On stage are two old desk chairs tied together, chairs on which Ted Kopout and Professor Phineas T. Out There will sit while Kopout interviews the professor on his network show, The Media Are Not Your Friends. The professor has been called in to help retrieve Chester Chicken Licken from Mars, where he has been taken by a couple of martians who fell from the sky.
Not all the gags in Fast Food are visual jokes. The chicken advertised on the television commercial in the show is from Sam and Ella’s Poultry Shop. Professor Out There has degrees in “phrenology, scatology, physiognomy, and what you got for me?” The kids may not know the meanings of all the words, but they laugh because the words sound funny. The adults laugh louder.
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The Pros Arts Studio, home of the ensemble, is on Morgan Street just south of 18th Street, Pilsen’s main east-west thoroughfare, home to Mexicans and artists and a few holdouts from the days when the area was home to other ethnic groups. Pros Arts is a shoestring operation now. But it’s been around, going through various transformations, since 1978–giving visual-arts, theater, and dance workshops and clown shows, working with schools and senior citizen centers, organizing parades. Its barnlike studio has portable seating for 70 people, and the perimeter is crowded with musical instruments, paintings, masks, and other props. A lot of the stuff is junk picked up in alleys and on Sunday-morning trips to Maxwell Street, which is right up the road. Against one wall stands a chair designed to make it easy to hang upside down, at one time a much-heralded health gimmick. In the actual prop room and workshop behind the studio, there’s more junk, alongside costumes and props and all kinds of machinery, some of it useful and some of it kept for sentimental value.
Bottari and Parisi paid $6,750 for the building, a steal even in Pilsen in 1976. They had been looking for a cheap place to live, and Bottari suggested that they move back to his old neighborhood (his family home is only a couple blocks away). Besides, he was working at the 18th Street Development Corporation and Parisi was teaching art at the Latino Youth alternative high school, a private school in Pilsen. It was convenient.
When the school needed the space back a couple of years later, Pros Arts was well enough established that it could afford to rent space in the community. While the art workshops were being given in a rented space on 19th Street, the group was beginning to give dance and clown classes in the Morgan Street studio. For a few years in the early 80s the organization was receiving annual grants of between $8,000 and $10,000 from the Illinois Arts Council, plus generous grants from the city Department of Cultural Affairs and other groups.
Also present from the beginning was Frank Melcori, 48, a small, rather shapeless balding man who has the air of a distracted intellectual but is in fact a painter, writer, actor, and dedicated clown, the straight man of the group. Nixon Live! The Future Is Now, his two-man show with accompanist Jimi Jihad, played most of last November at the Organic Theater mainstage–after having been performed at last year’s Bucktown Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, at Club Lower Links, and on cable TV.
