I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I have to put medicine on my back using
a spatula.
It's fun going into the drugstore when they ask, can we help you find anything?
And I have to say, yes, a spatula, low-trimon, and a hand-mear.
Are you intrigued, my lady?
I've got my little red-riding hood, Walgreens basket.
If you could direct me to the proper aisles, my dermatologist said he needed to do a biopsy
of a little mole on the tip of my nose, and I was like, wow, that sounds like it's going
to hurt.
He said, don't worry, we're going to numb it first with a painkiller.
I said, how?
He said, we're going to puncture a sharp needle into the tip of your nose.
So you're not canceling the pain.
You're just rescheduling it.
Just see the sleep out.
Ring the ring, ring the ring, ring the ring.
Just see the sleep out.
Ring the ring, ring the ring.
I make it so lovely where the voice my right should get up with you.
Ring the ring, ring the ring.
My brother was a head band back in the 1960s and he was able to read music.
So he used to back up a lot of the vocal bands like the Ronettes.
He didn't do the Ronettes though.
He did a lot of the decrystals.
He did the chiffons.
He did the Shangri-La's, the little lantern in the imperial scripts like that.
He never did the Ronettes for some reason.
They must have brought their own band with them.
But he played with some of the biggest groups in the 1960s.
Penny King and other one.
Ruby and the Romantics.
Play with them all.
Get 708 and good morning at WRJN ready.
I'm Don Rosen and I am happy to have some fun this hour of Pete Schwabba from Nightlight
with Pete Schwabba.
HL10PM here on WRJN and the Civic Media Network.
Did you have to set your alarm really to wake up at this hour, Pete?
I did, Don.
And thanks for having me, by the way.
Yeah, I'm trying to adjust my hours so they would do a nice show.
I'm trying to sleep into like 9 or 10 but it's pretty difficult to be honest with you.
Well, people always say to me, well, it must be easy for you to get up because you work mornings.
No, it's not easy to get up at 4.30 in the morning.
And I did mornings for 30 years and it's not easy to get up.
They always say, oh, you have no problem doing it.
I do have a problem doing it.
Yeah, but what's interesting is like morning radio, those are good gigs today.
Those are good gigs to get in radio.
I think, right?
I mean, and everybody I know that I listened to has done it for decades.
So people want to think what you like it, I guess.
Well, and when I did mornings here, years ago on our FM station WCY,
I did it for 24 years and then I did mornings at a previous station.
But because I was program director, I still didn't go home till 5.30 in the afternoon.
I mean, it wasn't like, oh, you're done with mornings.
It's all over at 9 o'clock.
You go home.
No, it doesn't work like that in radio.
Right.
At least it didn't back then.
No, it wasn't.
Yeah.
So let's do a little background for people who don't know Peach Waba.
You are in show business all the way.
I mean, you're a writer, producer, director of movies.
But the big thing is you're a radio star now.
Forget about all the other stuff.
You're in radio.
That other stuff doesn't mean anything.
How did you start producing directing and writing movies?
Because that's everybody wants to do that.
But you actually got movies made.
Yeah, not as many as I would have liked.
But yeah, I started out as a stand-up comic when I was at
all university in Chicago.
And I won a comedy contest for college kids in Chicago.
And I started to hit an open mic.
And I got lucky.
I started during when there was kind of a boom in comedy.
So I probably started working before I was qualified.
Like a lot of comics back then.
But it was fun.
I mean, it's a guy in my 20s on the road and doing what I love to do.
So, and then I moved to LA in the mid 90s and got lucky and sold a script.
And I thought, well, this is, I don't have to travel as much.
So I think I'll do this for a while.
So I wrote with a guy named Greg Lanna who started to meet the parents of franchise.
And he and I wrote together for years.
And we sold some stuff.
Only one movie that we sold got made though.
It was very frustrating.
It was called a guy named MGM.
But it helped me get an independent film made called The Godfather of Green Bay.
And, you know, yeah, it did wrote some TV while I was out there.
I worked on a show called Sports Soup.
Which was really fun.
I got to sit in a room with a bunch of other sports fans who were really funny.
And we just wrote sports jokes.
And it was like the soup only for sports.
And we had to perform the sketches.
It was really fun.
So I had a great time in LA.
And we've been back here for about 10 years now.
I haven't hosting a show on PBS.
It was constant about movies.
And now doing this radio gig too.
Which I'm having a blast with.
Now, when you hear people do scripts for Hollywood, I've seen the movies made about it.
I don't know how true they are.
People don't they say, I'm going to keep going.
I'm not going to stop until I get a movie made.
But in real life, you got us at one time get depressed over this.
And he wrote four scripts.
Nobody likes him.
I'm going to go work at our piece.
I mean, does it ever get to that point where you rather slice roast beef and say that you want potato cakes or curly fries?
I mean, well, did you ever get to that point?
