But kids in Brooklyn were inventive. There was no lack of ingenuity. We made our own scooters. We called them push-mobiles. A push-mobile consisted of a flat board around three feet long. We took apart a roller skate, strapped the front end to the front of the board and the back end to the rear of the board. On the front of the board we nailed an empty fruit box. The fruit boxes were discarded from the fruit store after the apples or pears or grapes that they previously had contained had been sold. On top of the box, we nailed two handles made of two-inch wooden struts that came from other places, like egg crates. The push-mobile, like a scooter, was propelled by putting your left foot on top of the board and pushing the ground as hard as you could with your right foot. When you gathered enough speed, you put your right foot up on the board behind your left and merrily traveled along. If you were lucky, you found a long hilly street where you didn’t have to push at all. You just shoved off, put both feet on the board, and sped down at breakneck speeds like five miles an hour. It was absolutely thrilling! I wonder if I’m the only person still around that remembers the amazing invention of the push-mobile?
We were too poor to afford tickets for High Holiday services （Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur）， so we hardly ever attended temple. But at age thirteen, like most Jewish boys, I was bar mitzvahed at a tiny synagogue on Keap Street. Learning Hebrew was nigh on impossible, but I got away with the prayers by memorizing the sounds and syllables. The only thing I remember is that when I was finished, all the kids in the synagogue threw hard candies at me to celebrate, some unfortunately finding their mark. I ended up having a black-eye bar mitzvah!
My path to comedy, and eventually to Broadway, started when I became a drummer. Shortly after my bar mitzvah we moved from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to the Brighton Beach section. I started high school at Abraham Lincoln. I tried out for the Abraham Lincoln High School band and was assigned second drummer （in case the first drummer couldn’t do it）。
In the band was a classmate by the name of Mickey Rich, who played the alto sax. I got to know Mickey and we became pretty good friends. One day, I said, “Rich! Rich? You’re not related in any way to Buddy Rich, are you?”
He said, “I try not to brag about it but yeah, he’s my older brother.”
Wow! Buddy Rich! One of the greatest drummers that ever lived.
I said, “I don’t believe it.”
He said, “Come on. I’ll show you his set of drums.”
Wow, wow! I lived on Brighton Sixth, only four blocks away from Brighton Court on Brighton Tenth Street, where Mickey and Buddy lived. We got to Mickey’s house and he led me to a kind of den or study and there was this incredible set of pearl-covered Gretsch drums. On the big bass drum were the letters A.S. and up in the left-hand corner was a shield with the smaller letters B.R. Oh my god. I said, “It is Buddy Rich! A.S.—that’s Artie Shaw!”
I knew that Buddy Rich was the drummer of Artie Shaw’s band. I couldn’t believe my eyes. For a while I just gazed in wonder at the drum set. A big bass, a snare, a tom-tom, a hi-hat, and a couple big Zildjian cymbals—an actual drum set that Buddy Rich played on!
Later on, I got the courage to ask Mickey if I could sit at the drum set and maybe try to play a little, and he said sure. So one Saturday afternoon when nobody was around but Mickey and me, he let me come over and sit at Buddy Rich’s drum set. He put on an Artie Shaw song called “Traffic Jam” that was up-tempo, with Buddy blazing away at the drums. I did my best to imitate his playing.
Suddenly the record went off and from the doorway I heard, “Not good, not too bad.” And there was Buddy Rich. He could have been brutal, but he was amused. He taught me how to hold the sticks correctly and emphasized the importance of driving the band with the rhythmic beat of the bass drum. I can still play a little and to this day I’m grateful to Buddy for stressing to me how important rhythm was. I constantly still think in terms of rhythm, which is so important when it comes to comedy timing.
Even as a kid, I loved all movies, black and white, color, what have you. We all had favorite movie stars. When I was little they were mainly cowboys: Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, and Roy Rogers. They never lost a gun battle or a fistfight, and they never fell off their horses. Later in life, I could wax eloquently about masterpieces like Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. But to tell the truth, I loved the musicals more than anything else. Shall We Dance, Swing Time, and Top Hat. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies thrilled me through and through. Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Allan Jones, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, and Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals. Nearly all of my films have a musical number in tribute to my affection for the great movie musicals of that era.