I was cleaning out the hard drive and I came across this article I wrote.  I didn't remember much about it  and looking at the time-stamp it's from 2010.  Back then Vince McMahon was the king of wrestling.  He had taken over the WCW.  He was trying to create Extreme Football, which would be like football only with more concussions.  He was all over TV and looking to expand his brand as his wife started to dabble in politics.  I know I wrote it, but I'll be danged if I can figure out it I sent it out to anyone at the time.  Well, what with interest in pro wrestling still high and Young Rock on TV, maybe I'll just put his nostalgia piece up here.

​Vince McMahon is the king of wrestling.  He owns the WWE and the WCW and has shows on every cable station (Wrestling on the SyFy channel?  Really?  I always figured wrestlers were mutants, but still) But, with his wife running for office now, and the kids grown up with title matches of their own, he needs to expand his brand, widen his horizons.  Face it, he’s going to have a lot of free time should his wife win.  So what will the Next Big Thing be?
​
Pro Wrestlers Senior Tour - two words; aging demographics.  Also, aging wrestlers.  And with the success of “The Wrestler” why not start booking the old men of the WWE before they go running off inventing the next kitchen grill or run for governor somewhere?
   
NASCAR Raw – Hell on Wheels as burly race car drivers zip around the track.  Only here, drivers are allowed to leap from moving cars onto other cars and try to pin them to the track.
WFHL – hey, burly men with sharp skates pounding each other in the middle of the rink with hockey sticks.  It’s a natural.

Extreme New York Stock Exchange (XNYSE) – Face it, the economy is in the tank and it’s Wall Street’s fault.  If they’re going to rip us all off, at least let’s make it entertaining.  Can’t you just hear them yelling things like "can you smell what the Rock is trading" and "I got your margin call right here!"  Man, will the ticker tape fly!

World Spelling Bee Federation - Burly kids spelling words like "Xtreme," “HHH” and "NXT."  And the spelling bee places already have lots of folding chairs to use.

Wrestling With the Stars – WWE stars wrestle 3rd and 4th rate celebrities on TV.  Who wouldn’t watch that?

Six Flags Over WWE - Theme park, where the rides include The Pile driver, The Folding Chair Whack-A-Mole and the Sleeper Hold.  Also, the Wrestling mascots will pound you.

Westminster Dog Show Heat! - Burly dudes with burly Rottweilers.  With rabies!  And folding chairs.

WWF on Broadway – Hey, if Disney can do it, why not Vince?  Who wouldn’t want to see Mickie James in "Annie?" Or find out if Triple H is a triple threat?
                       
                                                                                 end

While updating the blog, I stumbled across this lost bit.  I wrote it but 3 years ago, as the talk of the Olympics was comingling with the talk of the pandemic.  I submitted it to a number of sites, but it didn't make the cut, so it it is.  Just project yourself back to July 2021 when everyone was getting sick, but they still wanted to jump and run and stuff.

I started working on this in 2020, thinking we might be able to do a Christmas show, and that hope just vanished.   I wound up setting it aside and then going back to tinker with it from time to time.  It kinda came about from "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" and the character Hermie.  I mean he was a little blunt about people's dental hygiene so I figured what would happen if it was about everything else.  It works fine.  The elf Tweedle is named for one of the lead character in my novella, "Lost Claus," available over at Amazon.  It's kinda evergreen, although I'd have to update the toy that got too popular if it goes foward.

The wife has been binging "Grey's Anatomy" (again) and with everything that goes on in that hospital, it's surprising that anyone got cured at all.  So many times, a scene with the family goes "We did what we could for her" and "she died peacefully."  You hear that enough times and you start to wonder, what if they didn't?  What if she didn't? What if those things were unexplainable.  It turned into on of those "snowball" sketches, where you set the premise and just watch things got downhill and get worse.  It's a Pythonseque bit of nonsense, but I enjoyed writing it.  I actually wrote it over a series of days, jotting down a few lines, then coming back to it when thing slowed down and then finally put it all in order.  

