Oscar night!

A bit of an anniversary for me.  Seventeen years ago on Oscar night I was working on a film script I was going to send Disney in an attempt to snag a Disney screenwriting fellowship.  I was also doing my very best to keep Anheuser-Busch profitable.  To this day I blame myself for Busch having to sell to the Belgium folks.  I decided to move on with my life and abandoned poor Anheuser-Busch and my beer drinking ways.  The people at Busch were brave and hung in there for a while but without my constant support they were doomed.

I digress.

I paced myself through the day drinking a twelve pack of Bud before I started the second twelve pack I was going to sip during the show.  To keep with the spirit of the night I was going to work on the screenplay while I watched the pregame show, with Barbra Walters, and actual broadcast.
At the time I was working on a Brother word processor.  You wanted to save a file you did it with a 3.5 floppy disc and the daisy wheel printer, built into the machine, made enough noise to wake the dead.  All I had to do was a little proofing and a little polishing and my script was ready to send off.

To this day I don’t know what I did wrong that night.

It may have been my thoughts of the movie Babe winning Best Picture.  I’d promised I would kill myself if the pig won Best Picture.  I didn’t want to live in a world where a talking pig had an Oscar.  I could live with James Cromwell winning Supporting Actor in Babe but the pig winning Best Picture was too much.  Kevin Spacey won Supporting Actor for messing with my head in The Usual Suspects.
 Christopher McQuarrie, won for Original Screenplay for suspects.  Emma Thompson won for Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility.  In 1995 the hottest writer in Hollywood was Jane Austin.  Ms. Austin is coming around again with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies later this year.
Maybe I was thinking too much about Jane Austin, or how I was going to kill myself if Babe won Best Picture, maybe it was me thinking too much about Verbal Kint and who was Kaiser Sosa, or maybe it had something to do with me starting the second twelve pack of the night early.

Whatever it was I did was wrong.  Very … very wrong.
I deleted all one hundred and twenty-six pages of my screenplay.  No backup.
I briefly considered killing myself early, but decided to go to the fire escape and have a cigarette and think about what I’d done.  The script was supposed to be at the happiest place and freakin’ earth in ten days.  What I did do was took a deep breath, finished the twelve pack, sweated out the end of the Oscars, and rooted against the pig picture. I was also getting ready to go to war against the clock and myself.
I told myself if I didn’t dilly-dally I’d be able to make it on time.  The good news is that the Brother word processor was portable.  The bad news is the damn thing was the size of a midsized suitcase and weighed about twenty pounds.  The Brother went everywhere with me that week.  That’s why to this day my right arm is three inches longer than my left.

The script got finished in five days and sent out in six days and did very well for itself.  Out of thousands of entries we were one of the twenty that made it to the semi-finals.  Thank god we didn’t get any farther than that.  Working hard for little money and less love is one thing but working for the Mouse Brigade is something else entirely.

Babe lost Best Picture that night to Braveheart so I guess maybe, if you have a nasty streak, you might say a pig did go home with the Oscar.

Funny is serious business.

I started writing out of desperation. 

I was working with a little theatre group that was always strapped for cash.  Great ideas and low cash flow is the nature of the small theatre beast.  I’d never written a play, but I knew how they worked.  I wrote a play, a comedy, and it worked like a charm.  The audience loved it and it made money for the theatre.  I wrote another play but the theatre closed before they produced the second.  A friend, John Burkhart, stepped in and he needed a script for a theatre he’d started at Eugene T. Mahoney State Park in southeastern Nebraska. 

Then he needed another script. 

Then he expanded the season and needed a two more.

For the show we did in the fall I acted and directed and a fine time was had by all.

Over the course of seven years I’d written sixteen shows and seen a lot of people laughing.  Even sweeter was the fact I was actually getting paid to write, and direct, and act.  It

Then I got the idea that I wanted to try something new.  Move on to bigger things as a writer.  My sixteenth show had just opened and we were getting great audience response.  Kids from the ages of five to seventy-five were laughing and howling at the jokes.  For a writer there is nothing more satisfying than the immediate feedback of hearing a large group of people laughing at the jokes you’ve written.

We opened the show in late August 2001 and were scheduled to perform Friday, Saturday, and Sundays.  On Sunday, September 9^th, we finished our matinee, patted ourselves on the back for a great show, and said our goodbyes until we got together again for our Friday night show.

On Tuesday, September 11^th we were pretty sure our season had finished.

The towers were gone.

Flight 93 was gone.

There was a large hole in the Pentagon.

