Vasco da Gama, episode #18 (or, “The last one…the last I’ve got, anyway”)

     This isn’t the last episode of Vasco da Gama. But, it’s the last episode of Vasco I’ve got.

     There was one more episode in the series. I have no idea what became of the original master tape. I can’t even remember whether anybody made a copy. I do know that it was meant to wrap things up, while leaving the door open to restart Vasco, whenever the inspiration struck.

     Inspiration hasn’t struck—or maybe it has struck, and it’s still on strike. It’s been 20 years, so it probably won’t hurt to tell you how it all ended.

     Rob quit.

     The fictional Rob, that is—the real Rob and I have worked together many times since then. No—Fictional Rob quit the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom-within-a-sitcom, and went to live (and work, I think) at the Home for Waywardly Sarcastic Boys where he was raised. I seem to remember that it furnished an excuse for me to do a take-off on Bing Crosby in Going My Way as the priest who ran the place.

     That’s about it, really. Since Fictional Rob hasn’t come out of his fictional retirement yet, I’ll tell you a bit about the second-last episode of Vasco—but this time, after I give you the link to listen to it.

Vasco da Gama, episode #18

     There isn’t much to tell, really. Something goes awry; Rob goes in search of the cause of the awryness; Rob soon wishes he hadn’t. You can hear the series running out of steam. We all sound like we needed a break from it.

     20 years later, we’re still on break. If we had started Vasco up again, the series would have sounded rather different. “Less Vasco” was the generally-agreed-upon starting place for the changes. There also would have been more scenes with Mojo and Franklin Roseboro, the deli owner who first appeared in Episode 15. It’s just too much fun to write—and play—characters with a penchant for lateral thought that zigzags and doubles back on itself.

     Another of these changes would have involved constant change. The “Vasco” sitcom would have had a new executive producer every episode. Like Number 2 in The Prisoner, each of these temporary bosses would have imposed a new, inappropriate, and ultimately impracticable set of policies and procedures on Rob, MacSnoopeigh, and the rest of the Vasco team.

     But that’s all speculation. As I said, Vasco was running out of steam. Everything has its time, and that time must pass. As for my time, it’s going to be a little occupied in the next few weeks, so I’m giving you a well-deserved break before disrupting your Wednesdays again with a short series of audio oddities. That’ll start on April 2.

     In the meantime, keep watching this space. Who knows? Maybe I’ll tell you that a new series of Vasco is in the works.

     Well, probably not.

 

 

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #17 (or, “Foiled—curses again”)

     MacSnoopeigh as Macbeth? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

     Here’s another “true confessions” moment. Although I affect a veneer of Culture (pronounced “kul-chuh”), it remains a True and Undisputable Fact that, in my entire culture-veneered lifetime, I have only seen one version of Macbeth. It was Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version, so that’s bound to colour my idea of what makes for a good remount of what superstitious actors (are there any other kinds of actors?) still refer to as The Scottish Play. It probably doesn’t help my staging concept that I can’t remember anything about Polanski’s Macbeth other than a cauldron filled with what appeared to be regurgitated Welsh rarebit and a trio of naked witches. You’d think, this being Polanski, that the witches would all be 13-year-old girls. Polanski’s witches were definitely of age—they all looked like they’d just celebrated their twenty-ninth birthdays—if they’d been born in a leap year, that is.

     I’ll leave you to figure out what that means, and the mental picture it’s bound to conjure up, while I move on to a few mercifully brief notes about this episode of Vasco. It’s a continuation of the theme of the previous episode—everybody uses a stretch of unexpected downtime to talk about the role of bad luck and curses in their lives. In this case, the downtime is caused by circumstances that are a little less like fiction than I care to remember. I should remember it, with the amount of coffee I drink. According to something I just read on the internet, drinking a lot of coffee increases your long-term memory. I find the internet very useful for handy tidbits of information like this. For instance, did you know that, way back in The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight, the Chicago Cubs had a costumed mascot?

 

     I didn’t say it was a good mascot. It looks not so much like a bear as a cross between a porcupine and a throw rug. I can see why they gave him (her? it?) the boot after just one season. Still, The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight was the last time the Cubs won the World Series, so maybe that has something to do with the unceremonious way they ditched Porcupine Throw Rug Bear. See how useful the internet is? If I’d known that back when I was writing Vasco da Gama, I’d have done an entire episode about The Curse of Porcupine Throw Rug Bear.

     Unfortunately, another of the effects of drinking a lot of coffee is that your mind tends to race off onto other topics, or just off on tangents, before you’re finished dealing with the first one. Whatever it was…was it a topic, or a tangent? I need another cup of coffee to help me remember. While I’m getting that, you should click on the link and listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #17

 

P.S. I’m pretty sure I had something else to say, but one of the things I just remembered, thanks to my last cup of coffee, is that I’m out of coffee. Time to go to the store. Hope I remember where it is.