Rotund comic Stephanie Peters spotted a totally cool—no other way to describe it—gigantic 
psychedelic 3-D album cover of Cream’s immortal “Disraeli Gears” in the window of Dan’s Chelsea Guitars and just had to have it. She was in town from Providence—I think that’s right—for the Last Comic Standing competition.
I was sitting up by the counter in Dan’s, interviewing him for the Chelsea Now article, and shooting the breeze with the regulars, when she walked in with her two-man entourage. “So did you camp out overnight?” I asked. There had been a gaggle of comics, clowns and funny men lounging up and down 23rd street in the freezing cold weather since the afternoon before, hoping for a chance to showcase their tomfoolery for three minutes before a national TV audience.
“No, I had a private interview,” Stephanie said. She was loud and brash—as a comic should be--but seemed like a genuinely nice person.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“Not so well,” she said. “One of my judges was the comic Ant, and after my first joke he butted in and said, ‘You’re not just going to tell a bunch of fat jokes, are you?’ Can you imagine the nerve of that guy?! All he ever tells are gay jokes!”
“You should have started telling a bunch of really mean gay jokes yourself,” I said.
She ignored me. “What a jerk!” she bellowed. “And it was a good joke too! You wanna hear the joke?”
We all said we did.
“OK, here it is: I’m always trying to lose weight. I’ll try anything. So when they came out with this new diet dog food, I figured why not, I’ll give it a shot. So I ate the stuff for a week, and I didn’t lose any weight. But I found myself really beginning to like the smell of ass!”
Everybody cracked up laughing.
“You see!? Funny, right?!” Stephanie said. “See what I mean?!”
The Disraeli Gears poster, by an artist known as 3-D Bob (a long-haired fellow who turned up the next day, wearing two ties, a black one knotted over a red one), was rather expensive, and Stephanie was undecided as to whether or not she should buy it. Dan drug a bunch more of the 3-D works out of the back: an Allman Brothers “Eat a Peach,” a Miles Davis “Bitches Brew” and a smaller version of the Cream album, to name a few. They were all great, but the Big Cream was by far the most spectacular.
While she was making up her mind, Stephanie entertained us with excerpts from her comedy act. She said that one of the things she would often do on stage was to remark that she was hungry and then extract a cheese sandwich—smashed and heated, almost grilled--from her ample bosom and have a bite. This always went over particularly well when someone from the audience would agree to share the sandwich with her!
Still undecided, Stephanie left the store to walk around for awhile, and then when she came back an hour later she had made up her mind: she would take the big one! -- Ed Hamilton
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