Eleven o’clock. Dark. Quiet. Mr. Coffee set for morning. Neighborhood lawn sprinklers turned off. Dogs inside. Air dry and barkless, only crickets. Down to bare feet, worn-out jeans. Not awake enough to read, not wound down far enough to sleep. Switch on TV, turn the dial: Taxi, Joker, Faithline. Turn to 51, or 9 on Cox Cable. Find Rod Serling's ashen, potholed face, his arch-paranormal voice speaking from the Twilight Zone, his shiny black Jesuit suit, just like what Jerry Brown wore in Sacramento. Go to the good old black-and-white Zone.

Uncle Ed

Photo by Craig Carlson

The screen effloresces into a scraggly scarecrow frame, more than six feet in height, draped in tan slacks, a black sleeveless V-neck cardigan, pale blue shirt, striped tie, two watches strapped on his wrist, tan poplin pork-pie hat tugged down over his forehead. The ectomorphic stick figure squeezes through the set door. His wide mouth draws up to a half-smile. One ear — the cars are so big! — presses against a cassette player in his hand, against which he beats out with his head the rhythm to Madonna’s “I’m living in a material world, and I’m a material girl,” and his smile spreads from one ear to the other. Out of a face past middle-middle age peer brown eyes, twinkling with the glee of a schoolboy about to a pigtail in the ink well. A hand comes up in a salute, palm toward his face.

“I promise, every night at eleven, I will tune in to Night Time Live. A faithful viewer I’ll always be, I’m not handing you no jive . . . Aw-w-w-right! ”

The grin fades; the long face falls. He sobs, and the camera pulls in tight, filling the screen with his face. The voice rises in breathy, hysterical half tones. “Forgive me, no laughing now.” He gazes deeply into the camera and slips into the King James version cadence favored by preachers. “I get carried away. The Creed is a very sacred and a very serious part of my life and the show, and I hope you do not smile while doing the Creed.

“I have some very sad news,” he continues, sniffling. “The station manager, Bill Moore, received some hate mail concerning me and the show, and I will read it to you a little bit later on tonight. I understand from the note I got from Bill that I won’t be here on the station very much longer. But enough of that.” He stretches out his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobs. “Life is too serious to be taken seriously. Let’s be happy. Let’s watch tonight’s Twilight Zone.”

This is KUSI-51 s Uncle Ed, a fifty-two-year-old refugee from Midwestern blizzards with a name born to headline a lounge act — Ed Muscare (pronounced Mus-care-ee). He is the host of the five-month-old Night Time Live, shown from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. weekday nights.

Perhaps unwittingly Muscare models Night Time Live on low-budget, locally produced children’s afternoon shows. They have in common corny jokes, riddles (“How can you avoid falling hair? . . . Jump out of the way!”), trivia quizzes, sing-alongs, funny hats, guests collected at barber shops, grocery stores, even out of the phone book, and peanut gallery-type interviews on the set and over the speaker-telephone. One regular character, Muscarean alter ego Lee Cucarachi (“I don’t know how to spell his name,” says Muscare, “but it sounds like Liberace”), rings up with the day’s riddle on a yellow plastic banana Muscare calls the Banana Phone. Like any good kid show host, Muscare reads viewers’ mail on the air and celebrates their birthdays with a round of thumped-out piano chords that limp along under jagged arpeggios.

Some viewers hate him. A few complain that Muscare, who frequently addresses women callers as “Honey” and has been heard to respond in kind to an obviously black intonation and syntax, is sexist and racist. He gets negative letters and the station receptionist has logged a number of phone calls from peeved viewers — what Muscare fondly calls “hate mail.” But the pro-Muscare response outweighs the anti-.

KUSI’s signal beams all across San Diego County, but station manager Bill Moore says the number of people who watch Muscare is unknown, since the station has no rating figures for that time slot. When the two-and-one-half-year-old independent station (owned by a corporation whose members include United States International University and Mike McKinnon of San Diego’s communications McKinnons) first put Muscare on the air, Moore thought Muscare would appeal to “the camp, the in-crowd.” Moore, brought to San Diego from Mike McKinnon’s station in Austin, Texas and an old hand at gearing audience response, admits surprise at the breadth of Muscare’s audience, noting that KUSI receives many pro-Muscare calls from older people. What’s the appeal? “Tongue-in-cheek, off-the-wall. A lot of people like humor that gets over into verbal slapstick,” suggests Moore.

