Oscar Goodman grabs tail to tell Las Vegas tale
In a moment that brought to mind Carrot Top’s stage act, wouldbe prop comic Oscar Goodman cut himself off mid-sentence Thursday night and asked, “Where’s my rat?”
A member of the staff at Oscar’s Beef Booze & Broads then hustled off, returning moments later with a large, rubber rat. Goodman grabbed the rodent by the tale as the former Las Vegas mayor spoke to a group of 90 guests during his most recent dinner series talk, titled “The Hidden Owners of Las Vegas,” at his eponymous restaurant at the Plaza.
“My clients knew that I had an aversion to informants and cooperating witnesses, people who made deals with the devil so they could live comfortably in the witness protection program,” Goodman said.” “They were rats. So I used it in front of juries to demonstrate how law enforcement used these very bad people who were being used as informants.”
The rat originally was painted red, as if bloodied, and was a keepsake in Goodman’s City Hall office while he was mayor. The fake blood scared some of his younger visitors, so one day after work Goodman brought the rat home and asked his wife, Carolyn, “What’s the best the film and announcement of his stage show, I learned something about my old friend: He stashes tins full of black licorice nuggets, frequently offering them to guests at his Las Vegas home.
“My mother used to feed it to me if she suspected I was getting a cold,” Lewis said during an interview this month. “It worked.” SPACE MAN MARK
Mark Shunock has established a GoFundMe page to finance The Space, the 9,000-square-foot events center off Polaris and Harmon avenues at 3460 Cavaretta Ct. Shunock hopes to raise $300,000 for the project and plans to use the center as the next home for Mondays Dark, his monthly charity show currently staged at Vinyl. At this writing, donations are approaching $12,500.
The plan is to move Mondays Dark to the Space in January, and Shunock says he plans to hold the charity show twice a month. He’s locking in 22 local charities for 2017. John Katsilometes’ column runs Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the A section, and Fridays in Neon. He also hosts “Kats! On The Radio” Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on KUNV 91.5-FM and appears Wednesdays at 11 a.m. with Dayna Roselli on KTNV Channel 13. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on Twitter, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.