Curry as team standout — in comedy
There once was a Warrior named Curry
Whose career came and went in a hurry He wasn’t no Stephen But still, he’s high-steppin’ On radio, on mornings, no worries!
Sorry; I don’t know what got into me. Maybe it was the wealth of info I gathered about Mark Curry. He’s the center of KBLX’s wake-up crew, dubbed the Morning Dream Team, with Victor “Big Daddy” Zaragoza and Kimmie Taylor. Zaragoza runs the controls, while Taylor juggles news, gossip, giveaways, traffic and weather.
But Curry is the undisputed star, dunking comedic shots that he writes or thinks up on the spur of the moment, drawing on his work as a stand-up comic and actor, most notably on the early-’90s ABC sitcom “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper,” portraying a former NBA player who’d become a teacher and coach.
And, yes, this Curry once was a member of the Golden State Warriors. “It’s not in my bio,” he said. “A lot of stuff isn’t in my bio.”
Maybe that’s because his signing, in 2008, was a joke. As a local newspaper reported, Curry, then 44, got a 10-day contract, the reasoning being that “Curry is thought to be so hilarious that teams will just turn over the ball due to laughter.”
In reality, Curry is stronger as a comic than as a hoopster. This morning, he’s in the KBLX studio, using a pen to write out his “What’s on Mark Curry’s Mind” segment, which goes on in minutes.
On cue, he launches into a spiel about how American celebrities should work for the government in international affairs in their down times between movies and albums.
“Sean Penn hanging with El Chapo!” he exclaims. “We been looking for how many years? … He walks in with Adidas on, in the middle of a jungle, and interviews him. We should have put a video camera on him and we could’ve caught El Chapo, using Sean Penn!” He riffs on Dennis Rodman visiting North Korea, “and Angelina Jolie can go into any country she wants. Sean went to go see Castro. Not the real Castro, but the brother Raul, but that’s close enough. Me? I’d go to Russia, get Putin straight.”
He asked, “Where are we going to send Flavor Flav?” Taylor suggested the Middle East. “Let’s send him to ISIS,” said Curry. “They’ll say, ‘We like him. He won’t put a bomb in his clock!’ ”
Curry often cracks up his partners to the point of speechlessness. It’s good radio, and they clearly admire his talents. As for how he feels about them, it’s not obvious. When management hired him, I asked, did he care who would make up his team? “Not really,” he said. “Just, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s knock it out.’ ”
He got two pros. Taylor was a producer on “The Steve Harvey Show,” handling local inserts for the syndicated program, and did a weekend DJ show. Zaragoza was, most recently, the afternoon driver.
The Harvey show ran three years on KBLX. Asked how it had performed, Taylor replied: “Not very well. There was a huge disconnect.” Especially when he was talking about Atlanta, where his show is based. “We love where we live,” said Taylor, “so we want to hear people talking about this amazing place. Now we have Victor, born and raised in San Jose, I was born and raised in San Francisco, and Mark, born and raised in Oakland. That’s as local as you can get.”
Taylor, 35, is a radio rarity. She’s been on the air for 16 years, all on KBLX. She began at KMEL, as an intern, on a “street team,” doing promo work. Zaragoza, 48, has been DJing since age 13, when he spun records at junior high, then high school dances. He saw KSOL DJ Billy Ocean doing a commercial for a broadcasting school and signed up. “And 28½ years later, here I am.”
Curry, too, has a radio background. At Cal State East Bay, he studied mass communications and had a DJ show. He served an internship at KDIA, the R&B station in Oakland, and worked on KPFA in Berkeley. “That’s where I learned how to speak,” he said.
Curry had another pivotal moment in 2006, when he suffered extensive burns in a freak accident involving an exploding aerosol can. He reportedly considered suicide after waking up from a threemonth medically induced coma.
“It was the darkest moment of my life,” he said. “I came back a new man. It was time to be a different person, a different comedian. I was protecting the ‘Mr. Cooper’ image in what I said. Now I’m relaxed, and I’m the best that I’ve ever been.”
Monkey see: For the 20th year, I am co-anchoring the telecast of the Chinese New Year Parade, and for the 16th time, Julie Haener will be doing the actual work. It’s on Saturday, Feb. 20, on KTVU, and streaming worldwide via www.KTVU.com … and, yes, Live365 has died, but the Moonalice Radio station I program rocks on, on Radionomy and by way of Moonalice. com. I’ll be monkeying around today from 9 to noon, repeating from 7 to 10 p.m.