Category: Prairie Home Companion - 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

Barely Home Companion: Valentine's Edition - Dial M for Marriage 3/00

2/4/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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...

When I got the idea of doing a series of posts about PHC, I just assumed I would pull up old sketches and post them. Then I started going back, re-reading things, re-listening to things and working my way through the PHC webpages again. Some memories have been jogged and I'm relearning things I thought I knew. While I remembered responding to an ad about PHC looking for writers, I found this article online from around that time.

From the AP news site:

Keillor Looking for Funny People
September 21, 1998
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) _ Are you unemployed? And funny? Garrison Keillor may be looking for you.

The humorist needs an extra hand to keep "A Prairie Home Companion,″ his acclaimed radio program, witty and entertaining.

Minnesota Public Radio, which produces the show, placed ads recently in The New York Times, Variety, the Los Angeles Times and on the Internet.

"He was hoping to really be bowled over, but he hasn’t been bowled over yet″ by the responses, said producer Christine Tschida.

"With a two-hour show every week for 34 weeks a year, that is an awful lot of material,″ Tschida said. ``Garrison does write nearly the entire program. It would be nice to have a few other submissions to take off some of the pressure.″

Keillor’s Minnesota-based variety show started in 1974 and is broadcast on more than 410 public radio stations.

So around September 1998, they were looking for writers. I can't remember when I submitted my packet, but by October 1999, I was contributing. Part of being in the freelance bubble complex is the fact that I wasn't seeing the bigger picture. I mean, yes, they downplayed the whole idea of hiring writers by saying that Keillor needed "an extra hand," as opposed to a real writing staff, but I didn't realize at the time that they had placed ads in the New York Times, Variety, the LA Times and did some publicity about it to get the word out.

I must have seen it in the NY Times. Out of all of those ads, I made the cut. I never realized what a big deal that was, really, until now. I never had the nerve to ask the producer how many submissions they got. I just knew I was in. I had had my fair share of rejections over the years, so, no, I wasn't about to question an actual gig. Of course, I was clueless to what I was doing. And I'm sure the fact that I had never listened to the show was a handicap in the long run. I would counter that I do have a good ear and I was certain that I would quickly pick up the voice of the show. I'm pretty certain that might have slipped out during my communication with the producer, Christine Tschida, because she sent me a couple of CDs of the best of Prairie Home Companion to listen to to help me along.

Barely Home Companion - Radio Olympics 10/7/00

1/31/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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...

Once the 2000-2001 season started, I was better at saving the skits. I had to keep them handy in case they might find another home. So, I'm going to post them from time to time, in the the tradition of my "Skit Happens" posts. Thinking back, it may be because we got our first real computer Christmas 1999 and I wasn't writing my sketches on the Atari-2600 any more.

I wrote a ton of material for the show. Starting at 2 skits per show for 36 weeks or so, sometimes more, sometimes less. As my involvement wound down, it was just a sketch per week. As I've whined about elsewhere, communication with the contributing writers was very lackadaisical. My procedure, after a while, was to go to the PHC website and pull up their "Upcoming Shows" page (where they sold the tickets for the shows). It would tell be what live shows were scheduled for the month, when there were repeats, where the show would be broadcasting from and the scheduled guests, if known. So that first summer, I was checking the site almost daily, waiting for them to post the schedule. Once I had it, I started writing.

The Olympics had been broadcast the summer of 2000, so it seemed like a logical thing to reference on the first show back that October. Also, Garrison Keillor loved doing these sound effects-ladled sketches, that were pretty much written so they could do a bunch of SFX. I really enjoyed writing them as they could be goofy and I enjoy goofy. The marriage of these two concepts seemed to be a perfect match. Alas, it was not used.

I would sit and listen to the show most weekends and just mutter to myself about how much stronger my skit was than the ones they were actually using. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty petty. So, released from the hard drive, for the first time anywhere is...