Muscare was hired by Al Meson, KUSI’s director of program and news development. Meson, with credits as vice president and executive producer of such programs as ABC’s 20/20, was lured by Mike McKinnon from ABC-TV in New York. “We were talking about a nighttime live-type program,” Meson recalls. “Mike remembered Kansas City’s, so I called them. They told me the program’s originator had left town a year before to come to San Diego, and gave me his name.” His name was Ed Muscare.

“On the day [Muscare] was to come for an interview, the receptionist buzzed, saying, ‘Your Uncle Ed is here.’ I told her, seriously, ‘I do not have an Uncle Ed.’ ” Meson remembers the interview as being “peculiarly off-the-wall.” Muscare was accompanied by an elegantly tailored white-haired gentleman in flip-up dark glasses who introduced himself as Dr. Ph. Daniels, and who subsequently has made several appearances on Night Time Live. Meson remembers that when the time came for Muscare to show his videotapes from his Kansas City shows, a long pause ensued while Daniels searched for the tapes among a morass of papers stuffed into the wrinkled shopping bag he carried.

“We looked at the tapes, and he was so good. So I asked, ‘You want to do the program?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ So we set a date and agreed to build a set. The first few nights he was on, the set looked bland, so he painted it himself during the show.”

It’s two in the afternoon, and already hot in East San Diego, before Muscare — wearing woolen pajamas — rolls over in the Murphy bed that crowds half the living room of his trailer house. He plunges across the room to punch off the radio clock alarm. He had stayed up until dawn watching Arsenic and Old Lace.

Muscare sleeps diagonally on the bed. If he stretched out full length, his feet would dangle over into the cardboard boxes filled with videotapes of his old shows. On the floor by the bed, Racing Forms are heaped in piles. When Muscare is not working, he some days spends up to seven hours studying the horses. It would take almost as many hours, he contends, to explain what he looks for. It’s been three months since he even saw the Del Mar track, and several weeks since he called his bookie, who now probably won’t even remember him. Not that he’s a heavy bettor. He is, he supposes, a cautious bettor.

He steps over an empty pack of menthol Mores, beige socks, a cup still half-full of last night’s coffee. On his way across the room, he notes he can still count his ribs along his scrawny frame. But he’s been putting it on and needs, he tells himself, to get back to 140. Ten pounds.

Muscare switches the radio back on. He never watches television during the day and makes a mental note to remember, before he heads for the studio, to set his VCR to record Taxi, which, right now, is his favorite half-hour comedy show. He loves that Jim, the guy who is always spaced out but no one knows what on, and little Danny, “a groveling nasty immoral old man,” Muscare calls him.

Muscare figures he can afford an hour at his favorite card room on El Cajon Boulevard — where the owner keeps Muscare’s photograph on the wall. But now he takes his coffee out behind the trailer, sits down, and lights a cigarette. The yard disappoints him. The man who lived in the trailer before he did had put out weed killer, and Muscare’s tomato plants and an orange tree died.

Because he eats his eggs before he goes to bed, “breakfast is taken care of,” he says. When he cooks lunch, it’s steak thrown on the electric skillet on top of the counter that divides the kitchen and living room, but he won’t bother with that today, as he plans to meet his oldest friend for an early dinner. They will eat at the downtown YMCA on Broadway, where a ham-and-cheese sandwich costs two dollars, or at a nearby Chinese $3.95-all-you-can-eat place. Maybe afterward he will stroll down the Mile of Cars in National City, looking but not buying.

Muscare never married. Not that he hasn’t been close. He’s certainly been in love, but it never quite worked out. He doesn’t feel lonely. He’s close to his family, and as for children, there are the twenty-six nieces and nephews.

