THE BIZ : Driving Ambition

Reed Berry is pretending that he’s an old lady with a walker trying to step up onto the center divider in a busy street. As his traffic-school students watch, he loses his balance, tumbles backward and then, midfall, twirls, points an accusing finger at his class and declares, “But you didn’t wait for her to get to the other side. You went and put your foot on the accelerator. So what have we got?”

Shouts the class in trained unison: “Road pizza!”

Berry will tell you that he’s an actor, stand-up comedian and radio announcer. But when he’s between jobs, he teaches at the Improv Traffic School, one of the dozens of traffic-schools-with-a-twist that have sprung up over the years. “It’s a great place to network,” he says. “We get producers, actors, anchormen, game show developers--all types of entertainment people in here.”

But unlike many of the other stars-in-waiting who teach traffic safety, Berry has parlayed his gig into a handful of commercials and TV and film roles. What he really wants, though, is radio fame. “Give me a four-hour talk-radio show, and I’d be perfectly happy,” says Berry, who says his program would be a blend of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

Until some radio executive sees a need for that hard-to-imagine combination, Berry is only a little less than perfectly happy as a traffic school instructor. “It’s better than a comedy club,” he says. “The audience can’t drink and they can’t leave.”