Don King is Roasted by Donald Trump and the Friars

Everyone with the least ambition for fame should be made to sit through a Friar’s Club Roast. If you don’t come away with a healthy appreciation for a life of quiet obscurity, then you deserve all the celebrity you can handle.

Friday at noon 1400 people gathered at the Hilton Hotel’s immense ballroom to witness the public excoriation of Don King, fight promoter and felon. The “RoastMaster” was Donald Trump, and the Master of Ceremonies was Friar’s president Freddie Roman. Sharing the dais were sixty or so luminaries, David Dinkens, Michael Spinks, Fred Klein, etc., all lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery. It turns out that at a Roast, anyone within earshot is meat for the grill. I was glad the Hilton was only one block long.

Freddie Roman got first crack at them, introducing most with a respectful list of accomplishments. Then he turned the lectern over to “The Donald” and away we went. With the sound over-cranked, the air in the Hilton turned suddenly blue. Among the dozen comic talents that he introduced some produced a few great moments of hilarity.

My favorites - Stuie Stone dissing the Donald for getting a million bucks to teach people how to get rich. . . “What do you know about it? Your father gave you $40 million!” And “Donald, I think your hair is turning prematurely orange.”

Lisa Lampanelli said: “Abe Vigoda is here. . . I’m just saying that so he’ll know. . .” One of the few remarks from her that can be repeated in public. (Somehow, the Friars roast with 1400 people in the Hilton ballroom is not really in public. . .) Ms. Lampanelli was the only one of her gender to speak, but she understood the game for sure. With a vocabulary that would blow the doors off a porn shop, she just about won this strange race to the gutter.

Dick Capri thanked Don King for saving his life “from a vicious gang of Hassidim.” Leroy Neiman presented the honoree with a five-by-seven inch portrait that he had painted. Freddie figured it must be worth “eight to twelve bucks.”

Norm Crosby was great - pointing out that Canadians prefer making love “doggy-style because that way they can both watch the hockey game.” Al Sharpton sounded a protest on behalf of all the black tenants in Trump Tower . . .

Roasting was as perilous as being roasted, it turns out. Some of the greatest humiliation was self-inflicted as several of the comics crashed and burned. One even threw a little extra gas on the fire by continuing to drone on through a page of weak one-liners after he had gotten a big round of applause for saying “Maybe I should just shut up and sit down.”

Ironically, after being the target of this pie-throwing contest (with cow pies, yet), when Don King rose to speak, he was almost preacher-like in his response. He acknowledged the invective hurled at him with dignity, while admitting the pain he felt, particularly in front of his son. “There is no pain without gain,” he said. He spoke with justifiable pride of the distance he had come from his beginnings, and called himself a patriot who wears the Screaming Eagle in homage to the 101st Airborne. After the load of insults he had listened to, he sounded grateful and a bit surprised that there actually was a watch in the box he was given.

Now I graduated high school a long time ago, served a hitch in the U.S. Army, fought a war and made my living surrounded by theatre people, so there’s almost no depredation I haven’t become acquainted with. I’m no wuss. I too, have paid my dues, acted like a jerk and said unworthy things. I understood that this Roast was going to be a raw event with foul language and every sort of hostile, sexist, racist, scatological, anatomical, just plain dirty bit of Beavis and Butthead adolescent crap imaginable. As an actor I know there is nothing harder than comedy and nothing easier than criticism, but I left the Hilton Friday feeling like I’d been shot at and missed and shit at and hit. I’m sorry, but the ratio of actual humor to groans, cringes and gorge-raising images was disappointingly low. I was glad I had not brought a woman with me. I’d be hard pressed to explain why grown men must sift through so much manure for so long to find so few seeds of wit.

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© 2005 Mike Landrum

"On Anxiety" by Rollo May

"Anxiety is the experience of Being affirming itself against Nonbeing."

Rollo May

The Meaning of Anxiety
1977 edition

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. For a personal example, I experience anxiety before every lecture even though I have given hundreds of them. One day, tired of enduring this tension, which seemed so unnecessary, and with the help of a strong resolve, I proceeded to condition myself out of the anxiety. That evening I was perfectly relaxed and free from tension when I mounted the platform. But I made a poor speech. Missing were the tension, the sense of challenge, the zest of the race horse at the starting gate—those states of mind and body in which normal anxiety expresses itself.

The confrontation with anxiety can (note the word can and not will) relieve us from boredom, sharpen our sensitivity, and assure the presence of the tension that is necessary to preserve human existence. The presence of anxiety indicates vitality. Like fever, it testifies that a struggle is going on within the personality. So long as this struggle continues, a constructive solution is possible. When there is no longer any anxiety, the struggle is over and depression may ensue. This is why Kierkegaard held that anxiety is our “best teacher.” He pointed out that whenever a new possibility emerged, anxiety would be there as well. These considerations point to a topic that has barely been touched in contemporary research—namely, the relation between anxiety on the one hand and creativity, originality, and intelligence on the other.

“The more original a human being is, the deeper is his anxiety.”

Soren Kierkegaard

The Primary Skill of Leadership

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."

John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963),
From a speech prepared for delivery in Dallas
the day of his assassination, November 22, 1963

What would you say is the primary skill of leadership? Decision-making? Innovation? Vision? These are all important abilities that any leader will need. But the primary skill, I believe, without which the others are useless, is the ability to communicate effectively.

The further up the leadership ladder you climb, the more often you will be required to speak. So, it follows that if you want to climb that ladder, you should prepare to speak well, and make as many public speeches as possible.

Or perhaps you have bigger fish to fry than promoting your own business. Perhaps you are committed to a social cause, a political endeavor or a philosophical ideal. Perhaps you attend a church that encourages the laity to participate, or you would like to take a larger part in your children’s education – you’ll find that standing up and speaking out can definitely make a difference. . . in your life and in your world.