At home with the VCR

Photo by Craig Carlson

Hosting Night Time Live is easy, but it keeps him busy. Finding guests is a mere matter of using your noodle. Like that Eddie Murphy bit. He whooped up viewers by announcing that later in the week Eddie Murphy would appear, then he thumbed through the phone book, found an Eddie Murphy, and invited him to be on. Murphy turned out to be a quiet guy who had visited Russia. And then an Elizabeth Taylor called, and Muscare invited her to spend an evening on the show. He had Hot Lips the fire-eater, then Morris the Cat, a guy from the card room, then a woman who heals pets. There was the first American Playboy bunny in England and a waitress looking for a husband who asked interested men to write to her at the station. Muscare recalls that she got five letters, all of which looked as if they were written by someone criminal or mentally bereft. He had his barber, Pete the Hair Handler, come on the set to cut his hair. Why do people enjoy these unrehearsed spots — some not much better than Gong Show out-takes? Muscare guesses that it’s because the only thing you get live on TV anymore is the news.

Ed Muscare can see himself as the host, say, of a network game show. He wants something like that, yet he doesn’t. He won’t put pressure on it, won’t push. He isn’t all that ambitious. When he went to Mel Blanc’s School of Voices in Hollywood in the late Seventies, he intended to make some show business contacts. He even got an agent. At the school they told him he was talented, but he stayed only two months. Commuting from Kansas City, his home at the time, was exhausting, and as he told a Kansas journalist, he guessed he didn’t have enough stick-to-itiveness to stick stick to it.

He landed his first television job in 1970 as host of a Kansas City kiddy show called 41 Treehouse Lane, and doubled as “Mr. Mummy” on weekday afternoons and as “The Creeper” at night. Later he presided over two midday movie marathons, Dialing for Dollars and Jackpot Movie. It was only fitting that Muscare ended up on television, because his childhood in Queens, New York was filled with dreams of becoming a professional broadcaster. His dream edged toward reality in 1950, with an announcer’s position overseas on the Armed Forces Radio Network, which led to a civilian job in AM radio, which led to Kansas City.

In 1981 Muscare put together Kansas City’s precursor to Night Time Live, which he called All Night Live. After three months, the show, which was sent on cable across five states, acquired what Midwestern media columnists called a “cult following.” But in 1984, after two and a half years as ringmaster for this successful nocturnal circus, Muscare found himself early one morning changing a tire in twenty-degree-below-zero temperatures, the cold riveted in with a twenty-mile-per-hour wind. Saying he couldn’t take one more Kansas City winter, Muscare resigned, packed his belongings into a U-Haul trailer, and came to San Diego.

People wonder why he left Kansas City. It seems simple to Muscare. “People should not have to live where they don’t want to.” And he didn’t want to live in Kansas anymore. He was also tired. He just wanted to relax, to play cards and bet the horses, do a lot of gardening, and sit in the sun.

San Diego was the perfect place to do this. Muscare already knew the town, having come here during a hiatus from Kansas City in 1977. During his initial stay here he ran a hot dog stand on the site of what is now the Wells Fargo Bank building at Broadway and Front Street. After a year he sold the business, moved to Florida, then back to Kansas City.

Now, in 1985, Muscare thinks he might leave Night Time Live. Even though the show has acquired more commercials since Muscare began in January, he is still paid only $12,000 a year. Not that he cares that much about money. “But nobody else would do the show for that little.” He laughs softly. “Perhaps it’s the principle of the thing.”

What would he do then? He’s not sure. Friends worry. They ask, “What about your future?” They tell him, “You’re not young anymore.” “The future,” Muscare responds, “never comes.”

Recording an introduction

Photo by Craig Carlson

At 8:30 on this Tuesday night, his brown-and-gold plaid jacket characteristically flung across his shoulders and let to flow behind as a cape would, Muscare sweeps through the halls of KUSI on Kearny Mesa. He stops briefly in the darkened reception area, where Dan Capobianco, Night Time Live's director, is stretched out on the couch watching television. Muscare pauses in the station’s kitchen, pours a cup of murky coffee into a paper cup, then pushes open the door to the vast room where at one end sits his desk. The remainder of the space is storage-, jumbo cardboard cartons heaped with video cassettes sent to KUSI by job-hunters, and around Muscare’s desk, more cardboard boxes, mailed to Muscare from Kansas City and still unopened.