This sketch came to me in bits and pieces over time.  I remember getting the idea for a "bad stuntman" using a noose.  I emailed myself a note saying just that.  And it sat there.  Slowly, things came up to fill it out during the pandemic.  Just turned into a series of bad ideas, topped off with the original noose gag.  There was no rush to complete it for anyone, so I would pull it up, turn the names into a running gag and just make it goofy.  Weirdly, SNL did a COVID episode with a pair of bad stuntwomen showing off their meager skills and what they were doing to stay sharp during the lockdown.  The two don't really have much in common, but it was just weird seeing a stuntman sketch as I was wrapping mine up.  Oh, well.  At least they had somewhere to send it...

I kinda forgot where this idea popped up from.  SNL has been doing some "Voice work on video games" sketches.  There was a lot of news about the new Jurassic Park movie coming out.  Then during the pandemic, the news reported how Japanese theme parks were asking their visitors NOT to scream on the rides to prevent spreading droplets.  It all just came together as this thing.  It's a two-hander, so I'm not sure the comedy troupe would have leapt to do it.  And it does depend on a growing absurdity that is tricky to maintain.  It's cute, it's goofy and maybe it would have made the cut...

​Early on when I started posting under the Category "Skit Happens" (aka: From the Slushpile) I was posting stuff that that been submitted somewhere but didn't get chosen.  Post-pandemic (if we are, in fact, post-it) I've been writing sketches and have had few, if any, places to submit them to.  I don't know why I'm still writing them.  It's like the idea pops into my head and I get such a rush from the act of creating, I want to get it down on paper, I need to.  
In the mean time, these things are burning holes in my hard drive and I have to put them out there somewhere and I have a blog, so...

I'm not saying I was trying to write a sequel to my Homonym game show sketch,  but it sure seems that's the way it came out.  It's another game show for idiots and it got constructed from the end forward.  The idea that all the fairy tales have a character named Jack just kind of hovered around for a long time.  Then the phrase (and I believe an early game show) called You don't know Jack" worked it's way in.  After that I had to decide what kind of contestants to have and during our COVID downtime, I got to pull the various threads together.  And quicker than you can say jack-rabbit, I got...

Continuing with my musical comedy phase, I started this sketch with the gang from TMI: Hollywood in mind.  I listed all the characters at the top (which they requested on submissions).  It's a sketch where the characters get both too literal and too obtuse as Maria tries to teach them about music.  I really let loose with it.  It would have been a good sketch for a big cast (even though they never much cared for my song parodies).  But, like I've been saying, the group couldn't over come the lockdown.  I wound up sending the sketch to the producer because SNL did a parody of the same song this season, with West Side Story star Ariana DeBose screwing up the same song in a different way.  They had her being obtuse and not the kids.  Sure, mine's better, but they have an actual TV program to put it on.

As I posted else where, thanks to cable and streaming, topical pop-culture is no longer limited to recent entertainment.  SNL has gotten deep into the habit of doing parodies of classic movies.  In fact, they've done a number of  "Sound of Music" bits in the last few years (I think it kicked off with NBC doing Sound of Music: Live).  Add to that the fact that while working at home, I have on a music station (which I can't play at the office).  One of the channels is for stage and screen songs.  A lot of Sound of Music numbers get played, and that certainly triggered the idea for this sketch.  What if the song "My Favorite Things" was, as one of the kids says, a bit on the nose?

I recently went through a musical comedy phase, writing parodies of a couple of musicals.  The Rain in Spain idea I actually jotted down a while ago, and with the pandemic and working from home, got to flesh it out a bit.  And I mean a little bit.  It's just about two pages.  It's practically a black-out.  Without feeling like I was going to send it to TMI: Hollywood, I didn't push myself to expand it out much.  I wrote for the three main characters, got to the twist and bailed.  It's still cute, though.