Blog Archives - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

Barely Home Companion: Valentine's Edition - Valentine's

2/14/2019

As it turns out, I didn't write much in the way of Valentine skits for Prairie Home Companion during my time. Looking at the timetables, they were on hiatus a lot during February and I don't recall any requests for Valentine's Day material. But in February of 2004, right after what would turn out to be the last skit of mine to be used by them, I wrote this bit. It's not a remarkable skit, but I think it's cute and it sounds like a PHC bit. It was rejected anyway. I don't recall pulling it out for any other venue either. I just seemed to have forgotten about it. To rectify that situation, I'm posting it here. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

This edition of Barely Home Companion is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! And it includes the Nick Flebber short story, "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Valentine's Guy

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - Tourist Trap of Love

2/13/2019

Valentine's Day 2018 was the fourth production of "The Many Faces of Love" and my fourth appearance! I was ready for them this time! I actually started working on this toward the end of 2017, knowing the Hudson Warehouse would be doing the festival that year. This has a weird history. It started as a prose piece in 2011. It was a lot darker, about a disgruntled tour guide's last tour. It got posted on the now defunct Higgs-Wheldon site.

It was always tricky for me to come up with a comedic way to have a person do a monologue before an audience. But everyday, commuting to work, I would see the tour buses driving around the city with their stand-up comic tour guides. I even took a couple of these tours. And it's always fun to have someone over share. Now as the submission time approached, I decided to return to the tour bus bit, substitute love for kidnapping and rework it to under 3 minutes. It came out pretty well. Now I realize a better title would have been "The Tender Tourist Trap" but what can you do? Here's the video I took of it with my mini-iPad, which doesn't handle stage lighting well, featuring Jamie Flanagan and directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith...

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Tourist Trap of Love

Skit Happens: Valentine's Day Edition - The CPHCCVDMF

2/12/2019

Looking back, it turns out I didn't do a whole bunch of Valentine's Day sketches. The groups I got involved in would do Christmas, or Oscars or even Halloween, but Valentine's Day? Not so much. Even SNL makes a bigger deal about Mother's Day than it does about Valentine's Day. But I've done a couple. For instance:

Coming off a barrage of Hallmark movies, I was getting punchy and it came out as a Hallmark Christmas parody. I did a Hallmark St. Patrick's Day parody and then I did this. I've posted it elsewhere on the blog, along with a hope that it would be resurrected in a future format, but, alas, that theater group isn't doing it's annual Valentine Day show this year. So, let's toss the original sketch back into the mix in this year's celebration of St. Valentine!

This edition of Skit Happens is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Get your copy today at Amazon!

The CPHCCVDMF
(or Countdown to Valentine's)

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition: A Modest Proposal

2/11/2019

I had a nice run with the annual "Many Faces of Love" evening of monologues over the years Yes, often I was guilted into submitting but it forced me out of my comfort zone a little bit. Naturally, they would be comedies, they always come out as comedies. But I like to think that they had some heart to them. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve and wear short sleeves to really keep it from happening. I'm not really that in touch with my feelings, so to write about love is not my strength. Fortunately, the festival was always open to other outlooks on love. This piece kinda grew from the title, which is an obscure enough reference to a Jonathon Swift essay. And, to kinda reaffirm my reasons for getting married. Love is a rock and time and elements can wear down a rock. Writing lets me go back and relive the moments that time can erase, and rediscover a certain period of time, both the joys and the willies. So, here is a recording of my entry performed at the 2017 festival.

2017
This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

A Modest Proposal

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - A Beautiful Friendship

2/10/2019

I once wrote a joke that went "I like my comedy the way I like my chocolate; bittersweet." And I wrote it about this sketch. It's an early sketch of mine and it was very close to my heart, it's almost a one act play. It's combines my love of Casablanca and my social awkwardness. And it certainly stems from my love of movies, to the point that I often, back then, would go to the movies by myself because no one else wanted to see them. I was curious if I could write a bittersweet thing and I was locked on the idea of two people who could not get out of their own way, who could not overcome their own introversion when face with a real connection.

The play did go up at a workshop and it did work. It was a bit that was always included in any packet I sent, as a way to show range ("That's correct, I wrote both "Pet Rock" and this..."}. Man, I even thought so much of it, that I made it the center piece of a play I wrote, the story of a writer whose growth we witness when he presents the first draft of this sketch as a slap-stick, pie-throwing bit and later rewrites it to reflect a more mature attitude. Which is probably a lot of pretense to lay on the shoulders of this little sketch.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

A Beautiful Friendship

Sketchy Tales - Valentine's Day Edition - Blind Date

2/9/2019

This is an early sketch of mine, a real hybrid. It's Python-esque in it's premise; a woman shows up for a date with a bag on her head. It's full of terrible puns (and by "terrible puns" I mean "puns"). But it kinda makes a point. That's something I like about some of my sketches, they start out silly but I actually can hang something on them, or they have a true beginning, middle and end. And a satisfying ending, not just a black-out. I remember working on the ridiculous premise and trying to ground it in some sort of reality as well as an internal logic that holds.