Yeah.
I haven't got to that point.
But the employee discounted RV is favorable to employees.
I don't judge anybody.
No, I still do it too.
I mean, you know, you have your ups and you have your downs and show business.
And I had the pluses outweighed the negatives for me.
But yeah, it can be a hard road.
Yes, some lean years.
And it is frustrating when you sell something.
And there are scripts that we sold that are just sitting on a shelf.
And they paid for them.
But they'll probably never get made at this point.
So, you know, you just try to keep the, keep trucking to quote Will Ferrell from old school, I guess.
You know, and in the old days of Hollywood, before they had independent producers,
like United artists, really never made a movie.
They just gave people the money to make movies.
But back in the old days, MGM, Columbia, Fox 20th Century Fox,
they must have hundreds and hundreds of scripts sitting on the shelf to go through
that were just never made.
Occasionally they go looking through scripts and so forth for an actor they had on a contract, under contract.
Yeah.
But all those scripts, all that work that went into it rewrites and making sure it's perfect
and they just sat there collecting dust.
That's kind of the human icing to people.
All that work you put into it and nothing to show for it.
Yeah, you know what?
It's really, I mean writing scripts is hard.
It's like a math equation it can take.
You know, the first draft, you can turn that out kind of quick if you're inspired.
But then you have to kind of keep going back to it.
So, when you put all that work into it and then you sell it, you know, it could be a nice payday.
But then it's like, wow, that's never coming to life.
It's just going to sit there.
And, you know, you could try to get it back from the studios, but that costs money too.
And I mean the solution is, you know, with my partner Greg who made me the parents,
he did meet the parents as a small film in Chicago like in the late 80s.
I didn't even know him at the time and he cast it.
He did it all.
It was financed by the comedian, Emil Phillips, who was the big 80s and 90s comedian.
And it's still out there today.
But so, I kind of saw what he did and I thought, wow, he directed that.
He's the lead actor in it.
And so, I decided to do that too with the Godfather of Green Bay.
And I was able to put money together and I wrote this script.
It was, you know, semi-autobiographical about me working small comedy clubs throughout the Midwest.
You know, when you do comedy, you have your big dates and your cool clubs you work.
And then you have your paycheck clubs.
You go and you work a string of one-nighters through the Midwest or whatever.
And that's kind of what the Godfather of Green Bay, that's where it's sort of set.
So, you know, I got some people to give me some money and put Tony Goldman in it and Lauren Holley and Thomas Lennon and Lance Barber.
And we made a movie.
So, I mean, you know, it has kind of a cult following it that, okay, but at least I have something I can show people.
You know, whereas if you write a screenplay for the big studios, you don't know if it'll ever get made.
So, you don't make big money doing indie films, but at least you have a film to show people, you know.
I think one of the greatest success stories in the way you just told the story was, so that's just alone with Rocky.
There's a guy that had bit parts and movies.
I mean, the tiny little bit parts wrote this script.
And I guess somebody United Artists said, we got a movie here.
Not only did he write it, he got the star in it and the rest of his story.
It's pretty incredible.
I mean, you say what you want about Sylvester Stallone.
He has made fun of a lot.
You know, and he makes some bad movies.
But the guy...
He makes money about a rate of movies.
Yeah.
Yeah, he sure did.
And he's great at picking a villain.
I mean, all those Rocky films, I think I see them all.
But like, they really get you, you know, they kind of make the hair in the back of your next stand-up at certain moments.
And a lot of them aren't great films, but Rocky is a masterpiece.
I mean, what he had to do to get that made is such a great story.
In and of itself, it parallels the story in the movie.
Because you're against the studio.
You got this script, you're trying to get it made.
You know, he's pounding the pavement, so to speak, to get a film made.
And he did it.
So, good for him.
And I don't have any excuses for Tulsa King.
But Rocky was great.
You know, and you can name the villains.
He had a Apollo Creed, who became a good guy later on.
You've got Clubber Lang.
You've got Doth Lungren.
And he played the Russian guy in the 40s.
Yeah.
But you can remember the villain.
And they're still going.
The Rocky franchise is still going, by the way, with different people now.
But yes, it just goes on and on and on.
How about you ask him?
You mentioned on the road.
And I always thought about comedians who go on the road.
Who finances the hotels and the meals?
And who finances all that stuff when you're on the road doing these clubs?
Does it pay that much to do a club where you can go on the road for a month at a time?
Yeah, it can.
I mean, typically, you know, comedians are not living large.
You know what I mean?
When I was, I started getting work when I was 22.
I was probably making four or five hundred bucks a week,
which right now I was 22, doing what he wants to do.
You can get by on that, you know.
And where I started in Chicago at that time,
there were guys who worked just the city of Chicago
and never had to leave town.
Like, there was enough work there for a year.
So you didn't have to leave town.
