Now we know why he’s been keeping such a low profile lately…

Vasco da Gama, episode #9 (or, “Vasco Confidential”)

     Memories are what you make them…and what better place to explore that idea than at a high school reunion? I can think of a few without really trying, but that’s the theme of this episode of Vasco, so we’re all stuck with it.

     I probably shouldn’t give you the impression that I know anything about high school reunions, since I’ve never been to one. Everything I’ve seen about them in movies and on TV portrays the institution of the high school reunion as a giant game of “can you top this?” in a gym festooned with crappy crepe paper streamers. I’m not particularly keen on hanging around people I’ve been trying to avoid since I was sixteen, just to hear them tall tales about themselves. The only possible interest for me would be to compare the tales with the ones they told about themselves when we were in high school.

     There’s one character at the reunion in this episode who does nothing but tell tall tales, and wouldn’t you know that one of his most blatantly obvious exercises in falsifying memory led to other people hearing what they wanted to hear to give an ego boost to their own worldview. Yep, high school all over again, folks.

     Here’s the background on it: in the early 1990s, Wal-Mart had just come to Canada. Their stores are all over the country right now, and I’d be lying if I said I never shopped there. What galled me about Wal-Mart at the time was the rah-rah employee culture they tried (and subsequently failed) to impose on the minimum-wagers who were reduced to seeking a paycheque from them. Uniforms are a necessary evil in retail—although this doesn’t explain the countless times I’ve been asked by a fellow customer in one store or another “do you work here?”, even when I’ve been wearing a shirt that couldn’t have been a more obviously different colour from the ones that the store employees wore if I’d just finished dipping it in a vat of dye with everybody watching me. As I said, uniforms are all well and fine, but making cash register jockeys sing fight songs and do cheers at the beginning of every soul-sucking shift starts to veer towards the totalitarian. I’m also pretty sure it’s against the Geneva Convention. I’ll lay a wager that enforced singing was at least mooted as a possible addition to the list of charges at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

     People who are aware of some of civilization’s less-than-finer moments from the Twentieth Century might be able to guess where this is going. One of the scenes in this episode is an anecdote by a character who has already been proven to be the proud owner of an unreliable memory whose chief defining characteristic is hyperbole. He compared working at a Wal-Mart-like department store to being in…

     …wait for it…

     …a World War II German prisoner of war camp.

     Everybody get that? A prisoner of war camp. NOT a concentration camp. There’s a difference (see “Geneva Convention”, above). Not only that, but it’s based (albeit ham-fistedly) on a specific FICTIONAL German prisoner of war camp—the one in the movie Stalag 17. I’m going to digress for a second to mention that the key German military personnel in this film were portrayed by actors who had fled Nazi Germany. Not exactly members of the Hitler Fan Club, any of them. As a matter of fact, one of the points that Stalag 17 made, and rather graphically, was that collaborating with the Nazis—no matter what nationality you were—meant that you deserved to have the crap beaten out of you. This is one of the functions of art in a civilized society, folks. It forces us to look at things we might prefer to remember never happened, in an effort to ensure that we understand why they must never happen again.

     I mention this so you have some sense of why I hit the ceiling when we got that letter from Simon Fraser University’s radio station. SFU was one of a handful of little outfits across Canada that broadcast Vasco da Gama during the time we were trying to turn the show into a cottage industry. It never got past the status of a lean-to, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, my memories of the emotions I felt are coming back very clearly to me (I think “seething rage” is a fair, if understated, description), so now is a prudent time to turn the floor over to others in the Vasco gang who remember the whole thing with considerably more sang-froid than I do. Ian’s memory of the experience runs like this:

There was a joke in this episode where an idiot character compared the department store they worked in to a POW camp. I believe Rob, the character, called him an idiot. I seem to recall a line about the Germans rounding up everybody with more skin pigment than Ronald MacDonald. Our friends at Simon Fraser got upset about any reference to World War Two, any reference (no matter how tangential ) to the Germans putting people in camps without specifically referencing their persecution of homosexuals and gypsies, and the worst crime of all was mentioning a corporate shill in the same sentence as any of this stuff. That diminished the importance, etc., etc. The interesting thing was that we did the math and SFU must have ran the episode at least twice before they got upset and pulled it. This is either a testament to how tolerant our audience was or it tells us that not even the people playing the tape were paying attention.

