Staten Island is usually the butt of jokes.  I get it, Staten Island is the red rash on the bottom of Blue York City.  We were the final destination of the great white flight from Brooklyn.  We’re deeply blue-collar and red-hat.  And now, as the pandemic works its way into its third year, we’ve been the hot spot for embarrassing videos of mall-marchers and bar-busting protests about COVID quarantine.  I don’t know how this happened. Staten Island started on the right side of the pandemic.  The virus hit New York City hard.  Everyone knew someone who died.  The hospitals were overwhelmed.  As were the morgues; They were stacking bodies in refrigerator trucks like so-many fish sticks.  We saw the deaths. We saw the first responders being worked to their limits and beyond.  The sick kept coming. Only fools would deny that we had to take the pandemic seriously.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but one of the first videos that went viral during the earliest days of the pandemic was from Staten Island.  And it was a video of angry people in a supermarket chasing a woman out of the store FOR NOT WEARING A MASK!  Yes, that was us.

Then came the fools.  And the politics. 

​Here we were, on the front lines of the plague but we were also waist-deep in Trumpism.  Once the twice-impeached, classified-document stealing, liar, fraud and FORMER NEW YORKER declared that the virus was a hoax and we could cure it with horse paste so that it would be gone by Easter because he cancelled some flights out of China, the mood in Staten Island started to shift.  Bars decided they didn’t want to be closed.  Restaurants-goers didn’t want to wear masks.  They didn’t trust the vaccines that Trump claimed credit for discovering.  It was a very confusing time.  But Staten Islanders did want they do best; blame the mayor and the governor. 

The new viral videos were now “protestors” invading food courts and declaring the pandemic over.  Their new news outlets were more than willing to support that worldview.  Masks were the new oppression and mandates their new obsession.  People literally told me they didn’t get the vaccine because (and I quote) they didn’t like “being told what to do.”  These were firefighters who are told to run into burning buildings, but the vaccine was where they drew the line.

So, in a land where traffic lights are ignored, stop signs are merely “suggestions” and turn signals are “none of your business” we can now add health mandates to the list of things that are oppressing us here in the county of COVID.

​​From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."  I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie."  It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there.  But, like any other job, there were...things...

There were only 2 live shows in May, based on my files.  I don't know where this idea came from, but I can see the attraction for me.  Radio DJs were always doing phone-in contests to bring in ratings.  And Public radio was always trying to raise money, so it seemed to make sense to have PHC do a phone-in contest with a prize give-away.  And, of course, it wouldn't go well.  I thought it would be funny having GK be the straight man with the series of callers and to top it off the prizes would be bad.  I always go back to cheese when I go for a comedic complication.   It didn't make the grade.

Okay, while I'm late to the party, I finally saw "No Time to Die" and I'm not happy.  Spoiler Alert; they kill James Bond.  Unspolier Alert: at the end of the credits they announce "James Bond will return."  Why?  How?  You violate the whole Bond universe then pull this?
 
I mean, Daniel Craig was an okay Bond, kinda humorless, but after having 5 actors play the part, THIS is the Bond you decide needs to get a special send off?  Sean Connery stopped playing Bond 3 times and nobody made this big a deal about it!  The creators overseeing Bond have sat through one too many Marvel movies.  Do they think they can multi-verse this nonsense now?
 
The last few years of Bond have been on the shakiest ground.  The company got the rights back to "Casino Royale" and decided they would "re-boot" the "series" with a proper version of Ian Fleming's first James Bond book.  That gave them an excuse to fire Pierce Brosnan and the remaining old school cast.  I mean Pierce Brosnan hadn't been treated this badly since Mrs. Doubtfire kept throwing fruit at him.  I mean, you have to realize that from Connery to Brosnan, it was the same Bond timeline.  As actors aged out or passed away, they were replaced with replacements and only sometimes re-cast.
 
Sure, they called it a "re-boot" or "re-launch" but still kept Judi Dench as M. Fine, we'll go along with this being a "new" James Bond, his "origin story."  Then for the next batch of films they go making constant call-backs to all the early Bond films: the Aston Martin, the dead girl covered in oil like in Goldfinger, using the Bond theme from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" throughout "No Time to Die."  When "Skyfall" came out, word was they wanted Sean Connery to play the groundskeeper.  I'm glad he turned them down. The producers just stopped pretending this was a different time line, wanting their cake and eating it, too.
 
Then there's the whole Blofeld situation.  The Bond people lost the rights to the character Blofeld and SPECTRE sometime doing the 1970s.  The last (uncredited) appearance of the character was in the cold opening to Roger Moore's "For Your Eyes Only."  Then they got the rights back.  It's a big deal.  They bring Blofeld back in the movie "SPECTRE."  They even named the movie "SPECTRE."  The whole movie makes out that  it was Blofeld behind all the villains of the Craig-era Bond (even though nobody mention SPECTRE the whole time.  The company had gone through all the legal hassle and money to get the rights to the character back, Bond's main nemesis, and what do they do?  Kill him in the next movie.  Money well spent, right?
 
I mean if the Simpsons can figure out how do keep an 8-year old character around for 30 years, you'd think the producers could figure out how to keep James Bond going by simply replacing the actor.  They've only done it six times already.
 