The receptionist had piled Muscare’s mail on his desk, and he opens it, standing up to plug his Hitachi cassette player into an outlet on the far wall. He inserts a demo tape sent by a blues player named Robin. “Walkin’ Blues,” too heavily amplified for the little Hitachi, blats across the room while Muscare dials Robin’s number. “This is your Uncle Ed, Robin. Say fella, got your tape. I’d like you on the show. ...”

It is now 9:30. Muscare, who has run through six pages of riddles in his notebook, picks up the Hitachi and records, “Why is the ocean always in motion?” then decides that perhaps the answer (“ You would be too if you had crabs on your bottom”) is too risque. “In Kansas City,” he says, “Cloris Leachman hit me with the Banana Phone when I did that one.” He records, in Lee Cucarachi’s voice, “Why is Snoopy thinking of quitting the comics?”

Muscare’s father deserted the family when Muscare was three. He does not remember him. When World War II ended, his mother moved the family to Florida, where her brother lived. Muscare recalls that it was definitely after the war that they moved, because he can remember sitting on a curb in their Queens neighborhood on the day Roosevelt died: Muscare went to high school in Florida and, after he graduated, entered the army. Asked if he went to college, he spins around on the toes of his tan shoes. “I don’t believe in college,” he says, “but I do believe in education,” and he laughs, wildly, exultantly, and leaves the room, strewing the debris of laughter behind him.

At 9:40 Muscare is back on his office phone, calling the woman who came in second on last night’s trivia quiz. She had asked him last night, “But don’t I win anything?” and Muscare answered, “A kiss.” During the day, it began not to seem like such a bad idea to invite her to come on the show for her kiss.

By ten o’clock Muscare rushes through the set, tidying. The set sits on carpeted risers against the far wail at one end of the still-dark barn of a studio. Capobianco and his sound assistant, seated at their console on the other side of the soundproofed wall, stare through the glass window.

The set is done in suburban-new that has worn down to comfortable ruin, and the brown-and-gold striped couch, coffee table, musty brown easy chair give the effect of being like the rest of the world and eerily cockeyed to it at the same time. On the walls Muscare has hung a Humphrey Bogart poster, a photograph of an unknown woman, a rack of antlers draped with a fox fur wrap and Muscare’s Invader Cruises cap. (Invader Cruises is one of the show’s sponsors). Muscare fusses with the couch, plumping up its round needlepoint pillow he acquired from the Salvation Army. At the wheeled utility cart kept next to his desk, he stops to rearrange the pink, stuffed acrylic pig, an emerald green frog, and a toy duck so that they muster around a clock he bought at K mart.

Then, hat brim pulled down over his eyes, Muscare sits bolt upright behind his cluttered plywood desk. A freshly lit cigarette dangles from his mouth. The smoke rises in circles past the color photograph of San Diego Bay at night, which forms the view out the set’s “window.”

In 1955, after he was discharged from the army, Muscare got his first civilian radio job in Osage Beach, Missouri. Why Missouri? “Broadcasting Magazine. In the back they have help wanted. In fact I got my radio job in Kansas City that way, too. In 1966.”

The Osage Beach station broadcast from sunrise to sunset. Muscare did everything. “I did pop music, country-and-western, news. I was Eddie Stone, the country-western DJ, Ed Roberts the newsman, Ed Muscare the regular DJ. I did farm reports off the wire, and added sound effects — chickens and hogs. I swept up the station. One other guy worked there. The announcer. I got paid sixty dollars a week. I’ve got six apple boxes of reel-to-reel audio tapes of my shows — back to 1953. It’s amazing how bad I was.” He laughs, pauses, laughs again.

Backyard warm-ups

Photo by Craig Carlson

At six minutes until eleven, guests from Invader Cruises arrive: the captain, the house band’s singer, Ellie, and her drummer and keyboard player. They are giggling, nervous, the men’s brows sweating and Ellie smoothing and resmoothing her white dress. Muscare looms in height over them, graceful and easy. The captain and Elbe will sit at the desk, on either side of him, band members on the couch. “Nothing to it,” he promises. “While we show Maude we will talk, and then invite viewers to telephone and ask questions. All of it,” he smiles, “will be taped and played after midnight.”

