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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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ten curtain calls. I'm looking at him, and I say, “I can't believe it's that good.”

He says, “Moe, we're going to have to take this to Broadway.” That was the last time.

Anyway, it got reviewed in The New York Times, it got like a three- paragraph thing, a factual thing. Seymour Peck at that time was with either The Compass or PM, whichever was around at that time. He reviewed the show. Of course, he had been a department store worker, so I got to him. The show created a tremendous amount of excitement among the members. It really was good. I still have the songs, the lyrics -- “The Ballad of the Bra,” “It's Closing Time,” “How Long the Day.” Very clever music, music and lyrics, clever. “Taft- Hartley Rumba.”

Anyway, there were costumes, sets, the whole works. For the leads, we didn't have good enough people, so we planted people. We went around trying to get people with talent, and they had to get jobs in the store, and we'd pull them out. I remember the lead, we got him a job at Hearn's. See, that was a period when a lot of people -- now they work in restaurants and they worked in department stores, people, frustrated actors, actresses, who had given up on the idea. We put them all together in this thing. Then the sets, we had to get rid of everything. How do you do it? We'd just junk it. We had no place to put all this stuff.

Two months after we'd gotten rid of everything, I got a call from Dumont Television, the big television, “We would like to televise the show.”

I said, “You've got a shovel?” That was the end of it. But “Thursdays ‘Til Nine,” was very important.

Q:

Let me ask certain things. When you put together an advisory committee, how did you have access to --

Foner:

Millard. Millard. But I'm getting to know these people, too, you see, and I'm getting credibility with people that way. You see, through the student movement, I've known certain people. Zero Mostel, when we were playing in the band, Zero, virtually every place we'd play, every time we'd play at an affair, Zero was the entertainer, Harry Mostel. One day we're playing at Webster Hall --I forget, at 8:00 o'clock, we're setting up, Zero comes running in, “Oh, fellows, fellows, fellows, I'm going into Cafe Society.” He'd gotten his break. So you





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