By Jeffrey Felshman
“Oh, I’ve been bouncing around here and there.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“They never found out that I wasn’t the guy from Time Bandits,” Pidgeon says. He still doesn’t know who the guy thought he was or what name rolled on the credits. “They made the check out to Eugene Pidgeon.”
Somehow he kept working, turning out columns and stories for the Santa Barbara Independent, traveling to Bosnia in 1994, managing punk bands in LA. He says, “I should have been dead about a hundred times by now.”
He was now alone as well as jobless. New York was hardly any change at all. He says he ran through a small inheritance in a couple months of boozing and partying. He would crash A-list parties with $2 in his pocket. He remembers one night Alec Baldwin getting on his knees to talk to him. “So he could look me in the eye, he said.”
The past year touring with the company has been the happiest of his life, he says. The show just closed a two-week stand at the Rosemont Theatre. The money is great, the adulation from the audience is wonderful, the other players are friends. “There are perks that come with the job,” he says. “I’ve given keys to the city to several mayors. I travel all over, and I tell people I can fix parking tickets.” He laughs. “I’m 43 and I’m four foot three, so this must be my year.”