When Muscare does his opening segment, he lets his viewers know about the hate mail brought to him before the show by station manager Moore. On the bottom of the screen Uncle Ed’s phone number flashes. Now, while the first twelve minutes of Twilight Zone air, Muscare answers the telephone, which had begun to ring only seconds after his face faded from the screen.

“Is it Uncle Ed?”

“You know it, buddy.”

“It’s Uncle Ed,” the caller yells to someone in the room with him, and cheers go up. “We watch you every night and we think you’re great.”

“Where you calling from?”

“San Diego State.”

“I’ll mention it on the air, pardner.” Muscare grins.

A woman calls to ask, “Why the two watches?”

“One, ma’am,” says Muscare, “is for Pacific Time Zone, one for Twilight Zone.”

The next caller is a voice deeper in timbre but as roused as the first. “You might not be at the station too much longer? But you’re great! We watch you every night.”

Muscare learns the caller is a law student at the University of San Diego. “Is that the school with the blue dome?” he asks.

“Yes, the blue dome.”

“Aww-right, USD. I’m glad I’ve got some good nephews out there.”

The next caller offers to send protest letters to station management, and Muscare tells him, “Thank you, buddy, but that’s not necessary. Just to know you’re out there and that you care is reward enough.”

Capobianco and the sound assistant crawl on the floor behind the couch, untangling microphone cords. The sound assistant hits her knee cap, yowls. Muscare, scowling, gets off the telephone and asks what the problem is. They’re not getting sound from one of the mikes, he’s told. “Oh . . . good,” Muscare’s voice fibril-lates with rancor. The first segment of Twilight Zone ends and Muscare is back on the screen, live. He grins, says, “I just love [actor] Don Gordon and I know you do too. We’ll be back in a minute to tonight’s good Zone.”

Off the air again, Muscare says that he detests the cord mikes. “They are constantly getting tangled up,” he says, adding that he wishes he had a cordless mike. “But they cost two, three thousand dollars. . . . Things have changed since I started in this business.”

The commercials end and the Twilight Zone resumes. The phone continues to ring. “Uncle Ed?” asks a girlish voice, “are you going to be fired? Is Twilight Zone going off?” “No.”

“Oh, good.”

“She was just worried about Twilight Zone,” says Muscare, and laughs.

The next call is a man who had watched Muscare’s Kansas City shows from Denver. “What did you have? A saucer?” Muscare asks. “Great things, saucers.” Muscare tells the caller he has just completed a tape on which he has collected calls of other transplanted Midwestern viewers who had watched him in Kansas City and that he’s planning to send it to his former station in Kansas City.

At 11:20, while one of the two cameramen chases a moth through the studio with a broom, and Leo the Mad Price Cutter screams about stereos on a taped commercial, Muscare sets up the microphones for the Invader group and settles them into chairs. “They have producers on other shows who take care of this stuff,” he grouses.

At 11:35 the guest spot is taped while Maude plays for the home audience. “Hey, aww-right, here we are with a group from the Invader Cruises,” says Uncle Ed. “Seated, we have beautiful Elbe the singer. Seated next to her is the captain of the Invader Cruises, and our guys standing back here, the B Street Band. Night Time Live, where you meet me to sail on the seven seas. . . .’ ”

While Maude plays, the calls come in. A sultry voice demands, “I want to speak to Mr. Uncle Ed. I am very upset. About the letters.”

“There’s lots of vicious people out in the world. Let’s heap fire on their heads and send them lots of love and kisses,” Muscare suggests.

Petulantly, the voice responds, “We will send you a lot of love and kisses. Uncle Ed.”

The taping resumes, and the shy, stammering captain is led by Muscare to talk about the Invader. It can “do ten to ten and one-half knots, about twelve miles an hour.” Unbending, he adds, “It was a classic racing yacht.”

Hal calls. “Hello, Hal, how the h’al are you?” Muscare inquires. In the control booth, Capobianco groans.

The cruise group has brought Muscare an Invader hat and T-shirt. He rubs the shirt against his cheek, cooing, “Oooh, this is pima cotton . . . so soft.”

Muscare

Photo by Craig Carlson

A youngster’s voice says, “Hello, I was wondering about your vocalist. Could she tell something about her family?”

