Author: Jeff Kennedy

I’m in the new Six Word Wonders anthology…

I found a hand in the woods yesterday…

Something just a little different. A 101-word story.

My family’s just one bubble off plumb.

A 100-word story.

In the mid-80s, some college friends and I had had a comedy show on WBGU-FM called “A 1/2 Hour of Static & Fuzz”. It was a ton of work. Writing sketches. Finding sound effects. Recording. Editing. This was the days of reel to reel tape and that meant wax pencils, razor blades, and splicing tape.

I was usually editing right up until air time when I’d wait for the DJ booth’s light to turn green (red meant “on air, no enter”) and deliver the show.

One evening was particularly grueling. (Ask me about the “Tina Louise School of Acting” and “Deep Sea Fishing with Ted Kennedy” sketches some time.) I rushed into the DJ booth about 10 minutes before air time and handed him the tape. He was pretty relieved as that meant he could just put on the show tape and take it easy rather than DJing for another half hour.

There were maybe six guys sitting on a sofa and sprawled on the floor in the DJ booth. They looked kind of familiar, but I didn’t recognize them.

And that’s how I met Michael Stanley and the Michael Stanley Band.

Year’s ago, I was the Playwright Representative for the Ohio Theater Alliance. The annual conferences were amazing. One year, I had a very, very bad cold, but went to the conference despite being fairly miserable.

Guest Speaker (as I walked up to table sniffing and shivering): Wow. You look really sick. Should you be here? What are you doing here?

Me (staring at Guess Speaker): *silence*

Guess Speaker (laughing nervously and looking down at his hands): Oh yeah. Well. I guess…

And that’s how I met Edward Albee author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, and many other amazing plays.

In high school, I spent about a month touring Europe with the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir, doing charity concerts to benefit cancer research. We gave concerts in England, Wales, France, the Netherlands, Brussels, and Switzerland.

One day, we were in a room just off the lobby of a London hotel, checking in. Technically, it was a VIP check-in area, but in our case I’m sure it was just a way of keeping a bunch of rowdy teenagers out of the lobby of their fine establishment.

Suddenly, there appeared in the lobby a bunch of weird looking robots spinning around waving their silly toilet plunger arms blaring out “Exterminate! Exterminate!” I stared blankly at the spectacle. It seemed to be a big deal.

I turned to the guy standing next to me at the counter and asked “What is this?”

He looked at me oddly and said “Dr. Who”.

I explained that I was from the US so if that was a British show, I wasn’t familiar with it. I told him I really like sci-fi, but this was a new one on me. Sorry.

He spent about 20 minutes explaining Time Lords, Daleks, the Tardis, and all things Whoish. When he was done, he smiled broadly, stuck out his hand, and said “I’m Dr. Who. Nice to meet you”.

And that’s how I met Tom Baker, the 4th Dr. Who.

Everyday, for as long as I can remember, my phone has vibrated at 9:00 a.m. I had no idea why.

So, every few days, it irritates me enough that I spend a few minutes looking at applications and searching through phone settings. After a few minutes, I forget why I’m doing that and go back to my day.

Today, I found a setting that causes my phone to vibrate at 9:00 a.m. when there’s an all-day reminder without a specific time. That is, if I have a todo set to mediate every day, but not at a specific time, the phone vibrates at 9:00 a.m. My phone has decided that “Hey, you’ve got something to do today, but you didn’t bother to decide what time ya knucklehead so, dammit, I’m going remind you of that every morning at 9:00 a.m.”

Unfortunately, my phone won’t vibrate tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. so I won’t remember what a genius I am to have found that setting and fixed the problem.

THAT is the old guy problem

Long ago, in the before time, I was sitting in a meeting on casual Friday when the guy leading the meeting noticed my socks.

Guy: Hey, those are some fancy socks.

Me: Yeah, they were a gift from a friend.

Guy: What do the words say? Looks like there’s some words there.

Me: Oh, nothing. It’s silly.

Guy: What does it say?

Me (putting foot up on conference table): It says “This meeting is bullshit”.

General laughter, then an awkward silence.

Guy: Well, being that as it may, we should probably move on to item 4 on the agenda.

A few weeks ago, my wife Sharon caught me completely off guard with the question that no man wants to hear.

“Honey, don’t you think it’s about time we did something different with the bathroom?”

Now, as your typical guy, I could go years without moving a couch cushion or a magazine, let alone walls.

Immediately, my mind races. Does the toilet flush? Check. Does the faucet still leak? Nope. We fixed that months ago. Is there anything growing in the shower? As far as I can tell, no. I say, “as far as I can tell”, because to me the shower is the most intimate place in our house. It’s the one space where I spend one hundred percent of my time naked and without my glasses. This means that my wife could rent it out to a bunch of hobbits and, as long as they were quiet and kept to themselves, I’d never know until a new Lord of the Rings movie came out featuring an overweight, naked, Irishman.