I liked getting out on the road and, you know, working with Thompson and Michigan and Minnesota
and then being in town too.
You have more opportunities in the big city to get on TV.
And that's really what it's about.
But, you know, you do these one-nighters at roadside bars and smaller towns,
like Appten or, you know, Mankato, Minnesota,
where you'd be there for the weekend and meet some really cool people.
I had a guy on my show yesterday, Frank Herman,
who's a big star now in Green Bay.
In the 90s, he and his brother owned a comedy club in downtown Green Bay.
And they were two of the coolest guys to work for.
They were just starting out.
You know, they didn't really know the business.
And, you know, that was always a fun weekend to go up to Green Bay and hang out and meet cool people.
So, it's a little bit of like a Jack Kerawak life, you know, on the road,
but if you're getting paid, if not great money, you're having a good time
and meeting a lot of fun people.
Hold on a second, Pete.
Nightlight with Pete Schwabba right here at WRJN Radio and the Civic Media Network 8 to 10 o'clock.
Weeknights.
It's 7-18.
We've got more with Pete coming up at just a moment.
I'm Don Rose, and I want to thank for joining us here.
Home town radio refreshed at 1,400 a.m.
99.9 FM, 98.1 FM.
WRJN.
And more coming up, Don Rose.
There's a song that got a brand new life.
Remember what movie gave that song new life?
Pete.
To Home Alone.
Yeah, Home Alone.
That's a great little bit.
I mean, that song is forgotten.
All of a sudden, they stuck it in one of the biggest Christmas movies ever and there they go.
You know, there's so many funny parts in Home Alone.
I find myself just like kind of laboring through the first hour until the action starts.
Because the whole film is built around, you know, the relationship between McCulloch and
Pesci and Daniel Stern.
But until you get there, it's like kind of brutal.
Maybe because I've seen it so many times, but family stuff and then we even could be
airport and yeah, it's such a fun movie.
You know what's, you could tell an amazing actor and the amazing actor and hate using that word
amazing all the time.
Joe Pesci, here's a guy that's so frightening in the movie Casino and Goodfellas.
He is scary and you look at his eyes and you start shaking at home watching the movie.
But yet you see him in movies like Mike Cousin Vinny and Home Alone.
How could that be the same guy who's begging me to laugh at it?
And I'm scared to death of him in Casino.
Oh, yeah.
How does he do it?
Yeah, he played Anthony Spalato in Casino.
He was great.
Well, that was his character.
The character was based on that.
Yeah.
And then you see chasing this little kid around.
That's like.
Yeah.
Like my cousin Vinny in the courtroom.
Yeah.
And you know, I had Don, I had Richard Rillian the other night, a couple of weeks ago, and he's
an actor with over 400 credits.
He's originally from Wisconsin.
If he saw a space, he'd known he was an office space.
He was the guy that created the jump conclusions, may have.
And he's a very, just a great actor.
And he told me the story on the air about how he got the role in Casino.
And because someone else fell out and patchy made a phone call and got Richard on the set
because they had just worked together.
So it was a fun story.
I was like running out of time and Richard was telling the story and I'm like, oh my gosh.
I hope he finishes before the, because I was still kind of new doing my show.
It was like the first week.
I'm like, it's a great story, you know, just kind of a coincidence.
My favorite scene in Goodfellas.
Now, you mentioned the Ray Leotus scene on your show where he's introducing people on
screen.
You hear his voice and you see the, you know, Joey double talk, whatever's name it.
Twenty two times.
Twenty two times, you know.
But my favorite scene is toward the end when the drugs have gotten to him and he's going
to celebrate the holidays with his family over.
His brother in the wheelchair is told to stir the spaghetti sauce.
And all he does is look at the sky looking for helicopters because he's doing a drug
deal.
And he's looking for that.
And you see the whole time and he narrates he says, well, I'm looking for helicopters
when my brother's stirring the spaghetti sauce.
I just, and he keeps going back to the sauce.
Like that's the most important thing, even though he thinks, you know, he's about to go to jail.
I actually had that clip ready for the show when he's arguing with the babysitter.
Oh, but the half.
So funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got to use the landline to call any things like I can't believe she did that.
I just reminded her.
Yeah.
Everybody's doing something stupid.
And that's how they all wind up in prison because they're all stupid.
Great movie.
And I, you know, you can watch Goodfellas, but you can't watch it enough.
There's just too many times.
You're insane.
Casino, Goodfellas, the Godfather one and two.
What's it a big fan of three, but Godfather one and two?
Yeah.
The town called Massapiqua.
That's where I'm from.
I was born in New York City, but I lived in Massapiqua and living on the other side of Massapiqua,
where he passed away watching New York Yankees game, Carlo Gambino, the Godfather.
They lived.
Wow.
10 minutes from my house.
That's five or 10 minutes away.
I didn't know what at the time.
