pee-wee herman

I'm not positive on the date, but I think it was November of 1983 at Wolfgang's, a small club in San Francisco, where we saw Pee-wee Herman live. Paul Reubens started a live show, "The Pee-wee Herman Show", in 1980 I believe. It was filmed by HBO and shown there in 1981. We didn't have HBO in those days ... I'm pretty sure we knew Pee-wee from his appearances on Late Night with David Letterman:

Here's a clip from that HBO special:

Of course, from there he went on to the classic Pee-wee's Big Adventure and the TV series Pee-wee's Playhouse, both of which were big favorites at our house.

It was the weirdest thing, reading the obits. He was 70 years old. That's the same age as me. Paul Reubens' age was always hard to figure, given his Pee-wee persona. He was a grown man playing a kid. You knew he wasn't a kid, but you never really knew how old the actor was, because if he put on the Pee-wee suit, he looked pretty much the same. If I had guesses his age, it would have been, I don't know, 60? The fact that I am the same age as Paul Reubens is hard to process.