A couple of years ago, in conversation with a childhood friend on Facebook, we began recalling the hours spent in my basement listening to the early comedy records of Bill Cosby. Suddenly, a business associate from my adult life joined in, demanding to know how we could reminisce about this, given the many allegations made against Cosby, and the one out-of-court settlement, regarding his sexual assaults on women. Because the dialogue was focused on fond memories, not Cosby himself per se, and because this associate wouldn’t let it go, I unfriended him. I did so despite the fact that I knew of the charges, believed them, and had already ceased to enjoy Cosby’s new work. At that moment, however, I just wanted reverie.

I did not then, nor do I now, countenance any of the actions with which Cosby is charged. I abhor them. I feel deeply sympathetic towards, and supportive of, any woman who may have been harassed, drugged or assaulted by him. I wish that he could stand trial for what he’s been accused of, so that he could be tried in the judicial system and not solely in the media. This is a case in which justice will likely never be done, in which there will always be unanswered questions – especially from Cosby himself, whose silence, as they say, speaks volumes.

But I can’t deny how much Cosby’s comedy meant to me in my youth. Long-unseen friends recall it readily at a distance of 40 years. The only time my brother and I came together peacefully as kids was to listen to comedy recordings, which we committed to memory. Later, when I lived with my parents for a year post-college, my family gathered in the room in our house where my godmother spent the final year of her life, promptly at 8 pm on Thursday, to watch The Cosby Show.

So what do I do with treasured recollections in which an alleged predator played a central role? How can I even remember the work with warmth – work which in and of itself seems timeless in much of the material – even as I disavow its creator?

Audiences in England faced these same questions when the pedophilia scandal at the BBC arose, first over the late Jimmy Savile and a bit later over Rolf Harris. I followed those stories in horror and disbelief, though it was Harris whose work I actually knew: his novelty hit “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” was a staple on the Dr. Demento radio show, another touchstone for me. In the case of Harris, who also became known as an artist, communities began removing his paintings and eradicating his murals. This is akin to what TV Land has just done by removing The Cosby Show from their line-up, to dissociate themselves from the now irrevocably tarnished brand and likely because no advertiser would accept the association. But in each case, those who were entertained, unknowing, must reconsider their relationship, to the men, and to the work. Let’s not forget that Stephen Collins, who portrayed the father on the popular family drama 7th Heaven, is under scrutiny for what appears to be self-admitted incidents of child abuse, surfaced during his contentious divorce proceedings.

In the cases of Savile, Harris, Collins and Cosby, the issue is criminal actions against others. Unconscionable. As an aside, it’s worth recalling that Paul Reubens was immediately shunned two decades ago following his arrest for masturbating in a porn theatre – a crime, at odds with his role as a Saturday morning children’s performer, but in that case a victimless one. Though he managed to secure acting roles intermittently, it’s only in the past few years that his Pee Wee Herman persona has been publicly embraced once again. I wonder whether his resurrection would have been possible had his transgression occurred in the era of social media – or whether he might have been rescued by it. Certainly it is social media which has allowed the long-standing allegations against Cosby to engage the public consciousness at last.

I could go underground with my appreciation of Cosby’s work, but that feels hypocritical. I cannot rewrite my past, even as it is – and should be – impossible to reconcile it with what has reemerged in the past few weeks, with greater traction than ever before. Given the enormous influence of The Cosby Show, I’m certainly far from the only person in this confused state; I suspect my affinity for the comedy recordings may be somewhat more rarified, especially among those younger than I am. No doubt I Spy and Fat Albert fans are experiencing profound dissonance as well. In fact, I hope they are.

I normally write because I have something very specific I want to say. In this case, I write because I’m grappling with deeply conflicted feelings. What do we all do when our childhood heroes are alleged, or revealed, to be profoundly different from the work and personae for which they became famous? How do we stand with victims, and against all such crimes, yet harbor genuinely warm memories created by the same artist? I can rethink my feelings about Cosby the man, and I have, but I don’t know that I can rethink my childhood, and the role he played in it. Should I? Can you? And if we truly can’t, where does that leave us? Are we hypocrites, or dupes, or forever divided as truth intrudes, maybe forcing us to even rewrite our own memories.

Addendum, 5 pm, November 20: As I discuss this post on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, another corollary presents itself, though its not as clearcut. Phil Spector was convicted of murder, yet no one seems to shun the classic records he made as a producer. Is it because he’s not the named artist, and so the line is less clear? But let’s remember, whatever Cosby has done, his alleged crimes aren’t Phylicia Rashad’s, or Lisa Bonet’s, or Robert Culp’s, and so on. Must their work be excised and shunned because of their co-star’s actions? For that matter, have people stopped watching the Police Squad movies because of O.J. Simpson? It may be difficult not to view them through the prism of true-life revelations, but there seem to be no correct or consistent actions or reactions.

