“No way,” I said. “It sounds like a nightmare.”

“It’s fun,” he lied.

There couldn’t be anything fun about hosting a pledge break on KCET. But as entertainment reporter for the local news, he had to do a lot of stupid things, and misery loves company.

The thing is, I hate public television. I know that makes me sound like someone who blows her nose in her hand, but I can’t fake this one. In my opinion, there is nothing more tedious than public television. Unless of course, you happen to enjoy Woody Guthrie retrospectives.

But for viewers like me, who never need to see Lord of the Dance again, it’s life draining. And that’s public television: Celtic dancing and hard hitting coverage of the Indio Date Festival.

But then my friend went and said it – The one thing that could make me change my mind.

“Did I mention we’d be on during a Bee Gees tribute?”

And that was that.

Years ago, when the crust of the earth was still hot, Andy Gibb hosted a TV show called Solid Gold. It was a solid turd, even by 80′s standards, but people watched it.

On any given week, you might see Helen Reddy lip synching Delta Dawn while boys in sequined harem pants clung to her legs, pretending to be in a sexual frenzy. I can’t really describe the effect, but you could probably recreate it by drinking a tumbler of NyQuil and rubbing your eyes really hard.

At the time, my mother owned a catering company, and did craft service for Solid Gold. She often asked me to go down to the set and work, but I rarely said yes (I had more profound interests, like writing terrible poetry and listening to Andrew Lloyd Weber scores). Secretly, however, I had a huge crush on Andy Gibb. I listened to Shadow Dancing incessantly, though I had to hide the record in an Evita album sleeve to protect my street cred.

Naturally, when my mother asked me to help with Andy’s birthday party, the jig was up. I spent the whole day picking out rubber bracelets and spraying my hair until it was vertical. I was in love, and I didn’t care who knew it.

The party was in the green room before the taping, and the Bee Gees were the musical guests. I manned the chafing dishes, waiting impatiently for Andy’s arrival. As my mother and I dished out lasagna to the Brothers Gibb, we gradually became aware of rising voices down the hall. The room grew silent, and the argument became plainly heard.

Andy was having a fight with Victoria Principal (his girlfriend at the time). She was yelling at him about his cocaine use, and he was angrily denying he had a problem. It was obvious he was in trouble, and the moment was awkward and sad for everyone. Eventually, someone turned on a radio. Robin left to knock on Andy’s dressing room door. The voices quieted, but Robin returned alone. Andy never came out. After a while, the brothers cut the cake without him. He died just a few years later, at the age of thirty.

Wow, that’s a fun story.

Obviously, that was not going to work on the pledge break. So I started writing down everything I remembered, hoping there was something I could bring to the party. Maybe one of them needed extra napkins or was lactose intolerant.

The first sign of trouble came when KCET called, asking for my resume. That didn’t seem right, and I just knew something bad was going to happen. Sure enough, the email came a few days later:

“While we appreciate your interest in KCET, we don’t feel you’re right for the pledge break.”

Wait – were they kidding? How could I possibly make the pledge breaks worse? How would my involvement make the begging segments less interesting? It’s already the most horrible thing you can sit through, with the crappy tote bags and the John Tesh CDs. How am I going to bring it down?

I found out later they thought I was too “edgy.” Like I’m going to show up drunk and take my top off.

Oh well. What can you do? There’s a lot of rejection in any creative business, and you have to find ways to deal with it. So when this kind of thing happens, and it often does, I try to see a bigger picture, and visualize what my future could be.

I like to imagine that someday, I’ll break through this membrane of obscurity. Perhaps I’ll write a book about my experiences, and it will make people laugh. And maybe the deeper message, about how relative fulfillment really is, will resonate with others. And maybe I’ll find myself becoming well known and respected.

Maybe then I’ll be right for KCET. And maybe then they’ll call, and ask me to join them in supporting good television.

And I’ll tell them that for the cost of a latte, they can suck my dick.

From: (REMOVED)
To: april@aprilwinchell.com
Re: You Cutey

April,

ya gotta post some pics of yourself when you were younger. You had to have been a cutey. No I’m not a pervert. Just noticed your current facial features reveal you were a very attractive gal. It’d be nice to see.

Oh, I can’t tell you how flattering this was. Every woman wants to hear that she was most likely attractive at some point in her life. You can tell just by looking at her current facial features, sort of like looking at Ozymandias and gathering he had a nose many thousands of years ago.

Please write back soon and talk about my weight.

FROM: Jane
TO: April
DATE: Mon, February 25, 2013 4:02:57 PM

But still – there are boobs, a naked lady with a crying eagle tearing through her chest, some crazy guy and shoes.