Radio Olympics

Barely Home Companion - Guy Noir, North Dakota 12/8/01

1/28/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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 another example of me coming up with a funny idea or bit and gets pulled out of what I submitted and winds up in another thing.

Another road show. PHC was broadcasting from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Which means they would need some site-specific material. So, I whipped up a couple of items and sent them in. One was taken from current events. There was a campaign back in 2001 about North Dakota changing it's name. The Chamber of Commerce thought the name brought up connotations of "Arctic" and "cold" and "freezing," "desolate," "tundra," etc. Weird, right? Therefore, my first skit was about the re-naming of the state. That material wound up in Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir sketch, one of his best known recurring characters. As for credits, there was no on-air credits, just the usual fake/punny writer names. Online, however, the sketch is marked as such:

© Garrison Keillor, Dan Fiorella 2001

Like I said, it's just tough to get a handle on what he's doing out there. I mean, full co-writer credit online? Cool. But, really, considering how little of the actual sketch was used (see below) and how long the sketch was, it seems generous.

But on December 8, 2001 PHC preformed Guy Noir going to North Dakota.

I'm attaching the material that I submitted to them below the break...

Barely Home Companion - Who Wants to Marry a Sound Effects Guy?

1/24/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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...

Okay, so here's the deal. While messing around on my computer, I stumbled across some of my older Prairie Home sketches! There's a few unused skits prior to December 1999 and I found the sketches from the year 2000 of the 1999-2000 season. Go figure.

One of the bits I found was a rejected skit I submitted in April 2000. As you are aware, PHC was first and foremost a radio show, a theater of the mind. And the cast and crew played mightily in that arena. Garrison Keillor would do entire sketches just about sound effects to give their sound effects guy, the late, great Tom Keith, a chance to shine. They were quite whimsical and silly. I found myself drawn to them and would write several of them, none of which made it to air.

Around this time, the big TV show was "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" and there were weird game show rip-offs like "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire." That was my inspiration. I remember emailing the producer to ask if Tom Keith was married, because the ending tag kinda revolved on that fact, his wife demanding to know what was going on. I was told Keith wasn't married and dropped that part. Since the show was broadcasting from Town Hall in New York City, I gave it a New York flavor---which explains the Trump reference. As happy as I was with the piece, the fact is, I violated the first rule of writing for Keillor; I based the skit on pop culture, a TV show. He wouldn't get it.

As my motto is "Never throw anything out," I held on to those radio bits. Many years later, the Writers Guild of America, East, began a program to try and get radio dramas back on the air. They cut a deal with the local radio station, WNYC, and produced a number of episodes of a show called "Anything Goes." I pulled out and submitted some of my radio-intensive sketches rejected from PHC and a couple of them were produced for this new show during the summer of 2005.

I wasn't thrilled with the results. There's no sense of fun, the comic timing is off and there's no studio audience, so it's a bit ponderous as opposed to absurd. Oh, well. We'll file this under "What might have been." But I recorded it and I'm posting it here.

I've included the original script from the PHC version beneath.

WHO WANTS TO MARRY A SOUND EFFECTS GUY?

Barely Home Companion - The Old Storyteller 5/19/01

1/21/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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...

Frankly, after the heady rush of my first few months of submitting to PHC and getting four sketches picked between October and December 1999, the rest of the season was a bust! Not a single bit picked for the rest of the 1999-2000 season.

At one point I contacted producer Christine Tschida about the situation and she basically said that none of the material was striking Keillor's fancy. And to be honest, not everything I sent was a gem. There were a couple of bits I resurrected from other work to submit and they were weak. I couldn't get as biting as SNL would get on topical events (or as stupid) so my skits meandered around. But I kept at it. And at it. Although the time gap is about a year and a half, I was technically in the 2000-2001 season. To my way of thinking, that means I got something in the show for my first two season in a row.