I mean, I knew he lived in town in the exactly which house he was in.
And plus I don't want to know what house he was in.
But I do remember going to school one day and the police had this house surrounded.
And by the time I got out of school walking home, the house was almost down to its frame.
But they took the siding off.
They took everything off the house.
And again, I was a teenager going to high school.
I just knew because he saw police cars everywhere around this house.
I don't know if it had anything to do with Gambino, but it wasn't his house.
Wow.
But yeah, it was that kind of stuff watching around and watching that stuff go around in my hometown.
Yeah.
Don't a lot of those games just live out on Long Island there.
I try not to find out.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of those things I don't want to know because somebody will ask me a question
something.
I don't know.
And I don't want to take a lie detector and fail.
So I don't want enough.
Is that funny?
Like, I was on the road working where I saw good fellows in like 92.
I think I was outside of Philadelphia working to comedy club.
And I come out of the theater thinking someone's going to whack me.
Because that's how good the movie was.
And I'm like, no, Eddie, you're at comic in your 23.
They don't whack people.
You think by some weird coincidence, you're going to end up in the mob and get killed, you know?
My father in New York City, they have little subrette hot dog stands on the corners.
And back in the 60s, my dad had a two way radio in his car.
This is before cell phones and everything.
And the frequency was shared by a couple of organizations.
And he used to hear this guy on there with a heavy voice, talking like this.
And he was crime related, mob related.
And they own some of the corners in New York where these hot dog stands can be.
And my father was listening one day.
And one guy said, he won't move us.
He won't move us hot dog stand.
He said he's going to stay there.
Well, you're going to pick him up.
You're going to take this thing.
You're going to put it in the truck.
And if he doesn't let go, you take him with us.
You take him with it.
And you bring him and we'll make a point that he's not going to be on that corner anymore.
My father's always, oh my goodness.
That's radio.
And you don't want to hear that.
You're involved.
You're a witness.
You're a witness.
Exactly.
But he shared the frequency with a couple of different groups.
And they, they, it was a business frequency where they, and he shared it with this guy.
And he picked you this big, heavy 500 pound guy behind.
Well, you take him with you.
If he doesn't let go, you put him on the truck with the stand.
And we'll deal with him later.
And I, my father, whoa.
Some other things I have to deal with you.
I, we're going to talk about Christmas cards because you brought that up.
Yeah.
Tell my Batman.
Batman we're going to talk about because I heard your old Batman segment there.
Oh, yeah.
The only Batman movie I really liked was The Dark Knight.
I mean, I've seen most of them, but The Dark Knight was something.
You know why?
Because they had a great villain in The Dark Knight.
Yeah, that was great.
I like all three.
I like the first two.
A lot of people think the Joker, the Dark Knight, oh, The Dark Knight rises.
But Batman begins.
Both of those great movies, I tend to lean towards Batman begins just because I was so blown away
the first time they did Batman.
Real and well.
But yeah, The Dark Knight is great.
And I used to watch The Batman TV series when I was a kid in 1966.
I used to watch it.
And it was on two nights.
They used to break it up on, on two nights.
They used to say, by time, say, by channel, Adam West was Batman.
And he played it for laughs.
It wasn't really a serious show.
And everybody, all the villains were, you know, old movie stars that, you know, weren't
movie stars anymore.
But Adam West, the two thing, he made a soft porn film at one time.
That's how he heard, yeah.
And he was also, he played himself in a very good episode on The King of Queens where he played
Adam West.
Do you remember that episode?
No, I don't.
He was.
That's hilarious.
Patton Oswald was going to a, one of those conventions and he wanted his next door neighbor,
Lou Ferigno, who used to his real name on the show.
Lou Ferigno was going to be going with him.
And then he met Adam West.
And he was getting, he worked at a told a, worked at the subway booth.
We get tokens and Adam West came up.
And Adam West said, yeah, I'll go to the show with you.
And now he had to convince Lou Ferigno that he was taking someone else.
He didn't want to hurt him and everything.
So he gets in the car with Adam West going to the show and Adam West tells him, my good friend,
Lou Ferigno told me that you dumped him all of a sudden.
Well, I don't like when people do things like that.
So get out of my car right now.
Anyway, stay there.
We're talking, we're talking to Pete Schwabba.
Nightlight with Pete Schwabba at WRJN Radio.
8th, 10 o'clock also on the Civic Media Network.
More coming up at 729 at WRJN Radio.
Stay right where you are.
Boy, Brenda Lee is making the circuit now on all the TV shows singing the song because
it hit the Billboard charts at number one this month.
65 years after she recorded at age 13 rocking around the Christmas tree.
How about that?
But do you know the first Christmas song that was ever number one of the Billboard charts?
I do not.
The Chipmunk song with David Sebel and the Chipmunks.
First Christmas song ever to make number one.