This caller, sputters Ellie, is her twelve-year-old nephew. She says, braving a straightforward glance into the camera, “I have the most wonderful nieces and nephews in the world! ”

At 11:55 Muscare asks the group, “Wasn’t that fun?” and helps a relieved-looking Ellie from her chair. The captain mops his sunburned forehead. “That’s all there is to tha-at,” Muscare says. “Your telephone calls will be played on the air tonight.” He ushers them through the door that leads off the set into a four-foot-wide niche, where he stores clean shirts, a part of his hat collection, hand puppets, and stuffed animals.

While the night’s film, About Face, starts, Muscare reminisces about 41 Treehouse Lane, his kiddy show in Kansas City. From 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, “There’d be kids, puppets in the tree that I’d talk to,” he says. “We’d have magicians. I’d make up rhymes on the guitar to teach them words. For instance,” he sits down at the tinny-toned Yamaha spinet, thumps out three major chords, and sings, “ ‘Opposites. Black is the word. What’s the opposite? White! Black is black is black is the opposite.’ I’d just make it up, that day, during the show. Because how hard is it to think of a word and its opposite?”

Did he watch other children’s shows, study them and their hosts? “Noooo,” he laughs. “I watched cartoons.” And laughs, again, even louder. What were the qualifications for doing a children’s show? “Just being there. And liking kids.”

Talking about 41 Treehouse Lane leads Muscare to talk about 1977, the year he moved to San Diego for the first time. A corner of the arcade along Broadway was empty. The arcade’s owner, he learned, also owned Funland. “I went to him and said I would like to lease the corner of your store,” Muscare recalls, “and the owner said, ‘Okay, 700 a month.’ So my brother came and built the hot dog stand for me.

“You see,” Muscare says in his tell-a-story-to-the-children voice, “you can never find any place that serves a good hot dog. So I said I’ll just open my own. People serve hot dogs on those grills or those rotary burners? They’re no good.” His long face droops and he pokes out his bottom lip. Then he brightens. “Put them in hot water like your mother used to do at home! That’s the way!

“So I had a big pot of boiling water to put the hot dogs in and they’re ready because all my sausages were precooked. Vienna Brand — they were really good — and knackwurst, too. So you just warm them up. I had a microwave for the buns. Give them five seconds and you’ve got a nice soft warm bun, a delicious hot dog, fresh sauerkraut.”

Muscare insists that he started the stand simply because he couldn’t find a good hot dog. Then he begins to smile, to laugh, and the laugh deepens. “Besides not having anything to do,” he adds.

Cops, office workers, and Broadway hookers were the most loyal consumers of Muscare’s seventy-five-cent hot dogs and knackwursts. “But I soon learned that when you own your business, it’s long days.”

At 12:20 a young woman wearing a clingy black sweater dress knocks on the set door, asking, “Is this where I come for my kiss?”

“You doggon’ right,” Muscare grins carnivorously, pats his lap, where she sits, gingerly, turning to look into his eyes. Her low voice rocking with giggles, she says, “Are we really going to kiss?” Muscare, studying her carefully made up and very pretty face, nods in the affirmative. “You have cigarette breath,” she says.

Muscare smiles as the woman reaches toward the Banana Phone and asks, “Is this your Banana Phone? Can I touch it?”

“You can always touch my banana, dear,” Muscare responds in a Big Bad Wolf voice.

‘“Is yours like this?” she asks.

Muscare does not blanch and introduces the woman, whose name is Patty, to the two cameramen, who, wide-eyed, have observed her entry onto the set. He tells Patty that while About Face runs, they will do commercial breaks, run tapes from the Invader interview, and introduce her. “Do anything you want,” Muscare instructs the young woman. “Of course, you have to be quiet during the commercials, but otherwise feel free to hop right in!”

After a pause he asks, “And what are you honey? What do you do?”

“Singing telegrams for Eastern Onion.”

“What do you do for work? I am sure that does not support you.”

“Yes, it does. But I also teach some exercise classes.”

Then Patty is back on Muscare’s lap and they are live, on-screen. Muscare is telling viewers, “Patty called the other night and was the second person to correctly answer a quiz question.”

“The answer was Pillow Talk,” Patty says, nodding.

