Dick O’Day might get beaten up on a regular basis if he weren’t so damn funny. O’Day, the host of the Annoyance Theatre’s monthly Big Lovely Bingo, just snatched an audience member’s purse and is busy riffling through the contents. “Nothing embarrassing,” he says with great disappointment, then tosses it back to its owner. She laughs without a hint of resentment.
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Through it all, the victims smile as though being ridiculed is a privilege. During the two-hour, insult-saturated evening, only two people leave–Kathy and Debbie, whom O’Day tried to fix up with a none-too-sober guy at the table behind them. But they’ve got to drive home to Naperville, they explain through profuse apologies, smiling and waving at O’Day all the way out of the theater.
O’Day was born by accident. Back in the mid-80s Knight, a perennial club kid who also studied composition at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, was doing special events for Limelight. He’d made up “Name That TV Tune,” a game show spoof staged to promote an album of television theme songs. One of the Refrigerettes was supposed to be the hostess, but she had to pull out at the last minute, so someone told Knight he was the host, that his name was Dick O’Day, and shoved him onstage.
“I was set up in the Crystal Cove,” he says. “Domed ceiling, waterfall behind me, playing a clear Plexiglas piano. Most of the passengers were 60 and up, either sweet and delightful or just hideous and horrible. This was a luxury liner, very, very expensive. You’d have people come over and say, ‘You’re the worst piano player I ever heard.’ Or ‘Play the airplane song.’ That’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ because of the airline commercial. ‘Can’t you play the plane song? I love the plane song.’”
–Justin Hayford
