From the Author of "Abbott & Othello" and "Three Stooges of Verona" comes the latest uncovered Shakespeare play "The Nutty Merchant of Venice."

​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's a bit of weirdness; I've been forced to relocate my audio bits as the old website suddenly ceased to exist, taking all my material with it.  Since a group I'm dealing with uses SoundCloud, I've started setting up shop here.  As I was doing so, I realized I never posted one of my PHC bits. 

It was October 2001.    Garrison Keillor had heart surgery over the summer.  It was now just a month after 9/11.  This was the first show of the season.  I had submitted a sketch sort of referencing 9/11, a Guy's Shoes bit I wrote about here.  They did use a version of it. But, I actually got a second piece on the show, the one and only time that happened for me.  I combined GK's heart surgery with his running bit about duct tape and he opened the show with it.  

This reminds me of the fact that GK never kept in touch with me.  I spent the latter half of the summer checking the PHC website to find out when the show was back on the air.  Especially this summer with his health and after 9/11.  The show usually started in October and I don't remember if they pushed it back at all.  But I know that no one had reached out to me to see if I was okay or to inform me if the show schedule would be changed.  And I had to do that for the rest of each season, checking when it was on or where it was broadcasting from.

Anyway, here from Oct. 6, 2001, is Heart Surgery and duct tape.

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...

If memory serves, this is the last bit PHC bought from me.   It's massively re-written as GK inserts his "tax & spend" liberal ideals into the bit to garder "clapter" (that's getting claps instead of laughter for something said.  It's not a joke, just a declaration that everyone agrees with).  It's just odd how I attempt to write a tight sketch, it gets unraveled into a meandering routine. 

It's back on the old PHC website (they had shrubbed it after GK had his #MeToo Moment a few years ago), but I'm posting my audio file below, so you may compare and contrast. 

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 bits I knew wouldn't get far.  It was way too pop-culture for Keillor's tastes.  But I thought it was a funny bit.  The reality shows were taking over so, why not combine Survivor and American Idol, right?  I'm sure all the mis-spellings in the draft I sent them didn't help either.  

​​​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's one of those submissions with a happy-ist ending.  As I've mention before, I was always looking to write one of PHC's signature bits, not the big ones like the cowboys or the english major, but I tried his Guy Noir character (and got a line or two picked up for one sketch), I submitted for duct tape and ketchup to some success.   But a many of my sketches had to pass through the GK-rewrite process.

One of my pet peeves is how we're inundated with Christmas music from Thanksgiving on and then somewhere around noon on Christmas Day, the radio station all go back to their standard playlists.  I used the ketchup sketch to whine about that.  But the folks latched onto the idea that music today sucks and people seem overly attached to 1950s pop music.  It's weird how that's the premise they focused on. 

A version of  my sketch was produced and there's a couple of my lines in their version.  I got a check and an online credit.  And enough confidence to continue submitting to the show for a couple of more years.

I'm posting my version of the sketch, followed by the audio of the PHC Dec. 27, 2003 production (which they have in their archives, here

​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...

I'm guessing there must have been some genetic engineering news floating around back in September 2003.  Along with lots of Harry Potter and fantasy films with their fantastic beasts.  And when the title Faux Paws popped into my head, well, a sketch was born.  It's a standard commercial parody, and PHC never shied away from those, especially if it had an SFX spin to it, coming up with weird animal noises, but they passed on it.  But it has a happy ending, as I was able to sell it elsewhere.  I've included the audio at the bottom of the post...

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 PHC rejected scripts that found a hope eventually.  A goofy idea I had for a commercial parody that I put together.  PHC passed, but I held on to it to submit to other venues and it finally got picked by All-Star Radio comedy.  I've posted the audio 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 piece has an odd history.  It started as a college essay.  Some class was looking for us to write an essay based on material we had read.  One of the things was "The Maltese Falcon."  So I latched onto that and wrote up a story about meeting an old-school private eye to find out what the job was really like back in the film noir days.  I was very much in a Woody Allen phase in college (prose-wise) having read his collections of essays and short stories.  I think I got an A on it.  I know it's sitting in a file somewhere, if I really had to back up that claim.  It was this time I started to believe I would be a writer, so I clung to my creations like something precious that I might get to release some day.  Instead, whenever I kind of hit a dry spell, I would pull something out and rework it.  This was one of those times.

I often would think that if I could nail one of the regular bits, it might impress PHC enough to be used.  That thinking is very wrong; it's tricky to submit a version of their baby and not have them focus on the mistakes and shortcomings.  Always better to hit them with something new (usually).  Guy Noir is one of GK's signature bits, and having played around with the form with my own creation, Nick Flebber, and my Christmas-tery, Lost Claus, it was a genre I felt comfortable doing.  A new week and month were upon us as the season was winding down and I remembered the detective bit and pulled it out, shaping it into a radio sketch.  It didn't make the cut.

Back to Nick Flebber: as I played around with the character in different mediums, I turned Lost Claus into a novella.  I would adapt it to radio.  I pitched it as a series and wrote two pilot episodes, which I adapted into novellas.  And I started writing more adventures.  I needed to increase the page count for my one novella, Space Case, so I turned the radio sketch into a short story.  From there, I adapted it back into radio episode.  It's been produced by a local radio group and I'm awaiting the audio link.  You can read more about Nick Flebber here.   I still work my favorite line "I always get my man plus expenses" into a few other episodes.  And not to spoil the ending, but I always liked my little "Some Like it Hot" reference at the end.

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.