a bicycle would no longer be his first choice. “I think I’d buy a Segway now,” he admitted, referring to the two-wheeled personal transporter.
Paul Reubens is gone. But Pee-wee Herman lives on, and not just on my piano or bookshelf. There really ought to be a Children’s Television Hall of Fame. And Pee-wee’s Playhouse should be inducted in the first class, dancing skeletons and all.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