“The question was, ‘For what movie was Doris Day nominated for an Academy Award?’ I said, ‘You win second prize,’ and she said, ’What was it?’ I said, ‘A kiss.’ So she came here to get her gift. And she gave me a piece of gum for my bad breath.”

With guests Quacky Doodle and the Captain, 5/24/85

Photo by Craig Carlson

“I wanted to give you something,” says Patty, daring her first glance into the camera.

“So after these commercials we’re going to have Patty and Uncle Ed kiss for you. And you college people out there, watch this, because you have to learn to kiss properly to get along in life.”

“So this is it,” Patty says, climbing off Muscare’s lap and pacing back and forth across the set while the movie runs.

“This is it,” Muscare gestures toward the enormous room and warbles out, “the kingdom of heaven.”

“One minute,” Capobianco’s miked voice warns. “Stand by. . . .”

Muscare has set the scene to make it appear to viewers that the duo have been caught kissing, and when they are back on the air live he and Patty carry off a believably startled breakaway from one another’s arms. “The moment you are all waiting to see,” says Muscare roguishly as a cameraman moves in toward the desk. “Are we ready?” Muscare asks Patty.

Wrinkling her nose, Patty complains, “Aren’t you going to take off your hat?”

“No. Humphrey Bogart never takes off his hat. Now in kissing, Patty, the eyes are very important.” Muscare crosses his.

Then the movie resumes and the set’s lights are turned off. “Now, since we won’t be doing this for another twenty-five minutes,” Muscare tells Patty, “I don’t want you sitting on my lap all that time. Let’s take some more phone calls.

“Five hundred deer and five hundred pigs, what do you get?” Muscare repeats after his caller. “Gosh, I know this one, too. A buck? A deer? A pork ... a thousand bucks, that’s right.”

“I want to say that bitch is ugly,” the next caller spews out harshly.

Muscare slams down the phone. “You are anything but ugly,” he assures Patty, who looks away, mouth agape. “Are you a coffee drinker, honey?” She nods a yes.

Muscare comes back carrying a paper cup of coffee for Patty and one for himself, then sits down at the Yamaha spinet and plays.

At 12:25 Capobianco moves a red motorcycle out onto the floor for the live Honda commercial. He turns to Muscare, saying, “Pretty soon we are going to have Rolls Royce commercials in here.” And one of the cameramen, back on the set, asks Muscare, “Will you just turn at a rakish angle, Uncle Ed?”

At 12:30, while a segment of the Invaders interview runs, Muscare offers Patty a woman’s garden party hat. He tries on a hat from which rises a red, white, and blue umbrella imprinted “Uncle Ed.” At the control booth, the sound assistant shakes her head, saying, “I just don’t believe this.”

Muscare tells Patty, when she asks, that he taught himself to play the guitar and then he learned to play guitar chords on the piano. “I am going to sing you a love song,” he suggests, lifting an imaginary tailcoat as he sits at the Yamaha, In an Irish tenor under-girded by thump-a-de-thump-thump thunderstorm of chords, slamming his foot hard on the pedal of the little spinet, Muscare croons “The Greatest Love Song.”

Capobianco, by 1:10 looking weary, runs the promo for Maude, and through the mike tells Muscare, who has been singing all this time, “Two minutes, Uncle Ed.”

Turning from the microphone Capobianco says, “You have to realize that this isn’t along the same lines as Johnny Carson or David Letterman.” He has worked with Muscare “from the beginning.” He sighs. “I pity the next people who have to get to know him ... to work with him. He can be difficult. I can be difficult. But he has been doing this for a long time. He knows what he wants and how he wants it done. At first I had a horrible time because he wanted to tell me how to run the cameras, how he wanted the shots run.

“But viewers like him. Rarely do we get phone calls that are negative. These today were some of the first.” Capobianco pauses to signal Muscare, “One minute, Uncle Ed,” then continues. “A grown-up kid show, just a lot of fun. You’re not supposed to take anything seriously with him. ‘I know I’m joking. You better know I’m joking, too.’ That kind of thing.”

Finally, at 1:15, Muscare tells viewers he will read the hate mail. Holding a sheet of paper as if it were distasteful, Muscare reads, “ ‘My friend and I have totally abandoned your station because of that jerk you have on your station late night. I have asked my friends about Uncle Ed. They turn off your station whenever he comes on. Please lose him from your family. He should be somebody’s aunt not an uncle.’ Well,” Muscare directs his eyes to Patty, “at least it’s bad grammar. I am glad it is such an unintelligent letter.”