     You read that right, folks. People who made it to all the way to university—and a university with one of Canada’s best political science departments—didn’t know the difference between a POW camp governed by a set of internationally-agreed-upon rules and places like Auschwitz, which were governed by terror, hatred, racism, and every other unpleasant aspect of human nature you can imagine. I don’t even want to speculate on whether they could tell the difference between the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the song “Guantanamera”, whether sung by Trini Lopez or not.

     Okay, now I’ve got bad music running through my head, so over to Kel, who remembers that “we actually had a character who sounded like Hitler…I believe that triggered their upset”. Well, the character was based on a Nazi, but not quite so high-ranking or factual a one. As writer and performer of this particular role, I can tell you that what you’ll hear was my bargain-basement impression of Otto Preminger as the POW camp commandant in Stalag 17. I think Kel must be remembering what I sounded like in the studio between takes while we were recording…

Vasco da Gama, episode #9

     Like how I just seamlessly slid into the link there, folks? It’s a good thing that all this stupidity happened so long ago, and that I’m over it. Otherwise, I’d use the rest of this space to say some things to the Thought Police from Simon Fraser who sent us that letter…things about how vital it is to get your facts straight before going off half-cocked—particularly when you work in a university setting. However, I’m sure that the greater sense of justice that governs the Universe has taken care of this. If they haven’t learned to think first and speak only when they’re sure of what they’re talking about, the sort of advancement that a post-secondary education is supposed to provide will have been denied them, and they’ll be working in a Wal-Mart somewhere.

     Of course, there is always the remotest possibility that justice has been delayed, and that they’ve gone on to post-graduate degrees and teaching positions. In that case, I’m sure that their inability to leave preconceived notions and biases aside when examining facts has made them the laughing stock of one student body after another as they’ve bounced down the pedagogical ladder, watching their careers disintegrate into hopelessness on their descent. In the faint chance that hasn’t happened, I’d probably advise current university students not to be too quick to trust any statement made by a professor who waxes nostalgic about their carefree college days of the early 1990s, when they ran Simon Fraser’s radio station.

     Fortunately, I’m above that sort of thing now.

     Or am I…? I really can’t remember…

 

 

 

A Message from Professor Proteus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #8 (or, “Title withheld for security reasons”)

     This episode is the second part of the two-part “Rob Vincent: Action Hero” trilogy. (Don’t try to figure that one out, folks—there never was a third part, nor was there supposed to be.) This time around, Rob has his cloak on, dagger at the ready, and is doing his best impression of James Bond—which is to say, an impression of someone who doesn’t care if anyone cares whether he’s doing an impression of James Bond or not. Again, there’s a parallel between Rob’s story and the “Vasco” segment of the program: Vasco is engaged in top-secret work of his own. Well, it’s as secret as can be expected from a man who bellows every line at the top of his lungs.

     So much for the cover story. Here are the secret files in the dossier for this week’s episode:

SECRET FILE 1: Rob’s secret spy code name—2, 4-D—is the name of a deadly pesticide. It’s one of the chief constituents of Agent Orange, who presumably works for the same spy organization as Rob. Agent B12, Rob’s contact, obviously leads a healthier lifestyle…he probably has a desk job.

SECRET FILE 2: If you have a lot of civic pride about Ottawa, this is NOT an episode for you. A fair bit of air time is spent dwelling on one of Ottawa’s worst-kept secrets—the fact that it still looks like a covert operation by the Ministry of Public Works to see how long construction projects can remain unfinished before anyone takes notice of it. Official buildings are by no means off limits from this: at any given time, some part of Parliament Hill looks like a drunken deadbeat dad’s half-started weekend home renovation project.