This was a quirky sketch. PHC was on the road once again, this time in Laramie, Wyoming. We had gotten word that the show wanted site-specific material, so I did some research into Laramie and decided on two bits. One was ambitious; Garrison Keillor liked to do a kind of overview of the place they were broadcasting from when they traveled, so I decided to write up one of these whimsical histories about Laramie. I mean, it's one thing to write a sketch that GK is in, it's another to actually write for GK himself.

And the second bit was a more generic take on the Hollywood westerns which were inspired by towns like Laramie. Two, I thought, very solid pieces. So here's what happened...

GK combined material from each into a bit called "When Things were Different," hosted by the Old Story Teller. I have no idea if this was a running bit beforehand, but he took lines here and set-ups there along with dialogue and gags and came up with this.

On air credits were the usual group of joke names and "Russ Ringsac and...and Laura Levine." So, no mention of me at all. At this point I emailed Tschida the producer and asked her about that. Her response? Keillor misread the copy. She apologized. He just skipped my name. Now, listening to it for the first time in ages, I can hear it, he loses his place while reading. That's live radio. At least the online credits listed me:

© Garrison Keillor 2001, with material from Dan Fiorella

I'm including the original skits that I submitted here below. Once out of the 1999-2000 season, I have a copy of everything I sent all with limited title names because file names couldn't be that long back then.

To be honest, I didn't get too worked up about them merging these skits into one skit, because a lot of the Hollywood skit was pieced together from other things I had written. For instance, here's a bit of Galaxy Ranger trivia; the the Hollywood West skit ends with a song. I talk about westerns being make in space so I grabbed the lyrics from my Galaxy Ranger song, "Oh Tortuna." I redid the refrain to be "Cowboys in Space," but the rest of the song is the same.

That section about the Pony Express? I lifted the prose from my novel (then in-progress), "Novel Concept."

And "The Man Who Sued Liberty Valance" was one of my "Cold Draft" sketches that I had written years before as a follow up to my "It's a Wonderful Life" parody.

Which brings us to The Old Story Teller from theMay 19, 2001 broadcast of PHC from the University of Wyoming in Laramie...

Barely Home Companion - 12 Days of Christmas 12/18/99

1/17/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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 bit I've posted before, as part of my usual countdown to Christmas (and beyond) but it's a very special bit. This would be the second week in a row that I got something on the air, so I was feeling pret-ty cocky. The show was still in New York and still open to Christmas bits so, I sent in "12 Days," which I nicked from my script "Christmas Carol," where some kids to a parody of the song during a pageant.

I was just floored when I heard it produced for the first time. Yes, GK rewrote some of it. And he certainly reworked the song performance, starting from 5 and working up from there. It saved some of the comedy surprises and, more impressively, got the whole audience to sing "Five Onion Rings" just the right number of times; not so many as to get bored, but enough that it grew and got louder as they reached the end. And the audience really sounded like they were having fun. Just wished I could have been there.

Another special thing about this one skit is that the online credit reads "(c) 1999 Dan Fiorella" I have full credit on it, even though he re-wrote some of it (mine was a lot more food oriented). The on air credit is ...fake names..."with some help from Dan Fiorella, Laura Levine and Laura Peterson..." which is nice, yet still demeaning. We helped some fake guys who everyone assumes is GK because he's too modest to take credit. Oh, well...

The thing of it is, the computer disc where I saved the first season of submissions to PHC got corrupted. I can't access it and I don't remember what else I submitted. And back then I was so paranoid about using up memory on my desktop, I always saved things to disc. So, that kinda backfired on me. Two PCs later, the emails didn't survive the transfers, so I don't have them to refer to either. And frankly, my record keeping was a bit spotty at the time. I thought I had the links to all the bits posted, but I can't find them. Even then, it would only be a research tool, as none of the original links are still up, but they would have given me dates on the shows. I just happened to find an old email with the old links to the first 4 bits but on that email, the next bit isn't until May, 2001. Though that long a gap seems possible, it seems long. But for now, on Dec. 18, 1999, Prairie Home Companion preformed my version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