But do you also know that David Sebel was an actor in movies before he did his Chipmunk thing?
And he was in one big, giant smash hit movie.
They had decent rolling.
It was Alfred Hitchcock's rear window.
Do you remember the movie?
Two and a half times, David.
Okay, James Stewart.
James Stewart's peering out the window at the apartments.
And there's one all the way on the left where guys playing a piano.
That's Ross Bag Deserian.
That's his real name.
And that's David Sebel.
That's the scene where Alfred Hitchcock appears fixing the clock on the wall.
But that's Ross Bag Deserian in that film.
And I guess acting didn't pan out and he came up with the Chipmunks and the rest is history,
I guess, right?
He set himself up for life at least.
Yeah, your window is like one of my all-time favorites.
That's just a movie.
It's hypnotic to me.
It's so good.
And it doesn't matter if you know the ending.
It doesn't matter.
It's getting to the ending.
It's like Colombo.
I've seen all the Colombo's a million times, but just watching Colombo figure it out.
I can't believe they actually came up with the TV series and they said to themselves,
we're going to tell you who the murderer is, why they did it, how they did it, everything
about their motive and everything.
We're going to tell you that in the first 15 minutes and for the next hour and a half,
you're going to see Colombo figure it out.
But that's going to watch this guy.
Yeah.
It's just cat and mouse game.
It's all it is.
Colombo.
But whoever thought if there's only one Colombo where they didn't show us the murder at
the beginning, and there's only one Colombo episode where he didn't catch the killer.
Really?
The one he didn't catch the killer.
He knew what was, but he couldn't catch her.
It was, oh, I hate to ruin it for people.
I'm going to ruin it anyway.
Janet Lee, she murdered her husband because he wouldn't give her money to put a Broadway
musical together, but she was sick at the time and she was losing her mind and she was
going to be dead soon.
So her best friend, the guy, took the rap and he said, by the time you figure out that
I didn't do it, she'll be gone.
And Colombo, he winked and he walked out and that was the only episode he never caught
the killer.
And there was one episode.
That was on sometimes when I was a kid, but I never really watched it to go to, you know,
to hit me TV for some reruns or something.
I was telling you off the air.
You were talking about Jerry Seinfeld was in Wawatose eating in an Indian restaurant the
other day.
Yeah.
We had the restaurant, it's a place called India Garden and we had the restaurant.
His name was the owner on it.
His name was Sharon Jeet Bola.
He came on the show last night to talk a little bit about Jerry.
He said that he was a great sport and yeah, it was pretty cool.
And why was he in town?
Where was he performing?
I don't know where, somewhere in Milwaukee, but I had Stewart Wattles who works down there
in Southeast Wisconsin doing news sent me a little clip of Jerry or a photo of Jerry eating
at this restaurant.
Oh, that's so great.
And someone took it like covertly, it looked like anyway and he had a bodyguard with him.
And Sharon Jeet said, I said, you know, if you think if you had to, you could have taken
the bodyguard down.
He grabbed it up like it never occurred to them, but no, I couldn't.
But yeah, Jerry Seinfeld was, but when I started doing stand-up, he was like one of my, you
know, I just, I liked that he worked clean.
I was pretty clean at least when I started and then I kind of loosened up a little bit.
He was so, he always had new material.
He always had such a well-thought-out act as well.
The words were so concise and he was just such a great comic.
And there might be other comics that made me like, Latla, you were playing a Brian Regan
clip earlier.
It's time to watch and Brian Regan, I can't even catch my breath.
And I got to work with him for two weeks back in the mid-90s.
Oh, he did.
Nice or guy?
He will not be.
Yeah.
But Seinfeld was great.
I saw him at the Vick Theater in Chicago in 1987 and got to talk to him for a couple
of minutes after I was just trying to be a comic or wanted to be and he was really nice
about it.
Now I saw him in LA a few years later and I reminded him of that and he kind of pretended
he remembered talking to me, which I thought was kind of nice, you know, but I'm sure he
didn't, but he was even nice then.
So nothing bad to say about Jerry Seinfeld and the show is one mile at that paper.
Yeah, we saw him at the Genesee Theatre a couple of years ago and again, I couldn't
catch my breath.
Even the comic who came on before him, the warm up comic was hilarious.
I mean, I couldn't catch my breath.
Just Regan or Seinfeld?
Jerry Seinfeld.
Okay.
Yeah.
He screwed up.
Yeah.
We saw him at the Genesee Theatre and I told you off the air that Jerry and I grew up
as kids together.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
And now it's the peak.
We lose about five houses from me and I have a picture only because my mother found
it.
And I took a picture and I have it on my phone.
And it's, we're five years old in the picture.
I mean, it's, we're little kids together.
It's not, you know, it's not like we're, we're good old buddies growing up, but we're
five years old.
And I used to hang around his house because his dad made signs because a sign painter,
but he had big signs too.
