'Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' name-checks Bellmore's Mepham High

Bellmore's Wellington C. Mepham High School, which legendary comic Lenny Bruce attended before leaving at 16 to join the Navy during World War II, got a shoutout in the third episode of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" season 4, in a monologue by Bruce himself.

"I got a story for you," the Mineola-born Bruce (played by Emmy Award winner Luke Kirby) tells his stand-up comic protégé Miriam "Midge" Maisel (fellow Emmy winner Rachel Brosnahan) in the episode titled "Everything Is Bellmore," written by Daniel Palladino and series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. Miriam has been emceeing at a strip club, where the response by impatient drunks has been less than overwhelming, and she's doubting her ability to go on.

"Back in high school — Mepham High, in Bellmore, out on Long Island — I took this speech class," Bruce begins, describing an assignment to give a five-minute extemporaneous talk on why zoos are bad.

"Now, I'm feeling fairly confident about the subject," he tells her, "so I start my little spiel, going on about how animals shouldn't be in cages and how we're the real animals for putting them there in the first place, when all of a sudden I get beaned in the head by an eraser. I check to see who threw it, and it was the ... teacher."

Bruce describes more objects being thrown at him — chalk, crumpled paper, a half-eaten apple — "but I soldier on and get through the five minutes. Afterwards, I ask my teacher, 'What was that all about?' And she says, 'Mr. Schneider' — for I was Schneider at the time — 'Mr. Schneider, I was simply training you to block out distractions. It's your job to stay focused despite whatever's coming at you, and you did good.' "

Calling it a valuable lesson, he tells Miriam, "It trained me for what I do now. So tonight, Mrs. Maisel, your version of erasers and chalk and half-eaten apples will be me staying for your gig."

"No," she protests. "This is isn't Bellmore." Responds Lenny, allegorically, "Everything is Bellmore."

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider in 1925, grew up in various relatives' homes, including on Hughes Street in Bellmore, after his parents' divorce. Living with his father, Myron, he attended what was then Bellmore Grammar School in North Bellmore. But, wrote Bruce biographer Albert Goldman in The New York Times in 1971, Myron during these Depression years "made very little working in his brother's shoe store in Freeport, Long Island. Sometimes Bruce slept with his father in the back of the store, sometimes he was farmed out to relatives."

Bruce lived for a time with the Fred Dengler family on their chicken farm on Wantagh Avenue. Fred's nephew Herbert, a Mepham High graduate, told the alumni association in 2009 that Bruce worked mostly at the farm stand and was "a born storyteller. Uncle Fred had no children (a daughter dying at an early age), and was delighted to have a boy living on the farm." According to the alumni association, Bruce attended Mepham High from Sept. 1940 to March 2, 1942, leaving to join the Navy. He served aboard the USS Brooklyn in North Africa, and following his tempestuous comedy career died of a drug overdose in 1966.

He is not listed among the more than 250 inductees into Mepham High School's Who's Who, for which the alumni association maintains a plaque in the school's foyer.

Neither Mepham High Principal Eric Gomez nor representatives for the Prime Video series responded to Newsday requests for comment.