SECRET FILE 3: The passage of time may only have altered which specific part of Ottawa is torn up beyond recognition, but it’s utterly demolished the idea of using terrorism as comedy cannon fodder. All I can say to a post-9/11 audience is that the terrorists in this episode of Vasco aren’t meant to be funny because they’re terrorists. They’re meant to be funny for the same reason that almost everybody else in Vasco is meant to be funny: they’re completely terrible at what they do.   

SECRET FILE 4: Just how secret is this episode? The rest of the Vasco team has sworn a vow of silence over it. Ian remembers that the episode also went out under the title “The Vasco Who Came in from the Cold”, but asks, “any chance for more of a description of the episode?”, adding “I vaguely remember some leprechaun-esque accents”; Kel wonders, “we did a spy story?”; and Rob has nothing to say at all. “Tight-lipped” doesn’t begin to describe it. You’d get more out of the KGB if you asked them what Francis Gary Powers said after his plane went down.

     Now that you've been fully briefed, your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to click on the link below and listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #8

     If you have the keen ears of a super-spy—or even if you don’t—you’ll notice that an explosion you should be hearing towards the end of the episode simply isn’t there. The reason for this is classified—which is another way of saying “I haven’t any more idea about it than you do”. It may be that there was a flaw on one track of the master tape, or on the tape we used to mix down from the master for broadcast. Maybe we played the effect while we were dubbing to the master, but forgot to hit the “record” button for the sound effects track. Or maybe we just plain forgot to put the effect in altogether. It all happened so long ago, and so late at night, that no-one can remember. Since this episode is a spy story, I prefer to think of it as part of a giant CIA conspiracy and cover-up. It has a believable air of deniability, if nothing else. 

P.S. Here’s a special test for your powers of observation, all you budding George Smileys. Where are the three sets of signs and countersigns Rob uses in this episode taken from? Write your answers in the “Comments” space below.

 

 

 

 

Hello again, everybody. It’s the girl they call “Moose” for reasons they never bother telling me. Uncle Fun really should be writing this, instead of me. However, he’s begged off, saying that he’s far too busy with his duties as the honorary mayor of Funsville. Today (supposedly), he has to oversee the distribution of the annual Lou Grant land grants, in honour of Ed Asner’s birthday. I highly doubt that such an occasion even exists—but stranger things have come to pass in that weird burg.

I think Uncle Fun is just using any excuse he can get for ducking out of explaining his part in the story I’m about to tell you. It all started (as they say in the storytelling business) when I went to take my cat Dom to the vet for his annual check-up. (Dom, by the way, is short for “Dominant Life Form in the Household”, which, as any of you who’ve ever had a cat will know, is just another way of saying “cat”.) Ever the soul of generosity, good old Uncle B. Fun offered to save my family a costly vet bill by doing the exam himself.  When I quizzed him about his credentials, he boasted of his extensive experience volunteering on weekends with the Ladies’ Auxiliary Veterinary Corps at the Funsville Park Petting Zoo. I let the matter rest there, not wishing to hear what kind of experience this actually involved. Sparky also offered to assist, claiming to be familiar with the details of a standard veterinary check-up. I didn’t really want a clarification on that one, either.

Dom’s check-up didn’t get off to the kind of start we all might have hoped for. In fact, it got off to this kind of start:

 

Things might have gotten a little better from there…if only Sparky’s aim had been a little better.

 

 

The next thing I knew, I was on the receiving end of some decidedly second-rate first aid.

 

 

I’d like to say it all ended well. I’d like to say a lot of things, but that one isn’t any more true than the rest of them. Between Dom wielding his claws like spokeshaves and Sparky doing his David vs. Goliath act on me with that hypodermic, I have enough stitches in me that I could change my name to Raggedy Ann. Not that I’m likely to. I have enough trouble with the name everybody here’s hung on me—even if they never tell me why.

