Mike Franzione Gets Married

Remember the show Silver Spoons? Remember, Mikey Franzione, the kid that lived across the street from Ricky Shroeder? Of course you do – little overweight kid who’d come panting into Ricky’s house with big news and deliver that timeless catchphrase “You’re not gonna BELIEVE this!” And the crowd would just erupt with laughter because they just knew that line was coming? No? Think hard now. That's him, on the left. Ringing a bell yet? No? Then you must not be drunk on Bourbon Street.

Let me back up.

I’ve known Josh for twelve years. When I met him, I liked him because he was fat and poor and therefore made me look good by comparison. Sadly (for me, anyway), he has shed his extra pounds (through both rigorous exercise and shaving his back) and become a lawyer (in fact chief council at a major DC lobbying firm). He has also gotten digits from a stripper and been hit on in a crowded pool hall by a hot woman who, for whatever reason, was there by herself. These are all accomplishments that have thus far eluded me. Yet despite his apparent superiority (and my hatred of superior people) we remain friends, mostly because we have criminally immature senses of humor and the social graces of a drunken orangutan. Both of these came in handy at his bachelor party, for which we travelled to the Big Easy.

I’ve been to post-Katrina N’awlins quite a few times but only for business. I was pleased that because the shackles of the business world were thrown off, I could drink heavily, eat expensive meals, ogle woman like I was Bill Clinton, and throw money at strippers like you’d throw bread to starving ducks. Come to think of it, it would be exactly the same as my business meetings. The only major difference was instead of staying at a company-bought hotel in the French Quarter, we would be staying in a large mini-mansion in the Garden District. The mini-mansion turned out to be purple. And there were dozens of small handwritten notes from the owner pasted in various locations, warning us about flushing only toilet paper and not using certain balconies. Since we found no signs about having naked women dance in the living room or leaving massive piles of crawfish pieces all over the backyard, we weren’t too concerned.

There was far too much comedy to recount in one blog entry, so I shall present the highlights. However, we must begin with the story of Mikey Franzione, or else, to paraphrase Dickens, nothing that follows shall seem wondrous.

1) Mikey Franzione

Josh spent his youth trying to make it big in Hollywood, finally landing the coveted role of Mikey Franzione. He played the role for two years, until Alfonso Ribiero took over the role of Ricky’s best friend. Franzione had a catchphrase, a unique style of dress that was copied by pre-teens all over the country, and a very popular haircut. Unfortunately, after leaving the show, his had trouble finding work as an actor, so he finished high school and went on to become a lawyer.

Now reread the last paragraph with the understanding that only the last twelve words are true. The rest is crap. The picture is from Josh’s bar mitzvah. But damn if we didn’t tell that story to nearly every attractive woman we met on Bourbon Street, as well as some very unattractive ones. I would say that 95 percent of the people we told this story to claimed to remember Mike Franzione and his catchphrase (which we made Josh repeat ad nauseum). In a stroke of pure genius, one of Josh’s friends printed copies of the atrocious bar mitzvah picture on card stock and handed them out to people to help jog their memories of this character that didn’t exist. Most didn’t even need it. “Oh YEAH!” they’d yell. “I REMEMBER that kid!” There were a hundred hilarious moments that developed out of our ruse, including:

• Asking any restaurant or bar that had pictures on their walls (and some that didn’t) to add one of Josh. Most happily accepted. With those that didn’t, we just put one up anyway. For example, here is Josh on the wall of Pascal’s Manale, right below Bonnie Raitt:

I would imagine that if you were to hit Bourbon Street right now, at least half the bars would have a picture of Josh somewhere. I’m headed back in July, and I’ll report back.

• Several people asked Josh to sign the pictures, and some were not joking. Josh happily accepted with an “aw shucks, I’m just a regular guy” humility, writing “All my love” on each photo.


• We ended up giving a photo to a tall tattooed gentleman who was in a band that, he claimed “was opening for David Allen Coe’s nephew.” He said it with the same reverence that a musician in mid-1992 would say they were opening for Nirvana. After his girlfriend showed us her recently pierced nipples (yay Bourbon Street!) he began asking Josh about his agent. Fortunately, Josh’s friend Carlos stepped up and claimed to be said agent. Musician guy immediately asks for phone numbers and claims he can get us VIP treatment at one of the lesser strip clubs. Apparently it didn’t occur to musician guy to ask why, if Carlos was such a good agent, Josh hadn’t had any work since 1984. I get the feeling that opening for David Allen Coe’s nephew doesn’t get you a lot of exposure. (And for the record, we did get VIP treatment at the strip club, if only because we made up 80 percent of the crowd the moment we walked in. As one of Josh’s brothers observed, the women dancing in this place would be on the Sunday 10 a.m. to noon shift at any other establishment.)

