This was one of the troupe’s favorite videos.  We shot it in Alphabet City and Spanish Harlem in the late 1980s.  It’s notable for a lot of reasons.  One is that we always took advantage of the environment.  We used the crumbling buildings of Alphabet City, for example, to depict NYC after WWIII.  And New Yorkers themselves were often some of the best characters in our videos.  Note, for example, the guy who gives us the funny look as we’re marching down the subway steps.  We also enlisted our close friends.  The woman holding the card is Julie, who was a friend of one of our actresses, Ronnie.  The other noteworthy thing is how very young we looked.  I remember my rich brown hair and full beard!

Pinstripe Plaza is actually based on a real building in Spanish Harlem inhabited by yuppies.  We were all poor and we hated yuppies with a passion.  One of the show-biz types who inhabited a building we nicknamed “Dogboy Manor,” across the street from the yuppie building, considered shooting bottle rockets at it.  ”What’s keeping me from doing,” he said, “is not the potential loss of life or even property values.  It’s the prospect of getting raped while serving time in prison for arson.”

For more information about the troupe and Rob’s book “Tales of the Troupe,” go to http://talesofthetroupe.wordpress.com.

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