Moose

Vasco da Gama, episode #7 (or, “The Conquistadors of Space”)

     Every now and then, I get a hankering to write comedy sci-fi. Then I write some, and remind myself why I only get the hankering every now and then. I can’t decide whether this is because I don’t like science fiction enough, or because I don’t hate it enough. I like science fiction for its element of “let’s pretend”, but I also know that sci-fi requires you, at least temporarily, to believe in some pretty ridiculous things. Zombies. Time travel. Ordinary people flying through space at speeds that would give ordinary people the worst case of motion sickness ever. William Shatner as a writer. William Shatner as an actor. William Shatner, period.

     My point here is that taking ridiculous things seriously is where comedy goes to die. An amoral robot dictator is hilarious when it’s Bender from Futurama. When it’s Stephen Harper…not so hilarious, really.

     So, this episode of Vasco got the sci-fi out of my system for a while. “Not nearly long enough”, say those of you who’ve heard any of the episodes of Science Boy vs. Professor Proteus which have links from other entries on this blog. I won’t argue that one with any of you. Fans of S.B. vs. P.P. (the law of averages says there should be one or two) will note that this week’s Vasco features the first appearance of Professor Proteus. They’ll also probably be grateful for the improvement in him over the years.

     I don’t know if they’d also be grateful for a Professor Proteus origin story (of sorts), but here goes. It all started with a thing my brother and I dreamed up to explain away the incomprehensible yet still trivial mischances that life has to offer. TV on the fritz? Professor Proteus must be jamming the signal with his thought control ray. Car won’t start? Professor Proteus is obviously testing his remote-controlled deep space energy-draining device on the battery. Lose a sock in the wash? Professor Proteus drew it to an alternate dimension, where he’s creating a fearsome behemoth out of loose laundry held together by static electricity.

     All that aside, it stands to reason that, with Science Boy and Professor Proteus appearing in this episode of Vasco, it’s sort of a lost “first” episode of Science Boy vs. Professor Proteus. Well, not exactly. Science Boy and Professor Proteus don’t even appear in the same scene together. Nope—not even once. For reasons I couldn’t defend even if I could remember them, I chose not to overdub one of the voices, or write the dialogue so that I could switch back and forth between them. Maybe I’ll write another show someday to explain why this all came about. Perhaps Professor Proteus zapped me with his Anti-Character-Doubling Beam.  

     There’s a bit of doubling going on in the structure of the episode as a whole, though. Not only is the “Misadventures With Rob” part of this episode a science fiction tale, so is the “Vasco da Gama” part. I attribute this to my ongoing and inexplicable fascination with bizarre futuristic updatings of historical and/or quasi-historical figures, most notably the epic exercise in almost-good-but-nearly-never-quite-bad-enough-to-be-so-bad-it’s-good known as Rocket Robin Hood.

     There—I’ve said it—I’m a Rocket Robin Hood junkie. Make of that what you will, but beware a mighty blow from my electro-quarterstaff. And before I go off on a tangent about whether the Maniacal King Tut of the Planet Nilor is a more worthy opponent for Rocket Robin than the Wicked Sheriff of N.O.T.T., I should just put up the link so you can listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #7

 

 

 

     Once in a blue moon, Uncle Fun, Sparky, and the rest of their cohort let me use this space, ostensibly in the interest of equal time, but really because they can’t think of anything to say. This week, they’re all too busy—Funsville has been wrapped up in preparations for the annual Joe Flynn’s Birthday Jubilee. What with all and sundry running around quacking “What? What? What?” at one another, it always makes for more work than anyone anticipates, and far more work than anyone really wants to do.

     All of which leaves me wondering what to do myself, which in turn gets me thinking about how it all started for me.