We used to have the letters in the garage.
He's big letters.
We used to make dirty words or whatever we did with the letters in the grow nose or whatever.
That's great.
But his house was an identical copy of mine.
There were two houses in our neighborhood, two different kinds you can get in his house
and my house were identical.
So when I went in there, I knew exactly where everything was, all the rooms, their identical
homes.
And we grew up together.
We were at each other's birthday parties.
I have an eight millimeter movie at home.
I got to put on some kind of DVD or something to show it, but we're, he's in the backyard
playing with our toys.
And I went to religious school with him for four years and then went 13.
We went our separate ways and he went, he moved to a different part of Massopaqua and went
to Massopaqua high school or I went to burner high school.
But that was it.
And I enjoy watching his show.
I mean, he's hilarious and everything.
But I remember when he was five years old and you know, in the picture I have, he's wearing
sneakers and my stepson, who say, I'll just say my son, who's a big fan, he says, you
know, he always wears sneakers wherever he goes and I said, it's funny, he's wearing sneakers
in this picture.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
And he's always eating cereal and you know what I'm hearing, Don, what you're telling
me?
You're the original George.
No, I'm not the original George.
You were George Kastanza before George Kastanza.
A friend of mine said, your Albert Brooks and lost in America.
He said, you are Albert Brooks and then it's another funny guy in his movies.
I have, I love Albert Brooks in all his films.
Jim Gaffigan's another guy who plays clean all the time and he's hilarious.
Oh, he's great.
I actually, I did a pie, I moved to LA in 97 and within like a month, I had Jack
Kaston pilot and the other guy was Jim Gaffigan, we were the two leads and a VH1 pilot.
I played kind of this airheaded DJ and he played the producer and it was not a great show,
but I went to New York for 10 days and Gaffigan showed me around a little bit, he was a really
nice guy.
He was pretty seasoned by that.
He had booked a lot of stuff already.
I was so thin that I didn't want to get the wardrobe girl mad and the catering guy mad.
He was like, they could all fire me if I messed something up.
So Kastigan was like, oh, they're just people, just relax, he was a really good guy and
nothing ever happened with the show, but I had a really good timing and I was happy.
Now I think he had us, didn't he have a sitcom, Jim Gaffigan, for a short time?
You know, I'm sure he has.
Yeah, he did, he had a sitcom, yeah.
Those guys, it's interesting because when Seinfeld got his sitcom, the story I was told
anyway was that he could hold out as long as he wanted to because he was selling out theaters.
And I saw him with a big theater, there had to be 1,500 people there.
Back then it was like 20 bucks a pop, but a lot of money.
So he could, if the network came to him with some crappy show that had been done 1,800
times already, Seinfeld could just say no thanks because he was already a millionaire.
So that's what allowed him to kind of wait and apparently, again, here's a, he said,
this is the guy I wanted to write it and it was Larry David and I only know that because
I worked with people that knew him well and that's what they related to me, but he held
out for Larry David to write the show and the rest of his history because what they did,
I mean, I still like Seinfeld better than, like I like Kirby or Enthusiasm, frankly,
I think it needs a script because sometimes you can tell they're improvving and it seems
to go on a little long, my opinion, you know, whatever, but Seinfeld is just so tight.
And those four people were all perfectly cast, like I can't tell which one I like better
than the other.
Like at times it's George, times it's Lane, that Kramer, it's just phenomenal.
It's a masterpiece.
And as the judge said on the final episode, how you four people ever came together, I
will never know.
That's great.
I read a story earlier that the, I have the date, I just put it away, do I put it away?
No, but it's somewhere.
The night Frank Sinatra had his fatal heart attack was the night of the finale on Seinfeld
and because every woman's home watching it, the ambulance was able to get through L.A.
traffic really easy because there was nobody on the road and they got Frank Sinatra to
the hospital.
He didn't make it, but the ambulance in record time got there because nobody was on
the road or watching the finale on Seinfeld, which I thought was a brilliant finale.
It got raked over the coals, but I thought it was brilliant.
How it's the end last scene was how it first started years, nine years before.
Oh, right.
Yeah, right.
They sat in jail.
So there was the same dialogue.
That show was just so, I've only seen the ending like once or twice.
I just, to me, the first five seasons of any sitcom are usually the best.
I'm not saying any of these people don't already know.
And then they just kind of hang on and they keep them on your own and there could be good
episodes.
I think the low fat yogurt episode in Seinfeld was the later season one or, you know, so
there's some gems, but I could watch the first five seasons of Seinfeld and I have repeatedly.
But yeah, that last episode, and it's hard to believe the show has been off the air for
27 years.
I know, but it's still in the last episode.
Yeah, it's interesting.
But that's interesting.
You say that, too, because I remember, I was still kind of new to LA and I saw a Sky Red
or put in the sky something about Frank's Nitro.
