Wind sprints, baby, run with it.

20 years ago I was amazed to see a restless class of third graders enthralled by a tape of a 1950s radio show with guest star Bela Lugosi as murderous pyromaniac Nick Segeden.   In the end he solemnly reminds children, after cops shoot him, non-fatally, “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” which may also have been the name of the show.  He draws the words out like a melodramatic high camp vampire.  The kids loved the radio play, wanted to hear the whole thing again as soon as it ended.

Point is– you can make a great radio play with kids, add sound effects, a podcast.   You want a story?  Hard to animate, animation is for fun ideas, quick, lively, unexpected.  Maybe the podcast is the way to go, what chu think?

I do not think, 8:45 left on the timer.  Why so chipper?  An old friend is struggling with the anaconda of soft tissue sarcoma which has cost him large chunks of his body.   Cancer wants the whole thing, my friend is fighting.  I think of calling him three or four times a week, but I’m scared.   What a good friend I am.

Do not think, 7:15 left on the timer, panned left, my voice imitating Bela Lugosi, panned right, and on three separate tracks, I’m the cops trying to apprehend him.  

In the left ear, Lugosi” “not so fast, gentleman…. I have a bottle of gasoline… and a ra-a-a-a-a-g!”  Pop, a gunshot, wings Segeden, he drops the bottle before he can set the rag on fire.  He cries.

“Relax, Segeden, it’s only a flesh wound.  You’ll live to fry for what you’ve done,” I say as one of the cops in the right ear.

I want you guys to write a script for a radio play.  OK, fine, improvise a story.  We need characters, a setting, a problem, a complication and some kind of weird, funny solution.   Yee hah.  Damn, it’s going to be fun!

What are you looking at?

3:51 on the clock, keep running, son.  

OK, there’s this.  Whatever is implanted in your mind that can hurt you will find the best possible time to leap out and do its darnedest.  Take this:  sure, you’ve been doing this successfully for six months, sure every step has been forward, you’ve proved it can be done, and probably scaled up into a business.  But, wait for it, wait…. “YOU SUCK!”  

Whenever the voice talks to you like that, ruthless and unfair, smile and nod.  “I do indeed suck, at this straw immersed in my milkshake.  And, uh, none for you, my merciless old suckless friend.”

1:33 and that’s really the best example you can think of?  

It so would appear.  Self rah rah sessions become mandatory in a tone-deaf world of worried sphinxes.   These sphinxes have a hard enough time without your problems, without mine.  They can barely help themselves, so go easy on them, would you?  

0:18  I most certainly will.