Many, many years ago, I was in Las Vegas with my then-wife Myra, and we went to see a double bill of Joan Rivers and Robert Goulet. Rivers came on first. Most comics in Vegas did a normal set of about twenty minutes. Not Rivers. She was on for well over an hour. She was hysterical every minute, but part of me wondered why she was doing such an abnormally long time on stage.
We figured it out when Goulet came on.
He was drunk. Rivers had been out on stage for so long because backstage they must have been trying to sober Goulet up. Didn’t work. He staggered his way through three songs, forgot the lyrics to “If Ever I Would Leave You,” and picked a fight with a guy in the audience before finally staggering off stage. So he was a disaster. But Rivers was amazing.
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