Rude Moose

Oh, for a return to those simpler, saner, more sedate and salubrious days of yesteryear. Say, perhaps, the latter part of the 1950s, or the earliest days of the suburban Sixties. Before all the overseas wars of intervention, before the riots, before the teen angst and anomie and their attendant drug scene, before the assassinations, before the liberation of various gals and gays and minorities, before disco, before People magazine.

Back when a buzz cut and a plaid shirt and dark-rimmed glasses and penny loafers labeled you a regular guy, and a bouffant and fake pearls and angora and a skirt with a poodle on it made you popular.

Why, back then, you wouldn’t have to cope with a comedian (or your 7-year-old niece, for that matter) dropping the f-bomb every 2.3 seconds. You could actually use your car horn now and again, free of the fear you’d soon be facing an Uzi, an enraged face, and certain death through an opposing driver’s window. You would truly be able to make it all the way through to Election Day without knowing all the sordid and seamy and icky and no-longer-intimate details of each candidate’s sleeping arrangements, bathroom stall habits, overseas dalliances, sexting, slush-funding, and questionable ‘mentoring’ of underage politico-wannabes. You could watch the news without a dozen on-screen crawls, blips, blobs, graphics and pictures-in-pictures. Televisions and radios were limited to two knobs apiece, and entertainment appliances were limited to televisions and radios.

Those were days when granny never flipped you off, and gramps never even thought of raising his walker to bash your @#$%^&* brains in. To rap was to knock sharply on your neighbor’s screen door. You could meet your arriving relatives right at their incoming flight’s gate. Investing in your future meant buying GM. Soccer moms actually stayed on the sidelines, smiling and uttering other-than-four-letter words in bright, melodic tones. The only vests foreigners wore to market were made of red felt. Kids were not jacked-in 24/7. ‘Mother’ was not just half a name.

Well, if you have succeeded at mentally turning back the clock to a more placid past, you might at last be able to fully appreciate Rude Moose, show here at the high point of his eminently gentle stage routine.

Migrating from his birthplace in Calgary to the famed Catskills, this fine specimen of Alces alces brought his low-brow Canadian brand of mild sarcasm and moderate obstrepory to upstate New York in 1962 as a mere yearling. And he has not stopped wowing the crowds since. Exceeding the normal moose life-span by close to a quarter-century, this indefatigable antlered quadruped continues today to entertain, still packing in the geriatric crowds eager to hear his signature raspberry — aided by a very Gene-Simmons-ish 17-pound tongue — and avid to spy his distinctive 3-meter spread of antlers.

So if you too feel that bland is grand, check out Rude Moose, appearing Thursday afternoons/evenings 4:38 pm to 5:02 pm in Kutsher’s Kebab Kafe on the Borscht Strip, right next door to Chevy’s Charming Cheese Shack.