Up Till Now: The Autobiography

became our subjects. We were watching them as they watched us make ever bigger fools of ourselves. These were the people the audience really got to know. One of them was our cue-card woman. In one scene, for example, I discovered the aliens had followed me to Earth and I had to scream a great echoing, “Nooooooooooooo!” That was the entire scene, one word. So naturally we wrote it on three cue cards. And we carefully instructed our cue-card woman that the first cue card had to have exactly five O’s. Then she had to hold up the second cue card, which contained precisely four O’s. And the final card had three O’s.
    And this wonderful woman really counted my O’s to make certain she got it right. Of course I couldn’t get it right, I kept getting the length of my “no” confused. You actually could read her expression:These people are crazy, but they’re probably harmless so I’ll go along with them.
    The film we supposedly were making, also called Invasion Iowa, was the quite confusing story of an alien who comes to Earth to find... well, it doesn’t matter. There was no plot. But it did have some very funny lines. For example, I arrived on Earth buck naked. After first pretending to be from Nebraska, I told the young woman from Riverside we’d cast as our ingénue, “I know this sounds crazy, but I come from the future.”
    To which she responded, “I thought you came from Nebraska.” We also gave her the classic science-fiction line, “I would much rather carry your seed than seed that would destroy the Earth.”
    Most of the real action for the TV show took place off the movie set as we put our cast and the townspeople in bizarre situations. For example, when our leading lady, Desi Lydic, went shopping at the local Kwik ‘n E-Z, for example, we whispered to the store owner that “Gryffyn,” the character she was playing on the show but not in the movie, was a kleptomaniac. We’ll pay for everything she takes, we said, but please don’t say anything about it. So this woman watched with growing incredulity as Desi went through the shop putting items like Remington gun oil and Travis Tritt’s Bar-be-cue in a Jar in her purse.
    Then we decided Desi was going to solicit advice from a group of women about a children’s book she was writing. A small group of them gathered to hear her read from this manuscript. It was the story of a female penguin who was very unhappy because she had small “wings.” Her wings were so small, in fact, that her sweater just drooped in front. Naturally, as she read this story we had a cast member dressed as a penguin making absurd remarks. Fortunately, in Desi’s story, the penguin was able to get wing-enhancement surgery so her sweaters would be really tight and people would love her and she lived happily ever after. Ta-ta!
    These women finally gathered the courage to suggest that her moral—plastic, surgically enhanced “wings” are the key to happiness— was probably not the best message to send to children. So Desi wentright back to work and a few days later read from her newly rewritten children’s book in which her penguin doesn’t care that her wings are small and meets another female penguin with small wings who becomes her friend and they move in together and live happily ever after.
    Naturally I was at the center of most of the absurdity. Right from the beginning I practically insisted that rather than wearing hats, the townspeople should wear Shats, sort of like berets. One night, we had decided that I should entertain these people with my stand-up comedy act, which consisted of jokes like, “One of my favorite places in town is the Kwik ‘n E-Z. They named it after my first girlfriend. It’s a good thing they didn’t name it after my first wife, because then it would be the Fat ‘n Ugly!”
    I think the proper way to describe their response is dumbfounded, completely and absolutely dumbfounded. Those were the jokes, folks. They didn’t get any better than that.
    Part of our continuing story was my growingly acrimonious relationship with my large and often loud nephew, Tiny. Eventually, though, I revealed to one of the townspeople that Tiny wasn’t really my nephew—he was my son! And when I revealed it to... dumb-founded townspeople, Tiny looked at me lovingly and said, “Dad, I want to have a catch!” And we proceeded to take out the baseball gloves and have a catch.
    The citizens of Riverside were so unbelievably accommodating. When