La Page aux Folles II
Credit where it's due and all.
Credit where it's due and all.
Well the storylines continued and the mailing list grew. Although the size of the sigfiles grew alot quicker than the mailing list. After "Strike Four!" followed the exploits of the expansion team Florida Marlins during the 1994 player's strike. I tackled my biggest challenge, a 25 episode, 5 acts of 5 scenes each parody of MacBeth .
The challenge for me was not so much in creating the sigfiles, which are told in couplets, but to keep from blithering like an idiot in real life while I was writing them. I think I still bear the scars of writing MacDavis, because I have developed this horrible propensity to rhyme my speech unintentionally.
Every now and then I check my web page files to see when the stories were last read. Since the MacDavis storyline is broken up intio individual scenes, I can take note of how far someone got through the story before they gave up for the day. Usually, The first five episodes all have the most recent date and the rest were never accessed. However one day I checked the files and the most recent date was right in the middle of the story.
"Geez", I thought, "Who the heck starts reading the story right in the middle?" My question was answered the next day when I received a note asking:
From: Jim Reeds Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Mathematics Research Center To: carrie@ee.umanitoba.ca Subject: citation Hi! I would like to cite your lines "My dear man I wish you were brighter/ you speak like a monkey at a typewriter" in an essay I am writing. Can you supply me with a date for MacDavis, and tell me your name? Thanks. Jim ReedsMy response was this .
I'm sure my mother is hoping that I will be remembered for a greater contribution to the world than THAT.
The increasing number of books by comedians appearing in stores which didn't require any more effort than having someone write down old monologues lead to the collection known as "Seintology".
This was followed by my Hallowe'en story "Frank Einstein" which introduced the evil physicist Count Dirac. Incidentally, I'm sure Dr. Dirac is not REALLY evil incarnate, but I did have to write a physics exam requiring me to write Schrodinger's equations inside a Dirac Delta well and it was not exactly the most pleasant experience of my life.
The University of Manitoba attempted to address it's problems with a much maligned PLAN 2000. Instead of offering my own solutions, I passed the buck and merely sent Winston Salem to PLANET 2000 to report on the future of the University as written in "Slauchthaus Zwei".
Sherlock Holmes made a brief, but forgettable appearance in "A Christmas Peril" I was basically killing time until January when instead of making up new characters, I simply used the members of the mailing list who were willing victims in the murder mystery Thirteen at Dinner .
The mystery theme continued with The Mailtease Pigeon
One of my favourite stories is still Alice in Wonderland. Throw in a dash of The Wizard of Oz, and move Alice from the chess board to a more contemporary game of Monopoly and you produce "Over the Rainbow (and what Alice Found there)"
While my good friend TV was still spitting out rip-offs of Seinfeld in record number, I thought it was time to showcase where American Writers came up with all of their ideas, by ripping off Foreign Films.
March 16-22 1995 was declared Foreign Film week and readers were exposed to some of the best fare from exotic locales such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France and Texas. These shows entitled "Jarri Ziegfeld", "Pelle Seindstrom", "Yuri Hammerskjfeld"," L'assistant cingle de laboratoire avec: Jerry Lewisfeld" and "Jed Holsteinfeller" reminded everybody that TV could still produce original shows. I, on the other hand, was fresh out of ideas.
As a farewell to all the characters I had created, I decided to bring them all to Telgte to coincide with the Academy Awards ceremony. As fate would have it David Letterman was the guest host and he had indirectly started all this nonsense in the first place
"The Meeting at Telgte" lasted six weeks and gave me enough time to make my own escape to Ottawa.
You can follow me there, or read some of the storylines .