Category: The Big Jewel

The Big Jewel, R.I.P.

12/26/2019

Nuts, lost another outlet. I just found out that The Big Jewel pulled a Mad magazine and is no longer posting new material. This happened back in August, which shows how much I was paying attention. The last time they published anything of mine was in April, where I got two pieces up in April. Maybe I should have realized something was up. They're keeping the site up for now, archiving all the material they've posted over the years. They didn't pay a nickle, but I always got the sense they were a respectable place to publish material and I always had to run a gauntlet of editors to get the thumbs up or down. My stuff is there. I'll miss having that forum to work with whenever a prose piece idea hit. But the guy who ran it was dealing with other successes and was finding it harder to maintain the site, so at least it was for a good reason.

And the search begins anew...

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Barely Home Companion: Political Ads (10/00)

4/20/2019

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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...

Another piece that went through several adaptations, all based on the converging of "politics" and "office politics." with some of that "negative ad" energy that I've used before in Pope sketches, American Idol sketches and Iran sketches. PHC didn't use it (although it would have worked very well as a running bit through one show). I did re-worked for The Big Jewel.

Paid Political Messages

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The Big Jewel: The History of Radio

4/18/2019

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Got an article posted over at The Big Jewel, home of Big Comedy and not jewels. I wrote it a few years ago, when I was working on PHC and other radio venues. It started as a piece for our local paper where it began with me kinda bragging about my work in radio. It was a thousand word article, originally, with lots of digressions and odd samples of radio history. I got it down to about 500 words to submit to The Big Jewel and here it is.
Screensnap below links to the site...

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Leave it to the Prose: Valentine's Edition - Missed Connection

2/5/2019

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As Valentine's Day approaches, we celebrate love, even the creepy, stalker kind. After having stumbled onto Craig's List and its "Missed Connections" listings, I got pulled in pretty deep. There are some remarkable posts on there. And some scary ones. Naturally, I got inspired by the latter.

The piece was submitted to the gang over at The Big Jewel and they went for it. I've got a screen cap of the beginning below which links to the article at the site.

Sure, it's a shaky start to the Valentine season but that was just the luck of the draw...

This blog post 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!

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

1/14/2019

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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

Dan Fiorella · PHC - Yikes Virginia

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The Big Jewel, R.I.P.

Barely Home Companion: Political Ads (10/00)

Paid Political Messages

The Big Jewel: The History of Radio

Leave it to the Prose: Valentine's Edition - Missed Connection

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

Dan Fiorella

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