Chapter 26
ME AND MY FUNNY FRIENDS
The weekend comes and I can finally take a break from prepping the TV pilot.
I can actually spend some time with my real buds, not the actors playing them on TV.
Gaynor, Pierce, Vincent O’Neil, and I all meet at Gilda’s house, where we turn her mother’s dining room into our own version of the sitcom writing room.
“Is this how the real TV people do it?” asks Vincent eagerly. “They sit around a table just like this one and tell each other jokes and write the show?”
“Sort of,” I say. “All the writers toss out ideas. They call it spitballing.”
“So,” says Gaynor, “do we need, like, straws?”
“No. It’s just another way of saying ‘brain-storming.’”
“I have an idea,” says our resident brainiac, Jimmy Pierce. “Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing. You could do your movie about that.”
“What?” says Gilda. “Jamie plays a termite?”
“Ooh, cool,” says Vincent. “We could put antennae on his head!”
“And then I shred my guitar,” says Gaynor, jumping into a pretty amazing air-guitar jam complete with rippling fingers, windmilling arms, and thrashing hair.
“You don’t play the guitar,” says Pierce.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s heavy metal, man.”
“It could be a spoof on an insect video they’d show in science class,” I say.
“Spoofs are funny!” says Vincent. “Like in Mad magazine.”
“I don’t know,” says Gilda, shaking her head. “Termites?”
“I could eat a box of pencils,” I say. “They’re wood.”
“O-kay,” says Gilda. “That’s one idea.”
“Ooh, oooh,” says Vincent. He’s so excited, he even raises his hand and waves it at Gilda, the way he always does in class.
“What’ve you got, Vincent?” she asks.
“What if, instead of spoofing a science video, we do a parody of a driver-education movie? One of those old-school ones!”
“This accident should not have happened,” I say in my deepest Highway Patrol Guy voice. “How could it have been avoided?”
Vincent snaps his fingers and points at me. “Exactly.”
“Whoa,” says Gaynor. “Since Jamie is the star, it could be, like, driver’s ed for wheelchairs.”
“But the accident,” I add, “isn’t a wreck.”
(I really don’t want to make fun of car crashes. Been there. Done that. Wasn’t laughing.)
“My accident,” I say, “is accidentally running into the school’s toughest bully.”
“Your cousin Stevie!” says Gilda.
“Or someone dressed like him.”
“I could play that part,” says Vincent. “I’d just have to slick back my hair and maybe stuff a pillow under my shirt—”
“And,” says Gilda, who’s totally getting into this idea, “we could shoot the ‘accident’ in slow motion like they do with crash-test dummies.”
“But,” I say, “since you’re a student director, we pretend you can’t afford real slow motion—”
“So we have to act out everything in fake slow-mo like a bad stop-motion dinosaur battle in a cheesy horror flick,” says Vincent.
“But,” says Pierce, “while you two are moving as slowly as you can and slurring your words like you’re even talking in slow motion, we have some people walk through the background at normal speed—”
“And,” I say to Gilda, “you could keep coaching us. We do the same scene over and over. We shoot you giving us directions. Slower, faster, happier, sadder…”
Gilda’s eyes sparkle. “It’s a film about directing a film!”
And the ideas keep tumbling out of all of us. The bit keeps getting bigger and funnier. I toss out a few funny one-liners. So does Vincent O’Neil. There are no pie fights or seltzer-bottle battles, but we’re cracking each other up.
Gilda is so psyched, she kisses all four of us.
And I realize something: Being funny is a lot more fun when you do it for laughs instead of money.