Howie in High-Gloss

A tale of one loudmouth, two pranks, and a lifetime of belly laughs.

“Cake-Blocked”

My brother’s expression shifted from calm confidence to befuddled annoyance as he cut into the birthday cake. Shaking his head slightly, Jeff hesitated when the knife’s smooth forward motion was halted by an object apparently even denser than the Thanksgiving turkey he’d carved about an hour earlier.

Since Jeff and I were both born in late November, the Urish clan always combined our birthdays with the annual turkey feast. Hence the cake.

He withdrew the knife, briefly pursed his lips and took a slow, measured breath before sticking the utensil back into the cake. A moment later, he said, “What the heck’s going on?”

Curiosity piqued, about a dozen family members gathered in the kitchen, glancing at my brother in confusion.

Our parents, however, didn’t look the least bit confused. “You’re doing great,” Dad said, grinning and shooting a quick glance at Mom. “Keep at it.”

Shrugging and sighing in frustration, Jeff suddenly turned into Captain Bizarro, withdrawing the knife and beginning to probe the cake with his fingers.

“Hold on,” he said, like a nervous OB-GYN intern. “It’s coming out. Just a sec.”

My brother soon extracted – get this – a book from the birthday cake. Acknowledging the sugar-coated tome’s author, outrageous “shock jock” Howard Stern, he briefly smiled and dropped his head in mock resignation before glancing over at Mom and Dad.

Then he began laughing.

And when he showed me exactly what he’d extracted, I began to laugh as well.

At the book. At my parents. At a prank very well played.

The Rise of an Articulate Buffoon

I can tell you the exact moment I became a follower of Howard Stern.

It was August of 1988, and Stern was hosting an obscure cable TV talk show that aired in the wee hours of the morning. His guest on this particular episode was Richard Simmons, the flamboyant, short-shorts-rockin’ diet-and-exercise guru.

Simmons was there to plug Deal-a-Meal, his popular weight loss program that used a card system to help dieters manage their food intake. Joining Stern and Simmons in the studio were (I’ll try to be delicate here) three rather “big-boned” Deal-a-Meal devotees who’d recently shed a few pounds but, God bless ’em, were nowhere near their goal weight.

What Stern did next made me bolt upright in bed, jaw dropped and eyes bugged out in amazement.

As Simmons began to discuss Deal-a-Meal, Stern reached behind his desk and procured a fishing pole. Tied to the end of the pole’s line was a huge bag of Lay’s potato chips, which Stern proceeded to playfully dangle and bounce in front of the faces of the befuddled guests while Simmons continued to talk about his diet program.

This cannot be happening, I thought. This Stern knucklehead is either gonna become a household name … or get tossed in the Hudson River.

Pulling audacious stunts like this nearly every time he was on the air, Stern bragged and bellowed his way to fame via both radio and TV syndication, eventually becoming the self-proclaimed “King of All Media.”

While I may have been a casual follower of Howard Stern, my brother, Jeff, not always known to have a slap-happy sense of humor, had become a full-blown fan.

“I’d listen to him during my morning commute,” Jeff recalled during a recent conversation. “I liked many of the serious points he’d make, but some of the stunts he pulled were really nuts. You never knew what’d happen.”

Rejected by Pops & Mumzie

Thanks to his bombastic lunacy and heavy handed, boastful ranting, millions of Americans loved Howard Stern.

And millions of other Americans wanted to, well, toss him in the Hudson River.

My parents? They fell, without a doubt, into the latter camp.

Straight-laced and conventional right wingers with roots reaching back to the Eisenhower-era ’50s, Mom and Dad were disgusted with Howard Stern’s long, flowing locks, eccentric manner of dress, and grandiose, self-promoting histrionics. It didn’t help that, along with politicians and A-listers either bold enough or stupid enough to stroll into his studio, many of Stern’s guests happened to be strippers and porn “actors.” No bar was ever too low for Stern and his production team of irreverent misfits.

“Mom and Dad never realized that Howard was in many ways quite conservative,” my brother said years later. “They refused to see past the hair, the dark sunglasses, the crazy stunts and all the bragging.”

