YOUTH '93 EXPO: A HALLOWEEN WITH A HEALTHY MESAGE

Michael Pritchard was kicked off the Southeast Missouri State University football team 21 years ago for being a bad influence. Much of his beery collegiate career was spent "finding out how to get home from Twin Trees," a once-popular party spot for collegians.

Now a nationally-known comedian, Pritchard will be back in town Saturday night trying to steer the youth of the region in a more positive direction.

He will be here for "Youth Expo '93: A Weekend of Halloween Hauntings," and it's expected to draw at least 1,000 young people and maybe many more to a weekend of music, sports, comedy and just a bit of serious talk.

Abbie Crites, director of Youth Expo, said it's meant to spotlight both the activities available to youths and the need for more.

"We're saying, Look, there are so many other things you can do. You don't need to limit yourself to drugs and alcohol," she said.

The event is being sponsored by the Southeast Missouri State University department of health and leisure, chaired by Edward Leoni.

It kicks off tonight with a free forum titled "Substance Abuse and Society" featuring state Sen. Peter Kinder, professor Brian Toy of the university department of health and leisure, and the Rev. Scott Moon. The forum begins at 7 in Academic Auditorium.

A Battle of the Bands Jam begins at 7 p.m. Friday at the Student Recreation Center. Nine local bands -- Magic Nose Goblins, Desolation Child, Paperclip Nun, Brave Little Toasters, Papa Aborigine, Midnight Rain, Classified, River and Brouhaha -- will vie for more than $2,000 worth of cash and prizes. Admission is $1.

A free shuttle will be provided to the Cape Girardeau Parks and Recreation Haunted House at the A.C. Brase Arena Building. Admission to the Haunted House is $3 for adults and $2 for children 12 and under.

From noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, youths can participate in a variety of free sports contests at the Student Recreation Center. They include an obstacle course, wall climbing, drama workshops, a fast-pitch contest, free-throw contest, hot-shot contest, sack races, three-legged races and Walleyball.

The free finale will be held from 7:30-midnight Saturday in Houck Field House, with the winner and runner-up of the Battle of the Bands warming up for Pritchard. Costumes are encouraged.

Afterward, participants are encouraged to attend a Student Activities Council-sponsored showing of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" beginning at midnight at the University Center.

The 6-6, 290-pound Pritchard didn't make it as a defensive tackle on the football team, but he did graduate from Southeast with a degree in psychology. He became a juvenile officer first in St. Louis and later in San Francisco.

"It's really easy to get a job in corrections when you're 6-foot-6," Pritchard said by telephone from his San Francisco Bay Area home.

In 1980 he decided "I needed to find better ways to occupy my time than being in bars." He chose stand-up comedy. "I was still in bars but I was completely sober," he said.

But it was kids who convinced him he really was funny. "I worked in the maximum security section with some of the toughest gang members in the world. They used to laugh really hard."

They encouraged him to enter the San Francisco Stand-up Comedy Competition, an event that brought Robin Williams to the attention of the public a couple of years later. Williams finished second the year he competed. Pritchard won.

He did stand-up tours until 1986, and appeared as a gay disco dancer in an Emmy-winning episode of the TV series "Taxi." But it wasn't enough for him.

"I realized I could be doing that forever, and I wanted to do something with what I'd been given," he said. "I feel like God gave me a gift and I want to use it in working with kids."

He performs almost anywhere there are kids of any age -- elementary schools, colleges and in between. So far he has made the biggest mark for himself through his work in the acclaimed PBS series "The Power of Choice."

His message is that "everything in life is a choice. One brother becomes a doctor, the other goes to prison. One chooses to do the right thing, one the wrong. I emphasize to awaken to the choice."

As someone who has at times made wrong choices, he recognizes that youths can't always be expected to make the right ones.

"Sometimes they may always choose what's harmful. But they have to take responsibility for it."

Pritchard, who has children of his own, thinks teenagers have gotten an undeserved reputation in the media as cynical and mean.

"I realize when I go to prisons that all that cynicism is just scar tissue from their pain," he says. "The media are just as cynical. The media see a lot of the debilitating, self-destructive behavior and key into it."

Pritchard, a St. Louis native, said his views about children and how to help them didn't evolve from "hip and trendy California ... They started from my life in Southeast Missouri."

In San Francisco he has become something of a community treasure for his selflessness. He was chosen to emcee when Pope Paul II spoke to 80,000 in Candlestick Park.

"My wife says, I thought I married a comedian and I married Mother Teresa," Pritchard cracked.

In 1989 the San Francisco Examiner Sunday magazine ran a cover story headlined "Michael Pritchard for Saint."

Pritchard takes that kind of praise with a laugh: "Certainly, anybody who went to Southeast Missouri with me knows I was no saint."