Posted on by mwhybark

Initial Entry

Well, following the lead of Ken Goldstein and Eric Sinclair, I’m setting up a wee blog site. Ken and Eric’s sites are accessible via the links section.

I hope shortly, once I have a grasp of the capacity of this blog app, (the perl-based Movable Type) to provide blog-hosting for at the least my family.

To kick things off, here are three recent short essays.

There are other recent project links to be observed in the “Links” section of this page as well. I assume most of my initial visitors will have already heard about them. When updates to these projects occur, I’ll note it here.

Posted on by mwhybark

I DREAM OF SITCOMS

I woke up one morning thinking I’d had dinner with my pals Greg and Stacy. They just got back from three weeks in France and we were to see them shortly. Greg was kind of showing off, ordering in (very fluent) French, in the dream. Then somehow we all started discussing the recently broadcast 2-hour “NewsRadio” reunion special. Such a show has not ever existed, to my knowledge.

It turns out that Maura Tierney, so excellent as Lisa on the actual show, was unavailable for the reunion production, and so instead, a role which in this conversation was characterized as “Dave’s girlfriend” was played by an actress who had previously portrayed Austin Powers’ girlfriend, and yet was neither Heather Graham or Elizabeth Hurley. I assume that this actress must be the actress portraying the International Man of Mystery’s paramour in the upcoming Austin Powers movie.

When I explained this to my wife after awakening, she exclaimed, “She’s a dwarf!”

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SITCOMMUNIST CONSPIRACY?

Consider this: the Dick Van Dyke show and the Andy Griffith show were shot at about the same time and shared, I believe, a producer in the person of Danny Thomas. The Griffith show featured child actor Ron Howard, of course. The van Dyke show, in addition to the well-known castmembers, featured a child character, the son of the Petries, named Richie.

Additionally, the writers for the show based much of the mise-en-scene of the show on their experiences working as writers on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”. Among the writers and performers was Carl Reiner (Alan Brady). Carl’s son Rob would later go on to fame as “Meatball” on “All in the Family” and as a skillful director of films about late childhood, adolescence, and of course, Spinal Tap.

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THE DEATH OF MR. RED EARS

A tragicomic operetta in three acts, which tells the tragic tale of a CHILD who finds love with a dime-store turtle, MR. RED EARS, only to have the sweet flower of selfless devotion crushed under the heel of mortality, dashing illusions to glittering shards and forever altering the worldview of our protagonist.

act one:

The CHILD, playing in the sunny afternoon, sings an aria of innocence and love, yearning for life, and so forth, entitled ” A Lizard in the Sun”. The time frame, early 1970’s, is set with pop culture references within the libretto.

As he finishes, enter MOM and DAD, with a Mysterious Box..

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