We miss, we already miss you, Frank or something like that.
And I was driving around and I'm like, oh, my God, I live in the same town as Frank's
Nitro.
It was just for a few months, but it was like the coolest thing ever, even though we were,
you know, a couple miles apart over the hill and using Beverly Hills.
But yeah.
And he didn't know how to pronounce Pete Schwabba.
He did.
He has never heard of me, but probably wasn't going to happen, but a guy could dream,
you know, you know, these are my favorite sitcoms because I have all on DVD.
The Dick Van Dyke show.
I can watch it over and over and never get tired of the Dick Van Dyke show mass, but only
the mash that had Frank Burns on it.
After that, it, it fell apart a little bit.
The Frank Burns.
And McLean Steve.
And McLean Steve, he was, he was good too.
But you're right.
It, it kind of like Alan, all the kind of took the show over and it just became this
over the sentimental, you know, kind of comments on the war and I was like, oh my gosh,
this is even a sitcom and I was so preachy, you know, King of Queens, also one of my favorites.
I can watch over and over again, King of Queens.
I love the odd couple TV series.
I can watch that over and over and over and over again, trying to think of some of the
others I have there.
Those are the main ones that I can watch over and over and I do have a great, I have
a little DVD player on my nightstand at night and I always fall asleep to a sitcom on my
DVDs and it's one of those.
I watched the series and then I go to the next series, but King of Queens is so great
for a modern show and that's been off the air for how many years.
Yeah.
A lot.
A good friend of mine was one of the executive producers and that, and they've had other
shows together.
Kevin, too, he had the show, Kevin can wait by the way, which I actually did punch up
on and he got a couple jokes in the show.
That was fun.
Kevin James is a really good guy, too.
He eats a real hard worker, you know, I'm not at all surprised by his success, but you
know what's interesting, Don, you just said something.
I know more people that watch sitcoms before they go to bed now.
And one of the greatest things about modern technology is I can lay here on my phone and
watch SoundCloud before I fall asleep or friends or cheers or whatever it is.
It just, it allows us to do that and what a great way to fall asleep, right?
Yeah.
You know, and you mentioned the Kevin can wait sitcoms, do you remember what town that
took place in?
That, that's Piqua.
Massa Piqua.
I knew.
I thought that sounded familiar.
I have a friend that was there actually, but I knew that sounded familiar from some
show.
On the Raymond show, everyone loves Raymond.
His brother ones was talking about a girl who was, and he had to escape out the window.
And it was in Massa Piqua.
And for a tiny town, that's got a lot going on, including the Gilgoy Beach serial killer.
Live 10 blocks from you, Massa Piqua, Amy, uh, member, um, Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Joey, about a food car, right?
Massa Piqua.
Wow.
Wow.
That's like intimate zone, what a fun, that's a fun name to say.
It's a tiny little town, but it's got so much going on.
Hold on, Pete Schwab is my guest from night light with Pete Schwab, uh, eight to ten o'clock
on WRGN and the civic media network is seven forty eight.
I'm Don Rosen.
Thanks for joining us at WRGN, 1400 AM, 99.9 FM in Racine 98.1 FM, you know, we should all
move.
I just love the David Letterman hat, darling love on at the end of that during his show,
the last show before he took his Christmas break every year.
He sang this song for years, he had around such a great song, it's one of my favorites.
It's not one in the Mariah Carey one great, and it's nice when it doesn't skip on the
CD.
Nice.
Hey, you talked about Christmas cards the other day.
And this comes every year in my house in 1980, when I had an apartment in Milwaukee, you
were able to decorate the door and the wall with over a hundred Christmas cards I used
to get in the mail.
I mean, there were so many of them.
I checked this morning, we have five on the wall this year, but you know what, you got
a send them to get them, I think now everybody is true, it's puts on face of Merry Christmas
everybody and that covers everything, but we spent the other day filling out Christmas
cards.
Now, we only put about 15 or 20 out there, well, what we do is whoever sent us a Christmas
card, the previous year gets one.
And so that's okay.
That's what we did and I sent some out to some people who didn't, but you know, we
get gift cards for the garbage collector, for the letter carrier, we get gift cards for
those people.
And it just dawned at me this Friday, when they pick up my garbage, I'm not going to
be home.
So how do I get that?
Oh, I don't want to tape it to the garbage panel because that's not the way to do it.
But I have to get a thousand dollars, yeah, yeah, I have the oil change in my car Friday
morning.
I've got to get in there and it was when I get off the air, I might be back in time
to do it.
Oh, boy, we had a letter carrier because then you think they think you forgot or you
don't care anymore.
That's the least what's going on your head.
And they'll dump the garbage all over the street in front of my house.
The we had when I was growing up in Massapigua, one of our neighbors was Mr. Mello, that was
his name.
