A Blast from the Past

EAST PEORIA — As a child we look up to television as a way of confronting or taking us away on exciting adventures and what the audience at Illinois Central College saw was a blast from the past.

On Feb. 1, ICC presented its Guest Artist series of Mike Toomey’s “TV and Me” at the Performing Art Center. Staring the standup comic Toomey, who grew up watching television and reliving the golden age of television of the 60’s and 70’s.

The show started six minutes late due to weather, but that didn’t stop anyone from coming to the show. We first saw a quick game show quiz where a couple of audience members had come up and try to guess some TV trivia from shows like “The Brady Bunch” and others.

As the show progressed, Toomey came out and did his stand up. He talked about growing up and watching a lot of television as a young kid. He couldn’t wait for those special Saturday morning shows because, as we all should know, those are or were the best of times as a child to watch.

The one thing that Toomey did during his act was impressions of characters from the TV shows. He performed voice impressions from Andy Griffin to Adam West as Batman (the 60’s version) and Mr. Rogers, just to name a few.

“I thought [Toomey’s] act was outstanding,” said James Peterson, 45, of Peoria. “His impressions of television characters and actors were just out of this world and sound like the originals.”

Probably the one bit that stood out during the show was when Toomey was talking about the series “Gilligan’s Island” theme song and how it had two versions of it. He performed a bit of a twist to it with his own version by performing it to the music from Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby.”

“I couldn’t stop laughing,” said Sharon Goodwill, 75, of East Peoria. “His performance really just blew me away.”

As the show concluded, the audience gave a standing ovation. Peterson mentioned that shows like “Mister Ed,” “Hawaii Five-O” and other shows they grew up on really don’t leave you and what Toomey has done was make sure that they live on in a humorous way.