Mel Brooks remembers growing up poor and exotic fruit cocktails.
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TRANSCRIPT
- We had many relatives but none that really had money.
Except Saul Silverstone, an emigre from South Africa who married my father's older sister, Martha.
They had money and they lived at Hancock Place in Brooklyn in a beautiful big apartment house with elevators, which my brother, Bernie and I snuck away and we just rode up and down for about an hour on the elevators.
We couldn't believe it.
You pushed something and you went up, you pushed something and you went down.
So anyway, they were serving us an appetizer beginning, kind of a fruit cocktail made up of melon balls.
We were amazed, we never heard of or seen a thing like this.
It was very nice of Martha and Saul to do this.
So we were eating them and then I saw the rinds, R-I-N-D-S.
The rinds, the cantaloupe, the watermelon and the honeydew.
I said, my God, look at all the stuff that's in the middle that they didn't get.
They didn't get all these little pointed.
You know, when you take the ball out, you leave some things around it.
Never forgot that.
To this day I think it's a waste of melon.