Over a period of months, Jeff patiently tried to get Mom and Dad to see Stern in a different light, even purchasing a copy of his best-setter, “Private Parts,” to spark their curiosity.

My folks wanted no part of it.

“Gotcha!”

Stepping closer to the birthday cake, my father nodded his chin in the direction of my brother and, pointing at me, said, “Gotcha, boys! You both had it coming. And just for the record, it was your mother’s idea.”

My parents, beaming like little kids, had tasked the local baker with embedding a copy of Stern’s follow-up best-seller, “Miss America,” into our birthday cake. Their unwritten message: “Here ya go, kids. We’ll read something published by this ass-clown the day hell freezes over.”

News flash: Howard will never be confused with Charles Dickens.

Art Therapy

A few months later, I answered a phone call from my brother.

“I got an idea,” Jeff said. I could hear the excitement in his voice. “It’s about Mom and Dad. You’re gonna love this.”

“I’m listening.”

“They’re going on a cruise next week, down to Baja. While they’re gone, what do you think about pulling a fast one on ‘em?”

“By ‘fast one,’ I imagine you mean a prank, yes?” I said. “I’m 90 percent there. Put me over the top.”

So he did.

My first visceral reaction: Mom and Dad would write us out of their will, something not terribly appealing, since at the time I was, as Mozart would probably say, flat baroque.

But when I pondered Jeff’s wicked tomfoolery for another moment, I had to smile.

“Okay, I’m all in,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

The following week, while the old folks were whiling away their days stuffing themselves silly, enjoying shipboard comedy and magic acts, and soaking up the Mexican Riviera sun, my brother and I planned to slip into their house and paint a massive mural in their garage. The mural in question would depict – yeah, you know where this is headed – none other than their blathering nemesis, Howard Stern.

Given our artistic limitations (my giant string designs notwithstanding) we needed to base our mural on a very simple image, one requiring only a few colors. Using an overhead projector, we traced the design in pencil and for a few hours played “Crayola Time” with high-gloss paint. Easy-peasy.

Howie in high-gloss: This was taken moments after Mom & Dad first saw Mr. Stern infesting – er, inhabiting – their garage. (Photo by Morris Urish)

Oh, but my brother didn’t stop there. He took the copy of the “Miss America” bestseller that Mom and Dad had buried in the cake a few months earlier … and embedded that same book in the garage wall next to the mural, covering it with plexiglass.

Note the tiny color printout located on the bottom left of the frame. That’s the original image Jeff and I projected onto the garage wall to paint the mural.

Jeff and I weren’t sure how our folks – especially Dad, who didn’t always see things quite as giggle-worthy as the rest of us – would react. As the paint dried and we cleaned up the garage, I pictured Pops saying something like, “Very funny. Now paint this thing over – or there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

But they loved it.

“What you boys did, that happens to be one of the highlights of my life,” Mom said more than once.

Dad concurred: “You guys got us good,” he’d say, shaking his head and smiling. “That Stern fella’s still a jerk, but you got us good.”

Decades later, I realize that both pranks – my parents’ Turkey Day Cake Caper and the High-Gloss Howie Counterpunch – had nothing to do with Stern. It was how one family learned to deal with divergent opinions, affection and identity through humor. Ultimately, it was about love.

We never said “I love you” with words. Rather, we expressed it by knowing exactly what would annoy one another … and doing it anyway, just gently enough that everyone ended up laughing.

Long after the paint had dried, visitors who found themselves in the garage might’ve assumed that our family had some kind of dysfunctional, deeply unresolved issue with Howard Stern.

The truth was simpler: We just had a deeply resolved way of showing how we cared for each other.

Still, to this day, I have only one regret about all these shenanigans: Given another chance, we would’ve gladly painted the mural in my folks’ living room.

Kudos to friends in my online community, Write Hearted, for their feedback and support: Rick Lewis, Dana Allen, Matt Cyr, Neha Patel, Rachel Parker and Kathy Ayers. Y’all rock!