After a long day of incrementally useful futility you go to dinner with a friend and wind up having an extended three way chat with a lovely young waitress from Bangkok.  The restaurant is empty and they are starting to put the chairs up.  You eventually take the hint and hit the street, she smiles and waves goodbye as you go.  

“Shall we see if Jackie’s at one of his haunts?” asks your friend and, although you’ve heard his sometimes funny, mostly aggravating tales of Jackie Mason’s coffee klatch, the odd, shifting collection of night crawling characters the monologist assembles around him as his impromptu court, you’re hesitant.  

“Where are these haunts?” you ask, and it turns out one is less than a block away, so you agree to go to the closest one.  As you walk you’re hoping he’s not there.  The place looks fairly empty and he doesn’t seem to be there.

“There he is,” says your friend, spotting him with a few others at a large table in the back.  “You want to go in and meet him?”  I really don’t, I tell him to go on in and say hello.  He promises not to stay long.  

I walk in behind him, intending by my presence right there to hasten him along.  I am standing back from the table as he greets each of the odd-looking people around Jackie. Naturally they invite him to sit, and I am in turn invited to sit and I figure, what the hell, might as well sit as stand waiting for the politeness to end.   It is fairly boring chitchat among strangers and then, after I mention a nearby kosher Italian restaurant that serves food during Passover, Jackie asks me “are you Jewish?”

I nod, shrug, “vhud den?  Are you?”   He nods, acknowledging with a deadpan expression that this is possibly a clever reply, or at least a convincingly Jewish one.   The disjointed conversations continue, then heads turn to him as he starts an extended monologue about performing for the Queen of England.  He’ll be performing for her a record seventh time in May.  

“Nobody has performed for the Queen seven times,” he says and then adds “Danny Kaye has the record, he was there six times.”  He then describes what sounds like a horrible scene:  no pay, you can’t look at the Queen directly, you have to wait for her to address you before you can speak to her, the performers have to wait on a long line to shake her hand after you’re done performing.

 “The second time I’m standing there for a half hour and I start thinking — what the hell am I doing here?  They’re not paying me, she’s saying the same thing to everyone, I’m waiting to shake her hand and hear the identical speech she’s giving to everyone.  Exactly the same speech.  ‘Oh, you are the most marvelous performer I’ve ever seen.  Thank you so much for coming.  I’ve never enjoyed anything more.  You are a unique and gifted genius.’  And each one of these unique and gifted geniuses are floating on air, quoting her, ‘the Queen said I’m a unique and gifted genius!’.  They’re too stupid to realize she’s saying exactly the same thing to everyone who’s waiting on line to hear the same exact line she’s been saying for the last fifty years.  It’s like she’s memorized a script, it’s the same exact line down to the syllable.”

“Maybe it’s a robot Queen they programmed to shake hands and deliver the speech,” I suggest.

“The same exact speech,” says Jackie.  “So the third year I decide to hell with this, and as soon as I get off the stage I tell the driver, they give you a limo and a driver, no pay, but your own limousine.  So I tell the driver ‘I have an emergency’ and I know he’s not going to ask me what the emergency is: I have a stomach problem, I have two seconds to live, I have no blood sugar, an internal hemorrhage, an aneurysm, projectile diarrhea — an emergency, let’s go.  And he takes off immediately, back to the hotel.  So I don’t have to stand on line for a half hour to be told, along with all the other unique and gifted geniuses, what a unique and gifted genius I am.”

“Sounds like the only reason you’re going back is to break Danny Kaye’s record,” I suggest.

“Do you like Danny Kaye?” he asks me, with his most serious face.  

“Yeah, I used to watch his movies with my grandmother, she loved him.  He was a very talented guy,”  I say and then conversation flits briefly over several of Danny Kaye’s movies, Jackie tells everyone what a huge star Kaye was, which leads him to nostalgia over the many great comedians of the old days, guys like Sid Cesar, a real genius, truly one of a kind, the kinds of comics the world will never see the likes of again.

Toward the end, as this restaurant is starting to close, after they’ve heard that I am not in show business, Jackie asks me if I was ever married.  I tell him I wasn’t.  “Are you a homosexual?” he asks.  I tell him no, not as far as I know.  It doesn’t occur to me until a minute later, as we’re all shaking hands on the sidewalk by the waiting cab, that I could have said “why? you asking me for a date?”  

My friend laughs when I tell him this missed rejoinder, and wishes I had said it.  “That would have been great,” he says as we head up Ninth Avenue.