As soon as they are off camera, Patty takes out her pocket mirror and applies fresh lipstick. The promos and Muscare’s live spots come faster now, and at 1:35 Muscare, looking toward Patty, says, “I didn’t know she was a show biz person when I asked her to be on the show.” (At the console the sound assistant and Capobianco boo.) “But Patty is going to be at the Improv. . . . Is it amateur night, Patty?”

“No, no, it’s the laugh-off competitions.”

“Have you appeared there before?” She has. “A semipro coming onto my show, sneaking in an appearance!”

Until two o’clock, when About Face ends, the crew will continue to broadcast a blend of commercials, Muscare and Patty, segments of the Invader group, and the movie. One of the cameramen has come into the control booth, and as the movie flickers across his face from a monitor, he admits that Muscare does have quite a bit of ego. Asked if Muscare has camera-angle preferences, the cameraman says, “Yes, Muscare has a couple of ‘you damn well betters.’ ”

“They will be kissing,” Capo-bianco tells the cameramen, who have returned to the floor. “I want the cameras brought in tight.” Patty and Muscare appear again on the screen. The contrast between the live color segments, silly and playful, and the heightening drama of the black-and-white About Face have become increasingly peculiar, even more so as Muscare breathily tells Patty, who by this time has relaxed and looks deep into his brown eyes, “The thing about kissing, Patty, is that you have to make believe that you really want to be kissed.” He grasps Patty’s chin. “No, your lips are too far up. Put them down a little. Don’t laugh. Is there someone out there who would kiss, seriously, on TV?” Muscare pleads, beseeching the camera. “She will kiss, but she will not be serious.” “No,” wails the sound assistant. “Now the women will call.”

Another commercial ends. “We are back.” Muscare punches on the cassette player and a telephone ring sounds. “It’s the Banana Phone! It’s Lee Cucarachi.”

“I have a riddle,” comes the voice Muscare recorded four hours earlier. “Why is Snoopy thinking of quitting the comics?”

“I know the answer, Lee,” says Muscare. “‘Because he’s tired of working for Peanuts.’ You’ll never stump Uncle Ed with a riddle. I’ve been doing this show for seventeen years. Back to our good movie in just a minute.”

It is nearing time for the closing shot. Capobianco yells, “We have to strike the set tonight.” The crew groans.

“Do you think you could stand by the piano?” Muscare asks Patty, as he works out how he will end the show.

In the movie bombs explode, crash, thunder. “It’s too loud,” Capobianco cautions the sound assistant.

“What do you want?” she says. “It’s a bomb!”

“Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.” Capobianco warns through the microphone, wanting to get Muscare and Patty in their places at the desk. “You look even thinner on television,” he says to Patty, who beams her appreciation.

As About Face's hero and heroine are joyously reunited, clasped in one another’s arms, a romantic melody swells across the control booth. “Stand by,” Capobianco sighs. On the control booth screen, Muscare can be seen tenderly holding Patty (who wears the party hat) in a tango pose, and as the theme song fades, the couple twirls slowly into a fading spotlight. “Isn’t she a great dancer or what?” Muscare, smiling wistfully, asks viewers as he waves goodnight.

“Okay,” Capobianco yells toward the crew, “let’s tear down the set. See fantasy land come down! ”

Muscare gathers his stuffed animals, the umbrella hat, and the garden party hat from the set, laying them in his storage niche between the back of the set and the wall. He kneels there and folds the Invader T-shirt.

KUSI’s building is vacant by 2:30 except for Muscare, who has taken a hot cup of coffee and tapes of the night’s show to the darkened editing room, a space no bigger than a broom closet. Leaving the door ajar, he sits down, lights a cigarette, and leans back. During his first spot, when the microphone was not working, the sound fades. Muscare frowns, roughly punches the tape ahead to his introduction of Patty, then to the “hate mail” reading. He stares at, ogles, searches out his image. He returns, twice, to Cucarachi’s riddle. He laughs as he says, “You know, I’d rather be home watching this.”