This was a fun, goofy script that I tried to keep going.  I actually think I wrote it for the stage, but realized it would be a perfect radio sketch.  PHC thought otherwise.  I just liked the vibe of the sketch with its slight Python-airs, so but I circulated it around afterward back in its stage form.  But never got it on it's feet.  Oh, well.

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.