My friend Mark Dorsey is moving to New York after a number of years Out Here. He’s moving there with his gal and that sort of thing can work out very nicely or Very Not.
Let’s assume everything’s gonna be Aces though. I hope they are even though it means it’ll probably be a while before I see him again. So it goes. The only permanent thing is Change.
“Ooohhhmmmm…..”
The funny thing is Mark and I aren’t tight. We aren’t BFFs. In fact for all I know Mark hates me and always has. He could be waiting outside with a knife right now. He’s Irish and those people are capable of anything except paying off their tab.
All that being said, I’ve known Mark for five or six years Out Here and we did shows together over four of those years. In LA terms that’s like being blood relatives AND married even though neither of us is Mormon.
It inspires a certain wistfulness is what I’m saying. Attention must be paid.
I met Mark back when we were both taking a writing class with Michael McCarthy. It was a small class and I think the only other students were Matt Lageman and Julie Mullen. I remember Julie was cute, Matt was twelve years old, and this Dorsey guy hadn’t just kissed The Stone, he chipped off a piece and dry-humped it everyday before class. He could talk about anything which would have been enough to earn him a spot on The List, but for the fact that he was so relentlessly friendly and upbeat AND he really did know what he was talking about. Imagine a Cliff Claven who deserved to live.
Move ahead a while and we both end up writing and performing in “Big News”, Michael’s pet project, his Frankenstein, his Painfully-White Whale. (It’s a whole ‘nother blog, possibly even a book.) Mark and I were both news junkies and between us we were capable (nay, desirous!) of taking up an entire Writers Meeting just pitching news items and sketch ideas, usually with the moral that Bush and Cheney deserved an extra chapter in “The Inferno.”
As a performer Mark was the Go-To Guy for any impossibly huge monologue. He had the ability to learn and repeat quantities of information that would have made “Rain Man” cry. He also played Arnold Schwarzenegger at least twice a month for his entire run of the show. Being from Boston he also handled anything having to do with Ted Kennedy or the Red Sox. He and I once played The Tapper Brothers in a “Car Talk” sketch I wrote and we had a ball. He also lives in my memory forever as Arnold doing another bit I wrote, a public service announcement issued after Schwarzenegger upgraded the legal penalties for necrophilia in California. (This really happened!)
The text of the sketch is elsewhere on my site. (Okay, it’s here.) But try and imagine a really loud and sincere Governor Arnold exhorting kids, “Don’t f*** the corpses! You may think it feels fantastic, but now under The Schwarzenegger Act it is a crime punishable by up to eight years in prison! Respect the corpses! And yourself! Join me and let us terminate corpse-f***ing in California! “
I think now one reason for my fondness for Mark is becoming clear. When you write something for an actor and he nails it so perfectly that the audience is on the floor, well, how are you not going to think kindly of that actor?
A final Mark Dorsey memory and then I’ll let go:
For some reason Hal Lublin, Matt Lageman (who was now 14), Mark, and I found ourselves at the House of Pies over on Franklin and Vermont. It was late and we were throwing the usual cast party small talk around when one of us, I’m pretty sure it was Hal, suggested that one of our writers might be inclined toward having an un-natural and intimate relationship with Fozzie Bear.
The Funny Dam burst and all four of us “heightened and explored” as they say in Funny Class. In very short order I found myself literally fighting to breathe as I laughed as hard as I have ever laughed in my life. Every time I started to regain my composure one of us would do something “Fozzie-ish” and it was Bedlam, on and on…
There are four people in the world, not counting some nervous House of Pies waitstaff, who know just how funny that night was and how good it felt to laugh that hard. Now one of them is moving to New York and I guess it’s okay to say I’ll miss him, even though we ain’t tight or BFFs or any high-maintenance thing.
I will miss that we never had to be.
“Wokka-wokka”, good sir!
Godspeed!
