Today is October 3 and this date marks a major anniversary for me. Twenty-three years ago, on October 3, 1985, my family threw me a surprise party. Actually, the phrase they used was “intervention,” but the point is, my mother, my three brothers and my sister had a lot to say to me about what they perceived as my addiction to drugs and alcohol. Maybe there was some validity to what they were saying, but to tell you the truth I was too hung-over to comprehend any of it. I just wanted them to finish up so I could go have a cocktail. It was 9am after all.

But I never did have that next cocktail, not on that day, or on any day since. Instead, in a rare instance of common sense, I took the one-way ticket they gave me and boarded a nonstop flight from New York City to a mythical land called “Minneapolis,” which until that point I had only known as the location of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I had always assumed that I was incapable of functioning anywhere off the island of Manhattan, but it turns out that the state of Minnesota, with its plethora of rehab centers, is a great place to send someone in a state of drug and alcohol dependency, which was the general consensus about me, although I had always been too drunk and/or stoned to develop my own opinion about this. I ended up living in that mythical land for nine years. New York is where I was born and raised; Los Angeles is where I currently reside, but Minneapolis is the place where my life was saved.

I am tempted to give you all the sordid details about my addiction and recovery, but in the time it’s taken me to type this sentence, several thousand books have been written and published about somebody else’s addiction and recovery, so I will spare you. But I will say that every good thing that has happened to be in the twenty-three years since that particular October 3 I owe to sobriety (like, for instance, just off the top of my head, the fact that I continued to be alive all these twenty-three years).

The move to Minneapolis and the sobriety that came with it resulted in a ton of great things happening to me, not the least of which was being “TV’s Frank” on MST3K. Here is a partial list of some of those great moments in my life that recovery made possible:

Dressing in a Joe Besser / Stinky / Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit and licking a giant lollipop while skipping across Deep 13.

Getting placed inside a giant “Operation” game and having my body repeatedly “bonked” while I repeatedly said “Thank you!”

Announcing on national television that I was going to throw a “Hat Party” and predicting that my hat would be “The grandest of them all!”

Screaming at the top of my lungs, “WHO IS MERRIT STONE!!!”

Singing “Nummy Muffin Kookle Butter.”

Parading around in a grandma dress as “Auntie McFrank.”

Wearing a unitard and doing a goofy interpretive dance in front of thousands of people at a live Mystery Science Theater 3000 show.

Spending my 40th birthday in a giant crib and making gurgling infant noises as part of my portrayal of a full-grown baby on an episode of “Sabrina The Teenage Witch.”

Yes, sobriety has given me so much, but more than anything else, it’s given me back my dignity.