Category: Sketchy Tales - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - Tourist Trap of Love

2/13/2019

Valentine's Day 2018 was the fourth production of "The Many Faces of Love" and my fourth appearance! I was ready for them this time! I actually started working on this toward the end of 2017, knowing the Hudson Warehouse would be doing the festival that year. This has a weird history. It started as a prose piece in 2011. It was a lot darker, about a disgruntled tour guide's last tour. It got posted on the now defunct Higgs-Wheldon site.

It was always tricky for me to come up with a comedic way to have a person do a monologue before an audience. But everyday, commuting to work, I would see the tour buses driving around the city with their stand-up comic tour guides. I even took a couple of these tours. And it's always fun to have someone over share. Now as the submission time approached, I decided to return to the tour bus bit, substitute love for kidnapping and rework it to under 3 minutes. It came out pretty well. Now I realize a better title would have been "The Tender Tourist Trap" but what can you do? Here's the video I took of it with my mini-iPad, which doesn't handle stage lighting well, featuring Jamie Flanagan and directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith...

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Tourist Trap of Love

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - A Beautiful Friendship

2/10/2019

I once wrote a joke that went "I like my comedy the way I like my chocolate; bittersweet." And I wrote it about this sketch. It's an early sketch of mine and it was very close to my heart, it's almost a one act play. It's combines my love of Casablanca and my social awkwardness. And it certainly stems from my love of movies, to the point that I often, back then, would go to the movies by myself because no one else wanted to see them. I was curious if I could write a bittersweet thing and I was locked on the idea of two people who could not get out of their own way, who could not overcome their own introversion when face with a real connection.

The play did go up at a workshop and it did work. It was a bit that was always included in any packet I sent, as a way to show range ("That's correct, I wrote both "Pet Rock" and this..."}. Man, I even thought so much of it, that I made it the center piece of a play I wrote, the story of a writer whose growth we witness when he presents the first draft of this sketch as a slap-stick, pie-throwing bit and later rewrites it to reflect a more mature attitude. Which is probably a lot of pretense to lay on the shoulders of this little sketch.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

A Beautiful Friendship

Sketchy Tales - Valentine's Day Edition - Blind Date

2/9/2019

This is an early sketch of mine, a real hybrid. It's Python-esque in it's premise; a woman shows up for a date with a bag on her head. It's full of terrible puns (and by "terrible puns" I mean "puns"). But it kinda makes a point. That's something I like about some of my sketches, they start out silly but I actually can hang something on them, or they have a true beginning, middle and end. And a satisfying ending, not just a black-out. I remember working on the ridiculous premise and trying to ground it in some sort of reality as well as an internal logic that holds.

It's a longer form sketch, which I was more in the habit of writing when I started out. I brought it with me to Style Without Substance and they performed it a number of times with different cast members. This is from a show in NYC, which I picked because the video camera was closer to the actors than it was when they performed it at the Whole Theater. I brought it with me years later to the Staten Island comedy troupe Generation Sketch and they used it as well. It's probably one of the few bits I didn't pitch to Prairie Home Companion because it was such a visual bit. I hope you'll agree....wait, what...?

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Blind Date

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - A Guy's Tale

2/8/2019

This is one of those sketches that that gets tricky for me. Writers get thoughts, all kind of thoughts. Some thoughts are creative, some are nice, some are dark and some aren't family friendly. Sometimes a sketch forms at the intersection of frustration and fantasy. A guy cheats on his wife. It's told via a narrator, reading it as if it was a storybook and we go to the actors doing their recreation of the moments. It's sweet and unassuming. It's callous. It's ironic. And a little bit misogynous. I turned it into a short story to submit to a collection of short stories being published at Amazon, Something to Read on the Ride. And it sat there for awhile. But I got some nice feedback on it.

When the "Many Faces of Love" festival rolled around again and I wanted to see if I could turn it into a monologue, one that ran 2-3 minutes. The artistic director of the festival accepted the piece, but asked it I could change the point of view to a First Person narrative, make it into a monologue from the guy in the story. I discovered I couldn't. Or as I responded;

As for point-of-view…I’d been over that when I first wrote the original. It was written like a fairy tale. There needs to be a buffer between the audience and this guy’s actions. There’s betrayal and disloyalty here. I think watching him try to explain it away or “justify” his actions would lose any sympathy for the story teller, IMO.

After making my defense of the POV, I realized the title of the piece, which I did change on a whim for submission from "A Guy's Tale" to "A Guy’s Monologue" didn’t properly frame the monologue. "A Guy’s Monologue" did make it sound like it was going to be a 1st person narrative. So the fix was to revert back to the original title.

As for the recording...my cell phone froze up near the end of the piece. It's the only recording I have of the event, so sorry about that. But it played very well, and I was very happy with it, even as it comes from my less-nurturing side.

Okay, now the technical issues; this was the year I first attended the performances. I was determined to record it with my new iPhone. My new iPhone had other ideas. It cut off toward the end. A dedicated author would have gone back to the second night's show to try it again. I, however, didn't. So, this is the only record I have of that night...

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

A Guy's Story

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Day Edition - Mel's Dinner

2/7/2019

A goofy tale of one man who loved too much and not too well. I did a number of "restaurant sketches" which are always fun to do. A couple at a table, some hired help, some weird twist and you got a 5-minute sketch. If it's just a "couple sketch" it's nice to try and mix up the location, but a restaurant sketch has a wonderful air of possibilities, it's a tremendous jumping off point.

The sketch was done by Style Without Substance a number of times and always played well. This is from the 1988 show in NYC. The title is just a weird reference to Mel's Diner, featured in the TV show "Alice" and has no bearing on anything, except the guy's name is Mel.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! Including me! Cupid flies the coup and Nick Flebber has to find him in "Cupid is as Cupid Does." Get your copy today at Amazon!

Mel's Dinner

Sketchy Tales: Valentine's Edition - Married Man

2/6/2019

This was a sketch I had written a long time ago. It was a monologue. I usually don't do monologues, but for some reason, when this idea came up, it was the most natural way to work it. Maybe I was into a Bob Newhart phase, doing one-sided conversations.

Anyway, it sat on my hard drive for quiet a long while, occasionally getting set out to theater troupes until about 6 years ago. The Hudson Warehouse Theater Group was presenting an evening of monologues about love for Valentine's Day. This seemed like a perfect match. Eventually. My friend is the artistic director of the group and since it was the first time they were doing this, she decided she should pester her friends to submit stuff. Hey, I figured, if she's that desperate for material, maybe I'll get picked!

So I pulled it out, cleaned it up and edited to about 2 minutes and sent it in. And it was picked. Alas, I had booked a family vacation so I missed the shows. And nobody taped anything, so I never actually saw it on it's feet. After that (spoiler alert) I was selected for the next 5 festivals and made sure I recorded them (to various degrees of success) just so I'd have something to remember it by. It's a positive little bit that has some clouds of doubt sewn in, but when I write about love, which I don't often do, that's how it comes out.

This edition of Sketchy Tales is brought to you by "Love and Other Distractions" the anthology for charity! Fifteen Hollywood writers spin tales of romance and more! And me, too! Cupid takes it on the wing and Nick Flebber PI is called in to find him! Get your copy today at Amazon!

MARRIED MAN

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."

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