2) Shooting
Friday night at about 12:30 a.m. we wandered into a club that had a live blues band downstairs and a DJ upstairs. After being there a few minutes, Josh and some other folks wandered out onto the balcony, a beautiful view of the sea of humanity that is Bourbon Street on a Friday night. Then gunshots rang out. As Josh told it, the crowd below parted like the red sea, and the people on the balcony ran back inside. Immediately rumors started circulating, the most common being that a young woman was shot in the head and that right there, see that stuff? That stuff was her brains. No, really, gray matter. You can tell from up here. And look at the blood. Gross, huh?

The area was promptly cordoned off and a fire truck came, but the amazing thing is life just kinda went on on Bourbon Street. People found their way around the roped off block, found another bar and more booze, and the music continued. The resolve of the true partier is amazing – it’ll take more than just a girl caught in the crossfire to ruin their good time. Turns out she was only shot in the leg and ended up fine, but it did provide a story. Probably not as good as the story she’ll be telling in HER blog, but still.

3) Food
Josh is a true epicurean and I suspect that half the reason he chose New Orleans as a location for his bachelor party was that, beyond drinking and carousing, there is nothing to do but eat. Which is what we did. We at K Paul's on Friday night and Pascal's Manale on Saturday night. Massively over sized portions of good Cajun food. However, the highlight may be on Saturday afternoon, when after consuming massive amounts of hangover-curing food at a Garden District diner, we ducked into a small fish market and bought several pounds of boiled crawfish and andouille sausage. By the time we were done, the back deck of our mansion looked like the beach at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan if Spielberg had opted for crustaceans instead of human actors. There was crawfish shrapnel everywhere.

4) The Hour-Long Hora
At some point during the weekend, Josh revealed his plans to do an hour-long hora at his wedding. (The hora is a traditional Jewish dance in which the wedding guests dance in circles while lifting family members up in a chair.) This was agreed upon ages ago by his fiancee and him, and was ironclad and unbreakable. Josh's brother Mitch, the best man, spent the better part of the weekend trying to put a stop to this. Bad enough we had to were tuxedos, Mitch told his brother, but to make us lift you up and down in a chair for an hour...well that's just torture. Mitch began an email dialogue with his future sister-in-law, and pleaded to anyone who would listen about the insanity of this request.

But we knew Josh. We knew that if Josh's fiancee told him that he was to come down the aisle wearing a leopard-print loincloth and riding on a wild boar, he would ask if he was allowed to wear synthetic leopardskin or if he needed to book passage to Africa to hunt down a real one. Thus, this one-hour hora was happening no matter how much protestation was to go on. But that didn't stop us, the future wedding guests, from trying. Every time something of difficulty arose, it was met with "at least it's not an hour-long hora." When one of us dropped out of a Hold 'Em tournament early, he was met with "you lasted about an tenth as long as Josh's hora." As we waited for strippers to arrive, we asked if we should get a chair so Josh could lift them up and down for an hour. Josh became increasingly agitated as the weekend went on, which made it all the more funny. At one point, he "threatened" to walk out of a diner at which he had just ordered an omelet with chili on top and a milkshake. Unfortunately, he came back.

5) Strippers
The beauty of the successful bachelor party is that, no matter where you choose to have it, no matter who you choose to invite, no matter how classy you pretend to make it, there will always be one constant. At some point at least one, and usually more than one, woman will get naked in exchange for money. Without that, you just don’t have a bachelor party.

Surprisingly, given the post-Katrina economy, strippers were hard to come by. We ended up getting two women, one of whom claimed to be 29. If you know anything about strippers, you know their ages are distorted in proportion to how old they actually are. It’s a complex mathematical formula, but by way of example, if she says she 29, she’s 36. If she says she's 18, she’s 54. It’s complicated. We perused dozens of websites and called dozens of phone numbers, looking for just the right ladies. Most of the ladies we called had names like "Princess" or "Diamond." I'm always amused when strippers name themselves after inanimate objects like Diamond or Platinum; essentially you're telling me that you look expensive but in truth are going to lie there and not do much. A stripper calling herself "Gyrating Whore" would get a lot of business. One of our strippers was named "Judi," a name that I felt was better suited to a librarian or flight attendant.

We decided to have our entertainment perform on what was left of our pictures of Josh, so we scattered them on the floor:

The image of two strippers gyrating all over pictures of a young Mikey Franzione is the stuff of True Hollywood Story. Luckily the strippers asked that towels be laid on the floor; otherwise Josh’s attempt at a comeback may have been thwarted.

Here’s the other funny thing about bachelor parties (or at least the ones I’ve been to): men, despite all their bravado and boisterousness and bragging and testosterone, usually go a big wet one in front of two strange naked women. The 14 gentleman attending Josh’s bachelor party, who up until then had been howling-at-the-moon wild, sat and stared as if they were watching a Truffaut film. All except Josh, who was very busy being alternately mauled, tortured, and abused by the ladies. For me to do what they did to Josh would require much more money than what we gave them. I almost felt bad. They may have given him a discount, however, as he is a former child star.