“So, what do you want to change?”

A couple hours later, I’m in a store filled with color samples, each one ever so slightly more bluish-greenish than the next one. Sharon waves a paint chip under my nose.

“What do you think of this one?”

“I like green.”

“It’s Poseidon.”

“I didn’t recognize him without the trident.”

Sharon rolls her eyes and wanders off muttering under her breath and I do what I always do in these situations. I sit down in a comfy chair off to the side and try to strike up a conversation with the guy next to me who’s engrossed in Facebook on his iPhone while his wife is sifting through hundreds of equally similar, but ever so slightly different, red paint samples.

“What are you in for?”

It soon becomes clear that Sharon has quite the project in mind, moving the toilet, the shower, and inexplicably the ceiling. There will be new fixtures (all with brand names that contain no vowels), new tile (in a color I’d call light yellow, but Sherwin-Williams would probably call something like “sad omelet”), and a home equity loan that makes me weak in the knees.

We have a couple of architect friends do the design work and call a contractor friend to come over to give an estimate. (Why are all our friends employed in making home improvements?) After listening to Sharon spend half an hour describing the project, I finally pop the question to our contractor.

“How much is this going to cost?”

His answer is the classic line from Animal House.

“My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.”

While my wife Sharon’s youth seems almost idyllic with memories of maypole dances and afternoons climbing grandma’s apple tree, I remember the time I decided to find out what it would be like to run my tricycle off of the front porch. At top speed. With Mr. Winky our guinea pig. I was seven the summer I broke my nose for the first time. It’s not that I was a bad kid, it’s just that I was creative. Creative as in “Where’s Jeff going with that shovel and has anybody seen the cat lately?”

My parents encouraged my creativity and my interest in science and at nine years old I became the proud owner of the Major Matt Mason deep space action adventure play set (batteries included; it was 1969 after all).

Major Matt Mason was 6-inch high, rubberized, Gumby sort of thing. He was molded to look like he was wearing one of those accordion-pleated spacesuits from 2001 and could strike any one of two lifelike poses. Major Matt Mason had an evil nemesis, but my Dad got the cheaper set and Callisto (Major Matt Mason’s mysterious friend from Jupiter) became, to me, the evil green brain guy. Callisto had a gun that, when you squeezed a small red air pump, shot the most deadly weapon in the Major Matt Mason arsenal; a light yellow string with a knot at the end. Even when I was nine, this seemed like a pretty wimpy weapon, so this was soon replaced by the contents of a green ink bottle I found in my Dad’s desk. Now, even if Callisto wasn’t especially lethal, he did at least permanently stain.

Major Matt Mason had an amazing lunar command base. The base was a three-foot high, two-story white plastic affair with the top floor shielded in indestructible blue plastic. Indestructible, that is, to anyone except a nine-year-old with a geology set and a small hammer.

Major Matt Mason also had a very cool two-wheeled space walker that looked like something out of Lost in Space and was guaranteed to traverse any terrain. I innocently tested this guarantee on my dog Corky who, having been recently neutered, was none too happy with the intrusion of a motorized space vehicle into his dog house. Callisto didn’t survive the encounter and Corky’s nose was a light shade of shamrock green until the day he died 12 years later.

The space crawler also had a winch on back and, when attached correctly to the top of the space station, could haul items into the air. When attached incorrectly, the crawler made an incredibly loud and entertaining screeching sound and emitted colored smoke. When attached VERY incorrectly the crawler would pull over the space station and crush the plastic shields to bits. It was way cool.

Despite my destructive tendencies my parents continued to replace Major Matt Mason and the headless, green Callisto. Until one fateful day.

One Friday, my father stepped out of his car at the end of a long work day to a sight that, after all the lectures about the cost of Major Matt Mason toys, must have brought tears to his eyes. Major Matt Mason’s space station was standing upright and fully intact.

Dad didn’t see my friend Phil and I there, hidden behind some nearby bushes, and we didn’t see him until we leapt to our feet and tossed our Frisbees at the space station with all our might.

When the Frisbees hit the space station, the plastic shields exploded into shards of plastic. The station swayed and crashed to the ground majestically. The space crawler ($5.49 in 1969 dollars), still attached to the station, dragged the station ($7.99) and all the characters ($5.97 total) into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. The resulting crash had no effect on the car (it didn’t even slow down), but everything Major Matt Mason was destroyed. It was the greatest thing that could happen to a nine-year-old.

My father then uttered the only obscenities I heard cross his lips until I left for college.

“What the hell are you trying to do to these God dammed toys?”

Phil was, needless to say, gone. I shrugged, patted my Dad on the shoulder, and calmly explained, “Alien attack Dad.”

It was the next day that I started working for Dad, earning an allowance, and paying for my own replacement toys.