By that evening there were no planes in the sky.  There were very few cars on the streets.  We were all waiting for the next shoe to drop.  I was still waiting with my wife and daughter for final causality figures, but it was changing by the hour … by the minute.  Our daughter was four years old and wanted to know what was going on.

I’d lost my words.  Mom stepped in and said, “Some very bad people did something very bad and hurt a lot of people.”  I thought those were the most eloquent words I’d heard on the matter. 

By Thursday, after a few phone calls between cast members, we decided to do the show again on Friday.  We had no idea if anybody would show up and frankly we didn’t really care.  Performing the show would be an escape.  The show would be a little time we could spend away from the news.

We started the show on time and had about two thirds of the house full.  I wondered if it was going to be possible for us to be funny.  The script we were performing was funny.  How funny would we seem to a large group of people in mourning?

And then it happened.

The people sitting out there in the dark started laughing.

They started having fun.

After each show we would meet with the audience in the lobby of the theatre to shake hands and say hello.  This time it was different for us.  We were shaking hands and hearing the audience thank us for doing the show for them.  Some of them were driving back home because their flight back home had been canceled.  Some of them thanked us for being there and doing the show.  Thanks for making them laugh.  To show them that it was still possible to laugh. 

For a brief time we took our audiences on a guided tour of premeditated silliness.  During that brief time they were able to forget the horrors they had seen, and lightened the load they were carrying.  The rest of our season went on the same way.

That is when I gave up my plans for retirement from the funny business.

Writing funny is serious business.

You're best friend may be a cat. Seriously!

It’s not that I don’t like dogs. 

I just rather not have to live with one, or having one jumping on me, or licking me in inappropriate places at inappropriate times.  I prefer cats to dogs.  Cats are more compact, more independent, and more of a challenge than dogs. 

I realize there are small and independent breeds of dog but small dogs scare me.

Small dogs freaking get away with murder! 

When you see a child rampaging and yelping through the highways and byways of life you see disapproving glares and hear comments about how some people should learn how to control their children. 

Small dogs can leap at your face and use their sharp little teeth to rip out your throat and you’re the bad guy if you even try gently to swat them away.       

Most dogs are just too easy.  

They’re like the unpopular kid in school who agreed to anything just to be liked.

I still taste plastic every time I see a Frisbee.

Why else would any animal consent to be dressed up for Halloween or a matching outfit for family pictures. Don’t try to tell me people don’t do this twisted stuff.  I’ve seen pictures.

If you want a better view into the nature of the universe and the human condition you need to live with a cat.  If you’d like to have a successful relationship with another human being you need to be trained by a cat. 

Cats usually leave you alone until they need something.

Cats enjoy closeness but only on their schedule.

Once they are curled up with you they can either be content to keep you pinned down for hours or decide you are intruding on their space and demand you go somewhere else. 

If a cat somehow does something ungraceful that you happen to witness the cat will somehow make it your fault.   

Cats will arbitrarily decide you’ve done something wrong and punish you for it at their convenience.

Not only will living with a cat give you extraordinary insight into the way we treat each other but, if you’re a guy, they can help you find romance.  If a woman sees that a man can successfully and happily live with a cat they may get the idea you can successfully live with them.

When my wife and I started dating she and my cat circled each other for a while.  The cat took a swing at me in an attempt to discover how deep she could cut me without requiring me to have stitches to seal the wound.  My wife to be stayed as far away from the cat as possible claiming to be allergic.

To get ready to nail me the cat needed to sharpen her claws and used the back of the couch. I yelled at her, charged across the room and grabbed her from the back of the couch. Alicia, who would be my wife, thought she was going to witness extreme human on feline violence. After I had the cat in hand I held her against my chest and softy said, “We’ve talked about this. Please don’t scratch the couch.”

Having seen this Alicia realized the cat had already whipped me and that the hard work was done.  The joke was on Alicia though because she didn’t know the cat hadn’t successfully housebroken me. 

Fresh and new ideas in fall televsion line up

I’m really excited about this fall television line up.  Everything is so fresh and new?  The Count of Monte Cristo is on ABC only it’s called Revenge and the count is now a countess.  Person of Interest, on CBS, was fantastic when it was called 1984.  Unforgettable, also on CBS, was tons of fun when it was called Psych and The Mentalist.  Grim and Once Upon a Time were great as bedtime stories by the brothers Grim.  It’s nice to see Fame back on television but when did they change the name of the show to Glee.  I looked but I didn’t see Noel Coward get a credit for the new CBS show A Gifted Man and I could have sworn he wrote it when it was called Blythe Spirit.  And of course we have Charlie’s Angels back with us which were fun when it was Charlie’s Angels.  The  Angels were also fun when they were the three weird sisters in Macbeth.  New and different exciting!