He was the postmaster for the post office and he delivered mail the week before Christmas
by himself because he wanted to get all the gifts.
And I was thought that was not right, but that's what he never delivered mail all year
long, except that week and everybody gave the gifts.
He could only give, I think a max of $20 now, but back then, who knows, we've already
rules on it.
Mr.
Mello, what a nerve.
So Christmas.
That's cool.
So Christmas cards.
Yeah.
You don't send any out.
I just know.
It's all electronic now.
I have to admit, I just couldn't keep up.
I see these Christmas cards and some of them are beautiful and some of them look like they
cost like 20 bucks a pop or something, just to make one card that photos beautiful is
obviously professionally shot.
Then they got like hard cardboard and the card with this cool grainy texture and I'm like,
I just, you know, not that I ever had to send something like that, but we did Christmas
cards for the first few years of our kid's lives and then it's like, you know, we're
both working.
It's like, we can't do this.
We can't keep up.
It's like, it's time consuming.
You got to track everybody down.
We work good about keeping addresses and it's just like, you know, the people we really
like or in love are in our lives and then you got Facebook.
That's to me, the beauty of Facebook and Instagram and social media as you can see, see
stuff then.
But I will admit, I still like getting them and I do take the time to look them over
for people who do want to send them, but I would imagine at some point people are going
to realize, hey, Schwab, I had to send that to Carden 20 years ago, take them off the list.
I deserve that.
That's fine.
Yeah.
The heck with him.
Yeah.
We used to go to the stores and buy the big box set of hallmark cards.
They come in a box set.
They were velvet on the front and they were all the same in the box.
And I still have some of those, but now I donate to so many animal charities and disabled
vet charities.
About 15 or 16 of them and they send you free Christmas cards every year to hand out.
So I use those now, but I still have some of the old ones.
My wife went ahead and sorted out every type of greeting card we have, sympathy cards.
You're hope you get better from your gallbladder surgery cards, you know, all these and she
put them in different bags.
So and she labeled them with a marker.
So when somebody's, you know, has a card coming to them, we pull out the bag and we have
the cards and we fill them out.
And you know what?
I forced myself to do it the other day, but when I got done doing it, I was so happy that
I did it.
I use color pens.
I use like green and red pens for Christmas.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
And I enjoyed doing it when I, when I worked at my first radio station, they used to hand
out a Christmas time, a list of everybody's names and addresses and phone numbers.
And it was that Christmas time and I used to fill out 20 or 25 cards and I used to write
a long message in each one, telling each person, not what I thought about them for the
year because they wouldn't be my friends anymore, but what they meant to me during the season
and so forth.
And everybody commented how much they liked that and that lasted for a couple of years.
And then when I moved to Atlanta, I used to stand out.
I put a letter in the Christmas card of what they meant to me and then I just started
signing my name on them years later, but I still write a little something in there.
See that, that's different because what I get and what people do now, I'm sure people
that are closer to, they, they might do that, but that, that's what I think.
I think helps them on how you feel, share a memory, whatever, but like just the cookie
cutter, hey, happy Christmas or Merry Christmas, whatever, it's still nice to get, but I,
I don't personally, it's not worth the effort to me.
It might make me sound selfish, but, uh,
Well, here's the next Christmas card you're going to get.
There's like, someone's going to say, dear Pete, we check the obituaries to still, see
if you were still alive because we haven't heard from you in 25 years.
So we're just going to assume you're dead.
And this will be the last Christmas card we, because we haven't heard from you.
You know, I did that with a friend, um, we were, we used to talk during survivor text
during survivor of the TV show every week.
He worked here at the radio station and I was gone at that point, but he still worked
here.
And I didn't hear from him for a while and I left him at your dentist phone.
Are you dead or alive?
Are you going to call me?
He was dying in the hospital.
He lived one more day and his wife said, his wife said to me, I got, we heard the message.
I know you didn't know because it was all of a sudden and I just wanted to know, don't
feel bad about it.
But, oh, that's the last thing he heard from you.
Did I push him over the ledge?
I don't know.
Oh, you might have done a good job on you, but man, I enjoyed spending this, I love
showbiz and I love talking to you and I'm going to do your show coming up Friday and
Friday night.
It'll be fine.
I appreciate you asking me.
I love talking about it too.
And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it was fun.
Thank you.
And congrats on the new show, Donnie.
You, you sound, you have a voice like you pretty much had to go into radio, I think.
So, well, you know, because I can't do anything else.
If I, if I could do something else in life, I would have done it, but radio was the easy
way out.
Plus, I don't deal with it.
It's not too late.
And by the way, I don't deal well with the public.
So this is great.
You're alone in a room.
You don't have to deal face to face.
Be, hold on the line.
Don't go anywhere.
I'll talk to you a second.
Don't move.
Have a nice day.
It's 758 at W R J N Radio, hometown radio, refreshed.