     By “me”, I mean “me” of course, and by “it”, I mean work in the wonderful world of almost completely obscure entertainment and smaller-than-small-time show business. I came to this game by way of the recording studio, so when I decided to make the switch from voice acting to face acting (what a word to give it in my case!), I had no idea what to do with my hands. My extensive training behind the microphone (almost seventeen minutes, non-consecutively) had already taught me not to do anything even remotely like this:

 

     The worlds of stage, film and television are not nearly so sensitive to the effects of overzealous gestural flourishes, mostly because boom mike operators are careful to keep their expensive instruments well clear of even the most windmill-like of emotive flailing. Even though there usually aren’t boom mikes on stage, theatres do have expensive lighting instruments—but they’re generally hung far out of accidental slapping range for actors of my limited height and jumping ability.

     Still, the question remained when I began my training as the kind of actor you have to look at as well as listen to (seventeen minutes and ten seconds, non-consecutive, to date and counting):

WHAT DO I DO WITH MY HANDS?

     Years upon years of classes (mostly missed), rehearsals, shows, and cab rides to and from cast parties have yet to yield me a satisfactory answer. All I’ve managed to gather is a consensus of opinion among a number of broadly-defined groups with interests relating to the performing arts. Here they are, for the sake of posterity and the furtherance of knowledge, but mostly because it helps to fill space and kill some time:

 

Directors: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you don’t put them in your pockets.

Stage Managers: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you don’t drop the props.

Certain Cast Members: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you keep them to yourself during rehearsals.

Certain Other Cast Members: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you do it at my place tonight.

Members of Set, Lighting, Sound, and Other Backstage Crews: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as it isn’t something a member of our union should be doing.

Costume Designers: I don’t care what you do with your hands, unless I have to measure you for gloves.

Hair and Makeup Crews: I don’t care what you do with your hands. We don’t deal with them.

Agents: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as they sign the contract so I get my fee.

Audiences: Actors have hands?

 

     And that’s the sum total of what I know about what to do with my hands—when I'm performing, at any rate (and the rates I'm willing to perform for are ridiculously low). As for the rest of my time, I probably shouldn’t have put my hands on a keyboard to write this thing, but what else am I going to do before dawn on a Friday morning in November?

     Okay, a lot of things, but none of them fit in right now with my busy schedule of insomnia.

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #6 (or, “The Maltese Vasco”)

     This, folks, is the episode where Vasco da Gama becomes Vasco da Gama.

     Maybe I should say “the episode where Vasco da Gama becomes VASCO DA GAMA”, just to emphasize it. After five episodes, we were starting to get comfortable enough with doing a half-hour comedy show to throw out all the rules we’d set up for it. From here on in, the series is all about identifying our own rules, breaking them, and stomping on the broken pieces just to make sure everybody saw what we did, so they could tell on us.

     It’s been twenty years, so there’s no sense waiting around for anyone to tell on us—I’ll do it myself. First of all, the show doesn’t open with the familiar Vasco theme song…although it does open with a better explanation of Vasco’s basic premise than any we’d come up with so far. That figures. It also figures that the episode of the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom that we wedged into the middle of this story is tighter and better paced than any of its predecessors.

     It really also figures that this episode full of rule-breaking is the one that introduces one of Vasco’s character-defining obsessions: his professional rivalry with (read, “hatred of”) Christopher Columbus. No, I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me sooner, but you can bet I used the idea every chance I got after that. It is a sitcom, after all…well, the bit with Vasco in it is, anyway…what I mean to say is that the part of Vasco da Gama where Vasco da Gama plays Vasco da Gama is a sitcom, as opposed to the part where Vasco da Gama plays himself, which is to say Vasco da Gama, but doesn’t play Vasco da Gama, in the sense of Vasco da Gama playing Vasco da Gama…oh, the heck with this; I’ve painted myself into a corner and I know it. You figure it out.

     There’s a lot more that I could say about this episode, but since the whole thing is about stuff you didn’t see coming, that’d spoil the surprise, now wouldn’t it? Go ahead—click on the link. You can always ask me about anything that piques your curiosity by writing in the lonely empty “comments” section at the bottom of this post.