It's a longer form sketch, which I was more in the habit of writing when I started out. I brought it with me to Style Without Substance and they performed it a number of times with different cast members. This is from a show in NYC, which I picked because the video camera was closer to the actors than it was when they performed it at the Whole Theater. I brought it with me years later to the Staten Island comedy troupe Generation Sketch and they used it as well. It's probably one of the few bits I didn't pitch to Prairie Home Companion because it was such a visual bit. I hope you'll agree....wait, what...?

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Blind Date

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - A Guy's Tale

2/8/2019

This is one of those sketches that that gets tricky for me. Writers get thoughts, all kind of thoughts. Some thoughts are creative, some are nice, some are dark and some aren't family friendly. Sometimes a sketch forms at the intersection of frustration and fantasy. A guy cheats on his wife. It's told via a narrator, reading it as if it was a storybook and we go to the actors doing their recreation of the moments. It's sweet and unassuming. It's callous. It's ironic. And a little bit misogynous. I turned it into a short story to submit to a collection of short stories being published at Amazon, Something to Read on the Ride. And it sat there for awhile. But I got some nice feedback on it.

When the "Many Faces of Love" festival rolled around again and I wanted to see if I could turn it into a monologue, one that ran 2-3 minutes. The artistic director of the festival accepted the piece, but asked it I could change the point of view to a First Person narrative, make it into a monologue from the guy in the story. I discovered I couldn't. Or as I responded;

As for point-of-view…I’d been over that when I first wrote the original. It was written like a fairy tale. There needs to be a buffer between the audience and this guy’s actions. There’s betrayal and disloyalty here. I think watching him try to explain it away or “justify” his actions would lose any sympathy for the story teller, IMO.

After making my defense of the POV, I realized the title of the piece, which I did change on a whim for submission from "A Guy's Tale" to "A Guy’s Monologue" didn’t properly frame the monologue. "A Guy’s Monologue" did make it sound like it was going to be a 1st person narrative. So the fix was to revert back to the original title.

As for the recording...my cell phone froze up near the end of the piece. It's the only recording I have of the event, so sorry about that. But it played very well, and I was very happy with it, even as it comes from my less-nurturing side.

Okay, now the technical issues; this was the year I first attended the performances. I was determined to record it with my new iPhone. My new iPhone had other ideas. It cut off toward the end. A dedicated author would have gone back to the second night's show to try it again. I, however, didn't. So, this is the only record I have of that night...

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

A Guy's Story

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Day Edition - Mel's Dinner

2/7/2019

A goofy tale of one man who loved too much and not too well. I did a number of "restaurant sketches" which are always fun to do. A couple at a table, some hired help, some weird twist and you got a 5-minute sketch. If it's just a "couple sketch" it's nice to try and mix up the location, but a restaurant sketch has a wonderful air of possibilities, it's a tremendous jumping off point.

The sketch was done by Style Without Substance a number of times and always played well. This is from the 1988 show in NYC. The title is just a weird reference to Mel's Diner, featured in the TV show "Alice" and has no bearing on anything, except the guy's name is Mel.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Mel's Dinner

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - Married Man

2/6/2019

This was a sketch I had written a long time ago. It was a monologue. I usually don't do monologues, but for some reason, when this idea came up, it was the most natural way to work it. Maybe I was into a Bob Newhart phase, doing one-sided conversations.

Anyway, it sat on my hard drive for quiet a long while, occasionally getting set out to theater troupes until about 6 years ago. The Hudson Warehouse Theater Group was presenting an evening of monologues about love for Valentine's Day. This seemed like a perfect match. Eventually. My friend is the artistic director of the group and since it was the first time they were doing this, she decided she should pester her friends to submit stuff. Hey, I figured, if she's that desperate for material, maybe I'll get picked!

So I pulled it out, cleaned it up and edited to about 2 minutes and sent it in. And it was picked. Alas, I had booked a family vacation so I missed the shows. And nobody taped anything, so I never actually saw it on it's feet. After that (spoiler alert) I was selected for the next 5 festivals and made sure I recorded them (to various degrees of success) just so I'd have something to remember it by. It's a positive little bit that has some clouds of doubt sewn in, but when I write about love, which I don't often do, that's how it comes out.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! And me, too! Cupid takes it on the wing and Nick Flebber PI is called in to find him! Get your copy today at Amazon!

MARRIED MAN

Leave it to the Prose: Valentine's Edition - Missed Connection

2/5/2019

As Valentine's Day approaches, we celebrate love, even the creepy, stalker kind. After having stumbled onto Craig's List and its "Missed Connections" listings, I got pulled in pretty deep. There are some remarkable posts on there. And some scary ones. Naturally, I got inspired by the latter.

The piece was submitted to the gang over at The Big Jewel and they went for it. I've got a screen cap of the beginning below which links to the article at the site.

Sure, it's a shaky start to the Valentine season but that was just the luck of the draw...

This blog post is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! And it includes the Nick Flebber short story, "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

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