Live from New York … it’s Ron Stach?
No, the 1980 Saint John’s University graduate isn’t a famous former cast member like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey and the many other icons for whom “Saturday Night Live” has served as a career launch pad over the years.
But Stach – a humanities major who retired in 2018 after a 30-year career in the management consulting business – did once appear on the late-night NBC sketch comedy series, which celebrates its 50th anniversary with a prime-time special on Feb. 16.
That moment in the sun came during the May 17, 1986, episode hosted by famed author and journalist Jimmy Breslin. Stach was one of the back-up singers in a sketch performed by then-cast member Danitra Vance, reprising a role he’d already been playing as part of Vance’s nightclub and off-Broadway variety shows.
“I was terrified,” recalls Stach, a Connecticut native who attended St. Olaf as a freshman and sophomore before transferring to SJU for his junior and senior years.
“I don’t think I slept at all the night before, and the show comes on so late at night, so we sat around all day waiting. I think we had a quick run-through earlier in the day. Then suddenly you’re out there and it’s live. You can’t stop if anything happens. You just have to keep going.”
Stach first met Vance after moving to New York in 1982.
“It was really just by chance,” he said. “I’d always been involved with music. At Saint John’s, I sang with the men’s choir and I played clarinet. So that had always been a big part of my life. But fast forward a few years and I’m in New York. I’d never lived in a big city like that before and I was making a living by working for LexisNexis (a data analytics company).
“It turned out that one of my co-workers was (Vance’s) musical director. She hadn’t been discovered yet and they were doing gigs in little night clubs. She was from Chicago, and she’d originally come to New York to be a classical actress. But then she started writing and performing her own material.”
Stach was recruited to join the act as part of what were billed as the Mell-O White Boys – the backing singers who would join Vance (who was Black) on stage during her sets.
“This was around the same time that Whoopi Goldberg and other Black women were starting to make names for themselves in comedy,” Stach recalls. “But it was still really hard for them. Breaking through wasn’t easy.”
Yet Vance began drawing more and more attention, which allowed Stach the chance to join her on a three-month stint on the West Coast as part of an act that drew on Vance’s comedic talents and her training as an actress.
“I didn’t want to just do comedy just to make people laugh,” Vance said in an interview with National Public Radio in 1988. “I wanted to do something that was thought-provoking. When I got up there, people were laughing a little bit. But they were mostly trying to figure out what I was doing. Because it wasn’t stand-up. It was more like stand-up theater.”
That mix eventually drew the attention of Saturday Night Live scouts, leading to an offer to join the cast prior to the 1985-86 season. The program was in transition at the time. Original producer Lorne Michaels – who had stepped away after season five in 1980 – had returned.
The cast from the previous season – which included names like Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Jim Belushi and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss – had departed. In their place, Michaels built a cast consisting of unknown comedic talent like Jon Lovitz, Damon Wayans, Terry Sweeney, Nora Dunn and Dennis Miller, alongside established younger actors like Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Joan Cusack and an older Randy Quaid.
Then there was Vance, who made history as the first Black woman to become an SNL cast member.
“She was a trailblazer,” Stach said. “And she was so talented. She was able to make people laugh with the material she wrote, but it was poignant at the same time. It pointed out a lot of the inequities that existed in society then and still do now.”
Vance – who passed away at age 40 in 1994 after a battle with breast cancer – recalled her time on the show as challenging, as the writers often cast her in roles she felt were stereotypical or didn’t allow her to use the full range of her talents.
“It was the most wonderful/horrible year of my whole life, or the most horrible/wonderful,” she said in the NPR interview. “It was everything you ever wanted and a lot of the things you never wanted.”
But Vance was writing for herself as well, and those pieces occasionally made air. That was how she was able to bring Stach and his fellow Mell-O White Boys aboard late in the season.
It’s a night Stach looks back on as a bit of a blur.
“I think we may have met Robert Downey Jr. and some of the other cast, but it was just in passing,” Stach said. “Everyone is rushing from here to there.”
Unlike many of his classmates at SJU, for whom the early years of SNL (featuring cast members like John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner) were appointment viewing, Stach said he never gave the show much of a thought until he actually appeared on it.
“A lot of the people I went to school with loved it,” he said. “But I was in kind of a different space. It wasn’t really my thing.”
Still, it was hard not to be excited about appearing live on national television, even for someone who still suffered from anxiety about performing in public.
“I remember we couldn’t see the (studio) audience,” Stach said. “It was so dark. You knew people were out there, and you could hear them reacting, but you couldn’t really see their faces.
“Then, just like that, it was over. I think we hung around for the final goodbyes. But it passed by pretty quickly.”
In the years that followed, Stach kept in occasional touch with Vance – who went on to appear in several movies and perform in her own productions until the time of her death. But he moved on into his own career.
And, until recently, he didn’t look back on his one night at SNL, even though the skit circulates on YouTube and remains part of the episode, which is available for streaming on Peacock.
“It was really just in the last six months that I had the chance to watch it,” said Stach, who now resides with his husband in Delaware. “I’d never seen it before that.
“At first, I was cringing. But it definitely brought back a lot of visceral memories. Especially of how scared I felt being up there. I was never comfortable being on stage, even back then when I had been doing it a lot. So when I watch now, it’s like looking back at a version of myself I barely recognize.”
Stach continues to sing and play clarinet at his church, and while he hasn’t watched much of SNL since his appearance, he said he’ll always take pride at having once been on the show.
“It wasn’t a high point of my life or anything like that,” he said. “But looking back at it reminds me that I can step outside my comfort zone. I was terrified, but I got through it and it turned out OK. So SNL really reminds me that anything is possible.”