Barely Home Companion - Yikes, Virginia 12/11/99

1/14/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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's one thing I do recall about my time at PHC, I wasn't writing for GK, I was writing around him. I would use him as the introduction announcer of a bit or as the straight man of any interactions. I treated the the on-air persona of Garrison Keillor as the bemused onlooker. GK didn't hog the laughs. In fact, it never struck me that Keillor was after the big laughs on the show for himself. It certainly played it that way (although one could argue nothing on the show was played for big laughs). Keillor was forever low key, so you never felt he was hogging the spotlight, despite the fact he was omnipresent for the entire show.

But, again, these are all assumptions on my part. It's not like I ever got to meet the guy. It was Christmas 1999 when some of these realizations started to sink in. PHC made it a point to come to New York City for a series of shows at Christmas time. Now, here's the thing...I LIVE in New York City. So one would think I'd get invited to attend, right? Afraid not. I started dropping hints around Thanksgiving about "maybe coming by to see if any of my skits were used." No response. Nothing. As it turned out, I was on a bit of a streak that December, getting two skits on that month. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Christmas is kind of my thing, so I had a TON of material to draw upon.

This skit I called "Yikes, Virginia." It's a riff off the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" editorial that resulted from the correspondence between a young Virginia O'Hanlon and the editor of the NY Sun asking about Santa's existence.

This skit actually started as a prose piece, which was published by the Staten Island Advance and posted at TheBigJewel.com. I though it would work as a radio bit, especially on PHC; two people reading their letters and answers with GK, as narrator, bridging the divide. And it did work. However, once in GK's hands, it kinda went off into a mockery of GOP policies, so I'm certainly glad my original version is out there.

I'm guessing it's due to all that re-writing that my name doesn't appear on the credits of the sketch performed in my home town on Dec. 11, 1999...

On-air credits were his 10 usual fake names. Online credit reads:

(c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor

Barely Home Companion - Mt. Rushmore 11/20/99

1/11/2019

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie 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...

Let's face it, Garrison Keillor was Prairie Home Companion. People loved him or hated him, I've discovered (of course, more tilting to the latter nowadays). He was considered either a small town rapscallion or a liberal menace. But he was an institution. A radio institution, but still. The show ran for a long time (and in a sense, still runs). It premiered the same year as Saturday Night Live. It was done live. They would broadcast from different locations around the country in the course of a season. He was doing side-hustle shows, to boot, before each broadcast. And when he wasn't broadcasting, it was because he was on a book tour.

My opinion of him is more limited. To be honest, I had never listened to PHC prior to my involvement. I was aware of it, but I didn't know much about it. But a comedy writer should be able to handle anything, so I signed on.

Now we get to Garrison Keillor, show producer. Mr. "Tax & Spend Liberal" was actually the type of boss that necessitated the creation of an organization like the Writers Guild of America. Keillor, or GK as he was referred to on the website, had a habit of arbitrarily altering or changing bits as it suited him. He would extract material from one bit and place it in his own. Hey, maybe it wasn't his own, maybe he had a bunch of other writers submitting material; how would I know? There were never any real writer credits (see below). Once, I submitted an entire sketch, a Charlie Brown Christmas parody, and he took ONE line from it and stuck it at the end of one of his bits.

Oh, and once a skit was submitted, if it wasn't used, it was dead. No re-writing, no updating. It was done.

Let's talk about salary, now, shall we? His pay schedule was unique, to say the least. No weekly staff writer salary here. No per-page per diem. Nope. He based pay on how well he thought the bit went over with the audience. So, basically, my income was hooked to an applause meter, like a game show. It was very arbitrary. Like that Charlie Brown bit? I got paid as if it were a full sketch. Pay checks from PHC were like snowflakes, no two were ever alike.

