Show family mourns loss

You could tell they were a family up there. It was one of the things that made “Bottom’s Up” more than just a collection of old blackout sketches and creaky vaudeville jokes.

Breck Wall kept his variety show going off and on in Las Vegas since 1964. His two sidekicks, David Harris and Sue Motsinger, had been part of the gang since 1976, the year Carrie Proffitt was born.

“To think that they’ve been with him as long as I’ve been alive is kind of crazy,” she says.

Proffitt joined the family when “Bottom’s Up” went into the Flamingo in 2000. “I was just one of the dancers in the show,” she says. Wall “took all of us in as his children, and that’s what he called us: his kids.”

But Proffitt turned out to be the most important addition to Wall’s family as he gradually lost his faculties to Alzheimer’s disease. She stayed with him until he died in November and is now at the helm of today’s memorial tribute and show at 3 p.m. at the South Point.

“That’s what he did to all of us. Took us under his wing and took good care of all of us,” she says. “I felt that I needed to pay it forward.”

For 36 years, Wall oversaw the show’s content while his business partner, Patrick Maes, took care of the money. Maes died in May 2004, four months before “Bottom’s Up” left the Flamingo. Wall was faced with the financial side of producing just as he was starting to exhibit memory problems.

“People were starting to take advantage of him, and he was making bad business decisions,” Proffitt says. “He was paying the show bills but fell behind in his house bill. He was getting really confused.”

He also was taking worse deals to keep the show alive in small venues, “using his savings account to do what he loved, really,” she says. “People think Breck died with lots of money, and he really died really, really poor.”

Proffitt helped Wall with his business affairs and, as his condition deteriorated, gradually took control of his life. For a week, she even had him in her home the same time she and her husband had a new baby. “Somebody needed to take care of him, and I just felt like I was in a position where I could.”

Wall told friends his father was an alcoholic who deserted the family, and his mother died early. “He didn’t have any family. Really, ‘Bottom’s Up’ was his family,” she says.

“There were a lot of people who I thought would have stepped up (to take care of him) who didn’t in the end,” she says. “But I’m not going to resent it, because I was able to and cherish it and have a lot of really fun memories. Breck, even the last week before he died, was having a casting call.”

With his family, until the end.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.