Super Bowl Fallout

I didn’t really care who won the Super Bowl as long as it wasn’t the Patriots.

I’m a Green Bay Packers fan and I figure whoever can go to the frozen wonderland that is Curly Lambeau Field in late January and beat the Packers in their own house is hungry enough to eat whatever the Patriots might be serving.

The day after the Patriots baa-lew the Super Bowl I chatted about the game with my buddy Johnny B. Johnny B. was just as happy about the Giants win as I was, but was a touch apprehensive about the consequences of a New York win.

Johnny B. was worried that the win might give the normally meek and mild New Yorkers some sort of chip on their shoulders.

I told him not to worry. The thing you have got to remember is that the New York Giants home field is in New Jersey. Matter of fact the Jets home field is in New Jersey too. How can you get too cocky when you have to go to New Jersey to have fun?

I also pointed out that the Jets now have ex-Nebraska head coach Bill Callahan running their offense. Other than setting a league record for delay of game penalties I don’t think Jets fans or the city of New York is going to be very happy about what happens with the Jets.

The Mets are another burden the poor people of New York must carry. The Mets suck, the Yankees are pure evil in pinstripes, and the Knicks can only get into a playoff game if they buy a ticket. I don’t really think the New York fans have that much to cheer about when you get right down to the facts.

Speaking of basketball Johnny B. was very excited about seeing Nebraska play Texas Tech. First of all I was a little surprised to hear that the University of Nebraska still had a basketball team.

Actually the big draw for Johnny B. was watching Bobby Knight in action, but Knight quit before the game. Johnny B. was depressed about not getting to see the three-ring-flying-circus that is Bobby Knight. To make my buddy feel better I threw a chair at him and yelled in his face that he was an idiot who needed glass.

I think it helped a little but it wasn’t the same as actually being there.

The Original Dave Chapelle

I am the original David Chapelle. If you’re expecting me to be a tall, bald, and successful stand up comic ... you’re in the wrong place. Sorry. I am a short and fuzzy man who dances like a middle aged white guy. Saddest of all is that I’ve danced like a middle aged white guy since I was ten years old. The pain of being seen dancing like that hasn’t lessened now that I am a middle-aged white guy.

If you happen to be a fan of the other guy and think he’d like a call from you at three o’clock in the morning ... I’m betting you’re wrong. If you’re calling a number outside of the LA area code you’re totally screwed. If you insist on getting baked and calling any Dave Chapelle you can find I’m totally screwed.

The other guy’s name is spelled Chappelle by the way.

My favorite phone call to date was the guy who called up and asked me to say ‘I’m Rick James bitch!’ It was a birthday gift for his thirteen year old son. I did my best to explain I wasn’t the right Dave Chapelle but he insisted it didn’t matter. He said he had promised his kid Dave Chappelle was going to say ‘I’m Rick James bitch!’ and I was close enough to good to suit him. “He won’t know the difference,” was Dad’s rationale.

Even if Dad was okay with this I was having issues with this plan. First there was the issue of impersonating a famous person. Second, there were possible problems arising from impersonating a famous black person. Last but not least I seemed to be having some problems with calling a thirteen year old kid ‘bitch’. I sighed deeply wondering if I was going to get a good seat on the bus to hell. I told Dad if I went to hell for this I was blaming him.

I told him to hand the phone over to the birthday boy.

The kid came on the phone and said, in a hesitant thirteen year old voice, “Dave?”

“No,” I said, doing my best not to sound either disrespectful or like the whitest guy on the planet. “I’m Rick James bitch!”

I could hear the sound of the phone being dropped and the screams of merriment and laughing in the background. “He said it! He said it!” The kid was chanting. “It was him! It was really him!”

Dad picked up the phone again. “Thanks man,” he said, “You rock!”

I’m a Dad too so I can understand wanting to get your child that perfect present. So if any of you happen to have a number for Paris Hilton please share. Not for my daughter ... it’s for me. I have a thing for tall, skinny, rich girls and I do have a birthday coming up.

If you happen to be a Dave Chappelle groupie, the other guy, and want to leave him a message do please call and leave it on our answering machine between the hours of 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. so you don’t wake anybody up. It’s always so much fun trying to decipher messages from stoners with a cell phone.