When Laurie (Anderson) Met Andy (Kaufman)

There are entertainment cross-overs that you completely expect: Batman and Superman, or Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, or “CSI” and “CSI: Miami.”

Then there are those you wouldn’t expect: “Gilligan’s Island” and the Harlem Globetrotters, or Christopher Walken and Fat Boy Slim, or Chris Matthews and Ellen DeGeneres.

And then there’s Laurie Anderson and Andy Kaufman, another unlikely yet true story for April Fools Day. Wikipedia even suggests that they dated; I didn’t want to get into that, but in a phone conversation today, Anderson did speak of Kaufman fondly.

“I met him when he was doing his bongo thing,” Anderson recalled. “I went up after the show and said, ‘I love what you’re doing.’ I became a plant in his audience; it was really great fun.”

Anderson was actually around when Kaufman was into his bit involving wrassling ladies. “It was hard – he would really fight,” she remembered.

“We did that, and we would go to Coney Island and we’d do things like the ‘Test Your Strength’ stuff on the boardwalk,” she continued. “He’d make fun of the people doing it for a while and then I’d cry out, ‘Andy, please win me a bear!’ So he’d be ridiculing all the people doing it and then his turn comes and he hits the hammer on the platform and it reads, ‘Try Again, Weakling!’ And then he’d get angry and demand, ‘I want to see the manager!’ He was chaos-creating. It was completely entrancing to see how to break taboos in an interesting way.”

Another thing they have in common (sort of): R.E.M. wrote a song about Kaufman called “Man in the Moon;” Anderson was Artist-in-Residence at NASA in 2002.