I don't know how they are going to re-set Bond in this new age of Hollywood where they redo the same IP content over and over but it doesn't bode well if they're simply going to toss the game board every time an actor quits.

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."  I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie."  It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there.  But, like any other job, there were...things...

This was an unusual thing for me to sell two bits that PHC rejected back-to-back, but that's what happened here.  Was the sketch to technological for PHC?  Was it not "humorous" enough for them?  I would never know because there was never any feedback.  But I learned to take it in stride, especially knowing that my material may have a second chance elsewhere.  The premise was cool; Caller ID was all the rage, so I just took it to the next level.  It's just a variation on those "technology out of control" bits, most recently on display on the Colin Jost Alexa commercials.  So here's the bit as written for PHC and below it is the bit as produced by ACN.

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."  I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie."  It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there.  But, like any other job, there were...things...

This one has a happy ending.  Okay, how many times have you been stuck in traffic or cut off by some maniac and wanted to yell at them?  A lot.  Well, instead of just sitting in my car and muttering about it, I wrote a sketch!   I helps me blow off steam.  I can often write things out of my system, it's a way of venting.  So, I wrote this up so PHC could reject it.  But I was working the angles at this point.  PHC was the big fish.  But I had developed two other leads to follow for radio-based comedy.  So, if I listened to the show over the weekend and they didn't used my submission, I would re-work it a bit to submit to American Comedy Network, which syndicated jokes and bits to radio station nationwide.  If they passed, it went off to All-Star Network, which did the same.  So Mike's Auto Mike did get produced at ACN several weeks later, which I've included below the script.

​From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."  I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie."  It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there.  But, like any other job, there were...things...

This is one of those sketches that I have submitted and submitted and submitted, but it never gets the nod.  It's just one of those things that popped into my head when I was at the market and I noticed that after using my courtesy card, the cash register receipt would spit out coupons for items I had just purchased.  Retail was just starting to figure out how to target customers based on their purchase history, and this was years before Facebook would figure out how to have pop-up ads for anything you mentioned in front of your phone or toaster.  It's a bit that could have been really dry or really insane.  I wound up playing it down the middle, trying to keep it grounded as the reality of the situation dawns on the customer.  Again, I didn't even bother including GK as a "character" leaving it as Customer, Cashier and Announcer.  I had my ups and downs with them, and this must have been one of the downses. After PHC passed, I re-worked it as a stage bit and for other radio outlets, but couldn't get it over the finish line.  So, here is now, for your reading pleasure...

This is an unusual piece.   It was a prose bit I had written for my college Humor magazine, the Plague. I think the show was at a college that week that must have prompted me to pull this out. Obviously, I adapted it for the show, but I didn't even bother to make the HOST character Keillor, so I'm thinking I tried to submit it elsewhere, as a sketch.  Based on that and the typos, it really seems like a half-hearted submission.  Didn't get picked.  Anyway, it's not a bad bit, I remember it coming about the time I was getting ready to graduate and comparing the feeling to Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' theory on death and dying.  Apt, I thought.  We'll see if you agree...

Through an amazing string of events and much confusion on my part, I submitted my award-winning script, "Cupid is as Cupid Does" to the Radio Theater Project in St. Petersburg in Florida (thinking it was some other group). Turns out they enjoyed the script and wanted to produce it!  So, I sent them a couple of other Nick Files scripts I had written and they decided they were open to producing them!  They do their shows monthly, usually the last week, and this was from their February show, so the Cupid script worked for their Valentine-themed show of multiple scripts.  Just this week they produced another episode, "The Leprechaun Con" which worked for St. Patrick's Day in March.  As soon as they post that I'll post it here as well.  It's interesting to think that I've created a radio  "series" of sorts.  Right now RTP is sitting on 4 additional scripts.  And because of that, I began another 2 scripts that I'll be sending them shortly.

Nick Flebber was created for my Christmas script "Lost Claus" and I've since spun him off into new adventures and cases.  The first couple of scripts were cobbled out of a couple of TV scripts I wrote for that pitch.  Then I pulled out my old research and ideas and started some original audio plays off the confidence I gained from my fractured success with other contests and stuff.  RTP really put me over the top, being open to all the scripts.  I hope people are noticing. 

Anyway, if you enjoy the Nick Files, check out his other adventures on Amazon.

I have absolutely no memory of this bit.  From reading it, I thought I had the sketches in the wrong order, this being the first sketch after their Florida trip, but no, they had done some shows, then suddenly couldn't.  It sounds like a major storm rolled in and the show was suspended for a while.  So, naturally, when they returned, I decided to make that my premise.  I think I really captured GK's voice and cadence for this monologue, but it didn't make the cut.  Not a sketch I could repurpose, so it just dropped from my brain pan.  So, here it is, new to all of us, a look at the big chill of 2003.

PHC was back on the road, stopping off at Bemidji State University, because college kids love 30 year old radio shows.  Anyway, what could be more natural for a college than college humor?  This sketch is a real piece of work; a piece from here and a piece from there... The premise of a college calendar was lifted from my days on the college humor magazine.  As was the idea of bogus frat names. I have jokes in here from those issues.  I came up with some new things, worked in the actual names of college buildings and played up the kegger thing as a running gag until it fell exhausted to the curb.  But the skit didn't make the grade. Oh, well.