His credit policy was very lackadaisical. He never failed to mention show writers "Bob Wire" or "Sandy Beach" at the end of each show but I often went unmentioned, and I'm for real! I have no idea to this day who else was unmentioned. He encouraged the belief that he wrote the entire show each week. In fact, before I started writing for him, I called the Writers Guild of America, East (of which I was a new member) to see if I was permitted to write for him, was he a guild signatory? The staff member on the phone said it never came up because they all thought he wrote the whole show. In the end, National Public Radio was not a guild covered venue, so I could freely submit.

Credits were more forthcoming on the website that PHC kept, but not much more. Once GK's behavior issues went public, those web pages were closed down. I have only just discovered that NPR has reopened the pages and archives, so credits (or lack thereof) are back on display.

I got my second sketch, Mt. Rushmore, on the Nov. 20, 1999 show. Same deal, rewritten a bit (they added a "rearranger" joke that just bombed) but not slashed. In fact it was expanded a little, adding a swipe at the local city council and then-Governor Jesse Ventura. Interestingly, this was one of the few times I got a "heads up" going into a show. PHC was on the road that week, preforming in Rapid City, South Dakota and the week before the producer put out word that they wanted site-specific material. I came up with a couple of South Dakota bits and one got on-air. It's actually a character I created for a film script of mine, Forest Ranger Forest Ranger, an obtuse guy who doesn't realize how goofy his name is. I just had to adapt him to become a Park Ranger. Not as funny, I know. But it worked and got a solid reaction and it gave me the confidence to continue submitting after a 4 week dry spell.

No on-air writer credits (fake or otherwise). Online credit reads:

From an idea submitted by Dan Fiorella
(c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor

Barely Home Companion - Abbott & Othello 10/2/99

1/9/2019

One of the most high profile but frustrating writing jobs I had was my time with The Prairie Home Companion. I was a stringer there from 1999 to 2004-ish. It was a solid, but niche credit on my resume, one that had nobody stopping me on the street about it.

Us freelance writers work in a bubble; we write stuff and send it out. Maybe we get feedback, maybe we don't. Replies are typically form letter rejection notes. At PHC, I got material produced, so I assumed they liked it . I assumed they liked me. But I was kept at arm's length. It's more frustrating than the usual freelance gig because now you think you "broke in" but you're really still in your bubble. One would think it would change, even just enough to give you a head's up that they were going to use a skit. But no; you submit the material and then you have to listen for that week's show to hear if it got on or not. Hence the title for his new series, it was like I was barely there.

I generated a lot of material, often submitting 2 skits a week. I would generally re-work an older piece for radio and then write something new. PHC was timely yet timeless. They avoided being too topic, keeping pop culture at bay but they absolutely followed current events. That's just how it was in Lake Woebegon.

Sometimes my material hit and sometimes it missed. Sometimes I really felt I nailed it but most times I didn't. It wasn't from lack of trying. But I certainly did hit the ground running:

In 1999, I responded to an online ad for a radio show looking for comedy writers. I submitted my usual packet of material, which included my go-to bit "Abbott & Othello," a mash-up of Shakespeare and "Who's on First." They bought it. They bought the first skit I submitted. On October 2, 1999, their season premiere, the cast performed "Abbott & Othello."

OK, so they chopped it down from 5 minutes to 45 seconds, but still, it got on air. It got a lot of laughs and kicked off a productive autumn and winter, where I got several more items on, giving me a sense that I had a steady gig. The producer at the time, the one who "hired" me, Christine Tschida, was a fan of my writing (and my only source of feedback when I requested it). However, if you go to the site, note the credits: (c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor (idea contributed by Dan Fiorella). I did get my first on-air mention here, buried in a list of 11 fake writer names he says "with material by Dan Fiorella, Laura Levine," and more fake names. I'm assuming Laura Levine is real. But that was a heady moment, nonetheless.

Thus was my entry into the Minnesota Mafia...

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