Caution, this column describes the odd habits of our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos.
Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl
I eat lunch and sometimes breakfast standing up. I blame it on my father’s influence, He had a habit of doing that. My wife, Leann always says, “Sit down and eat!” I always reply, “I can’t ’cause it’s in the book!” You see, back in 1980, an art director of mine, Judy Reiser wrote a book called “And I Thought I Was Crazy”.
I illustrated it for her. It’s a compilation of the crazy quirks and idiosyncrasies that people have. Along with a lot of other people, my wife and I contributed a few quirks of our own. So, now that my habit of standing while eating has been enshrined in book form, on the printed page, out there for the world to read –and believe; I feel it’s my responsibility to back it up by continuing in my tradition, hence, “I can’t because it’s in the book”. Of course, my wife has heard my reply so many times that she now says, “Will you please sit down and eat … I know … it’s in the book.” Or, she says, “I don’t care if it’s in the book!”
We’ve been married for 63 years and she’s starting to get on my nerves!
Some of the stories in Judy’s book are pretty weird like the guy who goes to a card game every Monday night and doesn’t have time to cook or eat out so he has an arrangement with a deli owner who holds a porterhouse steak for him, which he double wraps in aluminum foil.
The guy then takes it and places it on the block where the carburetor is in his car and drives to his game. When he gets there, his steak is perfectly done on both sides and ready to eat.
Other snippets in the book tell about a fellow who always irons his paper money because he can’t stand to have wrinkled bills in his wallet. And another guy who wears a broad brimmed hat every day and it’s the first thing he puts on in the morning thereby causing him to put all his other clothes on around and over it, There’s a woman who always washes, sets and dries her hair at home before going to the hairdresser so she’ll look her best at all times. A 32 yr. old nurse that has never eaten an olive, tasted beer or oysters or snails. She says she has a “closed palate” –she’s not adventurous about food.
My wife’s contributions to the book were as follows: When eating out with friends, she always has to taste their food selections before even eating any of her own.
She always gets her hip out of whack sitting in a theater seat, so upon rising to leave at the end of a show, she’ll pause in the aisle and bend forward throwing one leg straight out behind her. Then, it’s my turn to say, “Do you know that you came within inches of kicking that guy in the face behind you?” Another of her quirks is that when going up or down steps, she finds herself uncontrollably counting them.
My other quirk, beside the standing while eating thing, is that whenever (I know this sounds made up but it is the honest truth) WHENEVER I eat a Bavarian cream puff, after the first bite, I always say, ” Mmmmmmm Mmmmmmm San Antone!” I have no idea where this comes from. I don’t know why “San Antone”. I have no control over it. I’ve tried many times to not say it, but I can’t not say it. Uncontrollable.
It is physically impossible for me not to say it. Calling Dr. Freud!
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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:
The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen
The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes
The Gray Lady (The New York Times)
Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe
The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World
Brought to You in Living Black and White
Art School Days in the Whorehouse
The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce
8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt
The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”
Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School
One day, he showed me another technique. He said for me to get a magazine and he’d show me how he can quickly put an idea together. I got a magazine and was instructed to flip through and at random just pick out three images. I found a picture of a cowboy in a cigarette ad, a picture of a little boy and finally a picture of a store or market. In a few minutes, he had the gag. A kid dressed in a cowboy outfit is talking to a butcher in a market. The kid says, “WHAT… no buffalo meat, and you call yourself a meat market!” This was before we actually had buffalo meat in the markets. Not a great idea, by his own admission, but it quickly demonstrated a method that could be used. I’ve used it a few times myself. Frank sold a comic strip “Mr. Abernathy” while he was working there at the school and he was off to fame and fortune.
In 1978, the Times workers went on strike. They were out for quite a while. No New York Times! Some guys from the Lampoon plus the author 
CBS had just created a break-through technology they called VPA (Vote Profile Analysis) which would hopefully predict the outcome of elections, shortly after voting had begun, with supposedly, a high degree of accuracy. It was top secret. They were going to reveal it when the time was right and the job I had been assigned was to tease the public and build up curiosity until then. We would throw out the letters V P A to the viewers and make everybody wonder what the hell it meant in ten second bits between programs. We also popped the words “Vote Profile Analysis” in small letters in the last few seconds at the bottom of the screen.
“The Neil Simon of England,” 
An audience member can see all the plays if they wish and in any order they wish on alternate nights. The theater might perform the first play on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday and the third play on Thursday and on Friday, back to the first play again. It’s all the same plot seen from different locations. For instance, when you’re watching the play that takes place in the sitting room, you can hear action and dialogue in the background from the dining room. When you see the “Table Manners” play, you can see what was going on in that dining room that you only heard at a distance in the other play and so forth. It was a very clever idea. It didn’t matter if you saw just one of the plays or all three, you still got the whole story and the SAME story.
In 2009, I got the job of creating a poster for the show when 
I was flying blind. I decided to make him faceless and I went with the beard.
It turned out to be a great job for me financially because as time went on, they kept asking for more and more drawings for the program: for theater décor, for New York Times ads, and for products. I hadn’t been to a Broadway show for some time and didn’t realize that they sold a lot of products with the logos and poster art on them, like mugs, hats, key fobs and shirts of all types. Ours had normal tee shirts featuring my poster design and they also sold fancy, sequined women’s shirts.
My wife and I ended up seeing all three plays at a special Saturday showing. We saw one play just before noon, had lunch, then saw a second play and then the third in the evening. I saw Spacey and other famous actors in the lobby at the performances, but what knocked me out was seeing my crude linocuts blown up to amazing dimensions. My sloppy hand lettering paraded across the wall over the ticket booths. A giant poster on cloth was hung in their big front window that you could see from inside and outside of the theater.
They were just plain ol’ bluish pajamas.
My first favorite comic strip was 
When you went to the movies in those days (25 cents), you were treated to a short feature, a newsreel and then the full length feature. The 
In 1955, just as I was starting art school there was the great Martin and Lewis movie 
In 1997, the movie 
After I had been an illustrator and cartoonist for many years, the Westport illustrator, 
The apartment building was above Dave Finn’s Irish Bar which had a garishly large green shamrock in the window. The bar and building were owned and operated by our landlord, Dave Finkelstein. Every night the bawdy sounds of music, drinking, fighting and other general ribaldry wafted up to our grand window and managed to deprive us of any quiet or sleep until the bar shut down around midnight.
Years later, I met the illustrator who everybody called “Von” when I worked at the 
But, that’s not what I came here to write. I came here to write about a different adventure when I accompanied my dad down to his office one summer morning; he told me that he had a surprise for me. After Dad did a little business at the office we drove down to the south end of the city. We parked the car and got out. He pointed up in the air across the street; there, high up on a scaffolding in front of a big billboard, two men were painting an advertisement for Sunbeam Bread.