Vasco da Gama, episode #6

    Okay, I’ll tell you ONE thing. Around the 7:30 mark, you’ll hear a rather peculiar proposal for funeral arrangements. It’s not really meant to be a joke—this is more or less how I want to go.

     Hm…maybe you won’t be so eager to ask me anything more when you find out what I’m talking about there. Sorry about that.

 

 

 

 

     In case you were worried, I’m very much alive. This little hunk of granite stands ready in a plot in Funsville’s Shady Dealings Memorial Park, generously pre-paid for by The Committee to Give Uncle Fun a Decent Send-off Featuring a Properly Stocked Open Bar. It seemed à propos to the matter at hand, since I have the dubious privilege of introducing this posting, probably as a punishment for sins in a past life.

     Or sins in this one…I guess I have no call to be too choosy, have I?

     Anyway, past lives—or lives past—are what it’s all about, at least within the confines of this corner of the World Wide Web. Today is All Saints’ Day, when the adherents of many popular name brands of Christianity celebrate the lives of the most eminent among the dearly departed, and tomorrow is All Souls’ Day, when they celebrate…well, all the other stiffs. Trust organized religion to create a class system among the deceased.

     Speaking of those with not quite enough in the class department, The Venerable Cousins is a fully baptized and confirmed but non-church-going lapsed Anglican (it’s important to make the distinction—many lapsed Anglicans still go to church, still clinging to the one belief that there’s no place else to go for them on a Sunday morning). As such, he gets a little…I think the only word for it is “weird” around this time of year. I used to put it down to lingering disappointment at how lacklustre the TV special Halloween Is a Grinch Night turned out to be, but now I’m not so sure.

     The Days of All Saints and All Souls see the Cousins mind lodge itself in a place that can only be described as melancholy and macabre. His thoughts drift towards Things That Are No More: donning his favourite California Golden Seals replica jersey, he stalks the halls of Cousins Manor, lamenting in a loud voice, “Why did they retire Milton the Talking Toaster from the Pop-Tarts commercials?” It isn’t long before his musings turn towards Them What Has Done Did Went and Gone Before Us (as Sparky refers to them).

     Then it’s off to the nearest cemetery. This seems to lift his spirits. It may lift other spirits, too—I don’t ask what he gets up to when he goes there. Maybe he lifts a few spirits to himself, if you know what I mean.

     In any coffin (this is how they say “in any case” in the undertaking business), Miniver Cheevy Cousins invariably returns from the boneyard in altogether a lighter and more companionable mood than he had been in before. I think I’ve finally found out why. While at the cemetery, he takes pictures.  

     These aren’t your standard scenic snapshots of gloomy graveside vistas, either. Our combination Ansel Adams/Charles Addams specializes in close-ups of headstones. Being the owner of a surname which has occasioned much mirth among others, Mr. Cousins is keenly aware of how a name can give its owner a bumpy road through life. Or, in this case, death. Truth to tell, there are some names which work quite well while their owners are alive , look just fine in an encyclopedia entry or the obituary column, but turn into ready-made punch lines for passersby when carved into a grave marker. I must confess that this is why I rarely visit cemeteries. It’s not that the accumulated grief overwhelms me—it’s just that I can’t be counted on to keep a straight face.

     So, unwitting reader, if ye be one who feels that respect for the dead must be observed in all circumstances, I’ll say two things:

1. Ivan the Terrible. I don’t think anybody was sad to see him go. Or Attila the Hun…or Machine Gun Kelly…or Mad Dog Coll…among others.
2. You’ll probably do yourself a favour by not reading any further.

     As for the rest of you, consider yourselves as prepared as you can be for a glimpse into the workings of a warped and twisted sense of humour. On with the slide show.

Uncle Fun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     This last one is rather beyond explanation. I’ll leave it to you to sort out what it means. –Uncle Fun