CBS Poop Show

This is a personal poop on CBS.

I am in a show this summer in The New York International Fringe Festival. While some shows in the festival have huge budgets and giant teams of producers and designers, we have had to delay paying some bills so we could fund the show and asked friends to work for free. The play follows three young men who hit and kill a deer on the way home from the funeral of a friend. So, we needed a dead deer. A talented young artist, Dylan VanDenHoeck, built one for us out of burlap and chicken wire. No deer were harmed in the making of this show.

The Fringe has had several opportunities for us to promote our shows. We went to the opening night party with the deer in tow. We danced on a table with her! A photographer from The New York Times took several shots of us and took our names! We crossed our fingers, hoping to see the picture in the paper the next day. Didn't happen. We did get one line in the article though.

Then we got word from the Fringe that The CBS Early show had invited 100 Fringe Festival Participants to stand out in the plaza and get some time on the air. They said they'd be talking to us and maybe even ask us to do some scenes. We jumped at the chance to promote the show. A couple of cast members stayed the night at my Manhattan apartment and at 7 a.m. we were eagerly awaiting our deer's television debut. Naturally we thought the deer would get some attention. It did. Cameras panned the crowd and we did our best to get the deer in every shot we could. We were thoroughly ignored by the TV personalities, but no one said anything about the deer being inappropriate. Eventually, David Price (CBS Early Show weatherman whose name I never knew until today) was the first to denounce the deer, telling us "We're not going to talk to you!" and security guards told us that if we put it on camera one more time they'd ask us to leave, which was nice of them. So we got it on camera... and they asked us to leave. We were escorted off the premises with our deer wrapped in a tarp. See it happen here...

So I would like to take a personal poop on CBS for the following reasons...

-Two and a Half Men is still on the air

-They invited a bunch of THEATER PEOPLE onto a morning show without screening us or making a list of rules that clearly needed to be in place BEFORE we thought we'd be able to promote our shows on television. (They're lucky the PORN ROCK - THE MUSICAL cast didn't show up.)

-It seemed that the invitation to the Fringe Festival participants was just a cheap way to make it look like people actually liked/wanted to be on the CBS Early Show. Apparently they made no mention that all of these wacky people in costume out on the plaza were from the festival, but waited until the show was almost over to confess where the crowd came from.

[NOTE: This poop on CBS is not intended to get on Andy Rooney.]

UPDATE!!!

We made it into a segment! This was right before we got escorted off the premises.

Poopy... I mean Gooby

I discovered Gooby several months ago. I watch all the movie trailers Apple posts and was terrified by this particular one. It claimed to be a family film, but the frightening title character seemed like the kind of thing I was most afraid of as a child; Gooby is a giant bear, he has fangs and claws, and he's foreign.

Willy is an imaginative (schizophrenic?) eleven-year-old who is neglected by his career oriented parents. At many points in this movie I wondered why these people had a child because they clearly hate everything about him and usually treat him like a nuisance. They move into a new bigger house and Willy worries this will bring strange, new, frightening hallucinations. His useless parents hire a wrinkly British nanny to watch him afterschool, but she doesn't play a huge role and is usually just in scenes where she is sleeping in the living room while antics ensue in the background. Willy had left behind an old teddy bear of his at his old house which magically is electrified to life (great special effects) to grow into the 8 feet of terror that will soon haunt Willy's daily life. Gooby shows up and scares the crap out of Willy. The two become fast friends and seal their friendship with a hotdog fight and farting contest. Willy sets him up a sweet hideout in the shed in his backyard. Eugene Levy (WHY ARE YOU IN THIS MOVIE?!) emerges as a new teacher at Willy's school. I expected him to be the villain, but really just turns out to be suffering from severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is displayed when he opens his briefcase in one scene and a cleanly creased stack of paper napkins are revealed as the only thing inside. There is a GREAT chase scene in a grocery store where Eugene is chasing the two around with a camera and the following things happen: Gooby tears the shit out of the cereal section, Willy has a fantastic green screen shot of him being pulled through the air by his bear counterpart, and the guy wearing the Gooby suit clearly can't handle the supermarket tiling and falls (this DEFINITELY was NOT choreographed to happen). I was really confused a lot during this movie because the storyline didn't seem to exist beyond Willy and Gooby having a rocky love/hate relationship. In the end Gooby gets Willy's parents to give a shit about him by taking him into the woods and hiding in what seems to be an abandoned crack den.

Why Gooby should NOT be trusted around children:

-he builds Willy a go cart so he can get him to sit on his "comfy" lap

-he takes Willy and some of his friends to see an R rated movie

-he could easily just be some guy in a bear costume who hides in a shed in a little boy's backyard