SFist Goes to the Paul Reubens Tribute
With the Yoga Journal conference going on at the same time as SF Sketchfest, SFist didn't know which way to turn. So, we spent the weekend in child's pose. Then, still feeling childish, we took our big sister to the Sketchfest tribute to Paul Reubens Monday night at the Palace of Fine Arts.
The scene at the Palace: No kids. Just adults who were once in various stages of kidness and under Reubens' thrall. "We've all grown up," observed Big Sis.
The show opened with a tribute reel of Reubens' famous and lesser-known performances, including his overwrought stake-through-the-heart death scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and an early staged version of "The Pee-Wee Herman Show," wherein Reubens and the late-great Phil Hartman draw the best roundy parts of a mermaid. (Her belly button and her watch, you perv!)
When the reel broke, perhaps on cue, Ben Fong-Torres, the esteemed rock journalist and the evening's moderator, couldn't stop himself from doing a nerdy-but-passable Pee-wee Herman impersonation. Then, he brought out the man of the night.
By SFist Karen S
In an homage to his younger self (and his most enduring character), Reubens took the stage in a well-fitting light-gray suit and regular red (not bow) tie. He looked older than seemed possible -- Is he really almost 55? -- and looked like he really appreciated the audience's applause.
Over more than an hour of polite conversation -- Fong-Torres told us that "acrimonious" was the day's "secret word," but the famous unpleasantness in that Florida porn theater wasn't mentioned even once -- Reubens shared childhood memories and Hollywood misadventures. He told of his love of "Howdy Doody" and "I Love Lucy" and of how when he was five years old, his father offered to build his sister and him anything they wanted in the basement. His sister wanted a ship; Reubens asked for a stage. He was always on the prowl for props and demonstrated how he'd sit on his stage, fawn-like, holding his prized brandy snifter.
Before he was Pee-wee, Reubens worked in restaurant kitchens, sold Fuller Brushes, was an early member of the LA's famed Groundlings improv group and practically supported himself for a year with resolutely bizarre performances on "The Gong Show." A rejection by SNL (he was chucked in favor of Gilbert Gottfried, a close friend of the show's producer), spurred him and Phil Hartman to hone and shape the nerdy boy-man into a full-fledged stage show, then sensation, then icon.
We've always loved Reubens and were among the members of our college co-op who woke/stayed up each Saturday morning to watch "Pee-wee's Playhouse." But the tribute provided a chance to really take stock of all Reubens has been involved with. Danny Elfman's second non-Boingo gig was writing the score for "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." Reubens hired a post-"Apocalypse Now" but still relatively unknown Laurence Fishburne (a friend of the Groundlings' spotlight operator), to play Cowboy Curtis on "Playhouse," and "Playhouse gave Emmy-winner S. Epatha Merkerson one of her first regular gigs. He passed on hiring Benicio Del Toro to play Tito, the lifeguard (he couldn't understand his English), but the two became such good friends that Reubens later visited him on the set of "License to Kill," where he was also able to ask producer Cubby Broccoli if his family really did invent the cruciferous vegetable. "Boyz 'N the Hood" writer/director John Singleton was even a guard on the "Pee-wee's Playhouse" soundstage. Move over, Kevin Bacon. Modern Hollywood might better be explained by six degrees of Reubens.
Near the end of the tribute, Fong-Torres prodded Reubens to deconstruct nearly every aspect of the Pee-wee persona, but Reubens wouldn't bite. In meaning deflections that would make a grown semiotician cry, he explained how Pee-wee's over-rouged cheeks and juicy lips owed more to ineptitude with makeup than any kind of overt journey into sexuality or gender rules. The too-small suit was a loaner from the Groundlings' founder. The voice -- that voice! -- was something he developed when he was a kid, trying to be more kidlike when he was onstage. It's as if all the pieces of Pee-wee were inside of him, waiting for the right moment to assault the world.
After confiding that he used Conky as an ashtray and before closing with questions from the audience, Reubens shared a dream he had in his hotel room the night before the tribute. In the dream, he was arguing with Napoleon and Pedro from "Napoleon Dynamite" about whether or not he was in the movie. He kept saying he wasn't, but they kept insisting he was. By the time he woke up, he was convinced he'd been in the movie. As Monday wore on, he realized he hadn't. But that's the thing about being an influence: Reubens' non sequiturs, awkward outfits and speech and heartwarming oddness are everywhere in "Napoleon Dynamite," even if he wasn't.
We love that story.