Elegy For Martin

Jon and Martin, pictured at right, in a Levels production in the 1980s.

I learned with great sadness of the too-soon death of Martin, a talented, funny, and sarcastic human being whom I had the pleasure of graduating with while I attended Great Neck North High School. He went to South, across the Long Island Expressway, but we became acquainted at Levels, a youth center located under the main branch of the Great Neck Library.

My memories of Martin are entangled with those of another deceased friend, Jon Aubrey. It was Jon who emphatically insisted that we persuade Martin to participate in our comedy productions at Levels. From 1982–1985, we wrote and produced two 90-minute sketch shows, one in April and the other in July. Jon and I weren’t trudging into the city to watch professional comedians when we could be smart asses and run the whole shebang ourselves.

I smile, remembering my bedroom being packed with kids, ad-libbing and laughing as we recorded a bit called (future retroactively) “Death Wish 2000.” Martin interrupted one take to pretend to give birth to a stuffed dinosaur toy, which I still have. This sketch included some highly inappropriate comedy by today’s standards, such as “The criminals rape each other…and themselves.”

The casts of the shows that Jon and I produced would entertain each other by pronouncing uncorrected typos that made their way into the scripts, as if that was the intended dialogue. For example, “And…