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...
Here I'm stealing from myself. I had written a script about a less-than-stellar trip we to Wisconsin. It was a natural for a script; a bunch of native New Yorkers go to Wisconsin for a wedding. A real fish-out-of-water story. Most of the script was based on actual events, including a trip to the cheese shop. We had time to kill, the hotel was connected, physically connected, to the mall, so we decided to check it out. And there we came upon a cheese shop. There was a culture gap between that way we in New York talk about cheese and the rest of the world. New Yorkers use Italian words that Italy doesn't even use. It was a brief stop, but enough occurred that it inspired this scene in my screenplay. As I often did, when I was low on ideas, I'd pull something out of the files and dust it off and make it pretty. It remains a short bit, but with my habit of writing odd store sketches, it seemed to be a natural. And like the many shop sketches before, it was rejected.