My parents were not theatergoers and my youthful memories are not filled with reveries of family trips to New York to see shows. I can remember being taken to the theatre only twice as a youth by my parents, once in 1969 in New Haven (Fiddler on the Roof, national tour) and once in about 1975 on Broadway (The Magic Show). Yet there was something embedded in my DNA which made me interested in performance; I was writing plays (almost all adaptations of existing works) in elementary school with very little frame of reference and undoubtedly even less skill.

I longed to be an actor, and vividly remember my envy of Danny Bonaduce on The Partridge Family, thinking if he could be on TV, so could I. This was a bit odd, because I was a rather socially awkward child who didn’t mix well with most kids in my elementary years; I read constantly and had to be pushed outside into fresh air, where I invariably kept reading. Unlike many drawn to performing, music didn’t have a big role in my childhood, outside of Top 40 AM fare once I had my own little transistor radio. My parents didn’t have a record collection to speak of; I do recall my mother’s beloved two-disc set of Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and some assorted children’s records, such as the Mary Poppins soundtrack and Danny Kaye’s Mommy, Give Me a Drink Of Water and Tubby the Tuba. Cast recordings, which loom large in the memories of theatre pros, were absent, save for Fiddler on the Roof (culturally imperative, but rarely played) and West Side Story (likewise, but we only listened to “Dear Officer Krupke”).

So I’ve often wondered how I managed to be cast in lead roles in each and every show (save one) that I auditioned for in junior high, high school, community theatre and college, and why being on stage or in speaking in front of large groups has never frightened me. I’ve come to understand that part of the appeal, and the ease, came from the stage offering the exact opposite of day to day life. On stage, I always knew what to say and when to say it, and when I did it right, I was rewarded with laughter and applause. It was a startling contrast from the uncertainty of casual interaction. Where did I learn this skill? Comedy records.

As a tween and teen in the early 70s, in the pre home video era, I was completely entranced by comedy recordings both current and from the relatively recent past.  My brother and I came together primarily over our basement record player and the comedy collection scavenged from yard sales (and Monty Python on PBS). We had a bunch of the earliest Bill Cosby albums, the deeply politically incorrect Jose Jimenez In Orbit, a Smothers Brothers disc and (purchased new, smuggled in) George Carlin’s AM/FM and Class Clown. These are the ones that come to mind; there may have been more.

We listened to these albums over and over as if they were music, and reached the point where we knew entire routines by heart. Not just the words, but the pacing, the inflections, the comics impersonations of other characters and performers. Each routine was a song, and we would recite along with the records. We worked to perfect Carlin’s Spike Jones “hiccup” before we’d ever heard a Spike Jones record. We were mesmerized by them, long after the surprise of the jokes had faded; of course, the contraband Carlin album made us very adventuresome among our peers because of its “dirty” language (we were perhaps 12 or 13 at the time).

I never of thought about these records as scripts, but they were almost sacred texts to us. If we learn to perform first by imitating and later by finding our own style, then we were taking a suburban master class from performers at places like The hungry i in San Francisco before we’d ever been on  an airplane and before we would have been old enough to gain admittance even had we managed the trek. The lessons ran deep: a couple of years ago, a gift set of Carlin CDs accompanied me on a road trip, and my wife was both amused and annoyed by my ability to recall every moment with precision, despite my not having heard the material in many years. Did I ever find a style of my own, moving beyond mimicry? That’s for others to say.

My actual performing years were brief, covering 1977 to 1981, 10 shows in all. I was perhaps the fussiest Oscar Madison in history, since most see me as a Felix; I probably shouted more than any one of the 12 Angry Men as Juror 3; I managed to make the characters of Will Parker and Albert Peterson the most inept dancers in their history. I suspect I was best in roles that called for comedy over movement or voice: the Woody Allen stand-in Axel Magee in Don’t Drink The Water, the meek Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler, and the dirty old man Senex in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (my college’s newspaper noted a distinct Jewish paternalism in my performance at age 19).  Whatever I had, I owed not to the performers from the Golden Age of Theatre, who I would only come to know later, but to the stand-up comedians who were the writers and performers I took close to heart – if for no other reasons than that they were repeatedly accessible on the technology that was available to me.

I do not suggest that aspiring performers should run out and start learning comedy albums by heart, though one could do worse for understanding timing and pace. Of course, now we can watch and not merely listen to comedians and work out their full routines step by step; I wonder whether the visuals would have added to our mimicry or distracted us from the deep concentration on words and delivery that took place as a ritual in our cluttered basement, our nightclub of the mind. But I am sure of one thing: there are many ways to find one’s way to the stage, and mine was through the storytelling and punchlines of some modern masters of the comedy genre.

P.S. My vocal coaches were Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, and Allan Sherman. But that’s another story.