Hey here’s an idea. How about you don’t change the name of a classic work, but hire an actual disabled actor to play the role? Wouldn’t that be kind of great?

No?

WELL YOU’RE THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Other shows in the Oddsocks 2013 Theatre Season:

• One Flew Over the Psychiatric Hospital
• Children of as Good a God as Yours
• Girl, Resumed
• See Some Evil, Depending on the Light and Where You’re Standing
• My Left Foot, Unless You Don’t Have a Left Foot, In Which Case I Mean Either Foot, or None

In the process of getting this bastard up on its feet again, I’ve spent a lot of time combing through 13 year old posts, looking for things that might be fun to revisit.

Last night, I came across links to some particularly horrible Geocities vanity sites. If you were online in 2000, you remember the midi music and the bad gifs, and how generally horrible the internet looked. If you weren’t, there’s no way to show it to you, since these sites went offline years ago.

Or so I thought.

Last night, I decided to try The Wayback Machine to see if any of this stuff is cached, and believe it or not, some of this shit is still out there.

I’m only going to post two today as a sort of appetizer for the main event. I hope you take the time to explore them before someone realizes they’re still hosting this shit.

SASSY ANGEL KISSES

Sassy – her real name, by the way – has written over 500 poems.

Like this one:

“The greatest treasour on earth can’t been seen or touched. It has to be felt with the heart. Because the treasour is love.”

Yes, Sassy is a national treasour.

Sadly, there are only a few pages of poetry archived. I guess we’ll have to wait for the book on tape, which I like to imagine will be read by Shirley MacLaine.

BARRY AND TRISH

“We first met on Yahoo Chat on November 17, 1998. Barry had been going from room to room, just looking for someone to talk to. Barry and Trish chatted for awhile, and exchanged email addresses. They added each other to their friends list on Pager. They then went their separate ways, neither knowing what fate had in store for them.”

I don’t want to spoil the ending for you in case you never added someone to your friends list on Pager, but on January 5th, 1999, at 6:15AM Eastern Standard Time, Trish received an email advising her of a virtual flower delivery. Those virtual flowers would virtually change their lives for virtually ever.

But this isn’t just a love story. This site is a treasour trove of midi files and backgrounds, created by Barry himself. Probably while he was flying 34 hours to meet Trish for the first time.

AND NOW, THE MAIN EVENT

In February of 2000, Halle Berry ran a red light in a rented Chevy Blazer and crashed into another car on Sunset Boulevard. She suffered a gash to her head that required 20 stitches to close.

Which might explain this:

HALLEWOOD, THE OFFICIAL HALLE BERRY WEBSITE OF 2000

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is the most fantastic thing I’ve seen in my adult life. There are beauty tips, workout videos, and a cringeworthy faux hip hop soundtrack that will make you cry. Not to mention the giggling voice overs provided by a pre-Oscar Berry (hover over the animated dog and Berry says “I’m Polly! Tee Hee!”).

And check out Halle’s closet:

I must insist you go to Hallewood right now. Click on everything you can, and lose the entire day digging through the most embarrassing chapter in Halle Berry’s life since Cloud Atlas.

I cannot put my love for The Wayback Machine into words. I’m adding it to my friends list on Pager, and with any luck, you’ll find the kind of happiness we have in the last 48 hours.

If you were a reader of Regretsy, you may recall my unpleasant interaction with Jacqueline Stallone, perhaps most famous for passing Sylvester’s giant cranium through her withered loins.

At issue was a post I wrote about Rumpology; the sophisticated science of looking at someone’s ass and telling their fortune. Ms. Stallone has been offering this invaluable service for many years, though not exactly as a labor of love. She charges $600 to look at a photo of your blowhole, and really, you could get someone to lick it for that much.

Unfamiliar with the concept of mocking charlatans on the internet, Ms. Stallone responded to my observations with a baseless legal threat:

I’m not sure who she means by “we,” but she’s had so many eye jobs that she probably sees two of everything at this point.

Obviously, September 5, 2011 was the happiest day of my life. It’s not often that you get pretend Cease and Desist orders from luminaries such as Jackie Stallone, and I treasure it as much as the autographed photo of David Caruso that I can’t find. And to put the injectable filler on top of the cake, Jackie posted this thousand word meltdown on HubPages.

Now, admittedly, there is a lot of questionable material for sale on the Internet – at Etsy or anywhere else. However, all people are individuals and there is no accounting for taste. What revolts one person may appeal to others. This is the core of a free market. That is until we meet Ms. Killer, who apparently has decided to set herself up as judge and jury on what is good and what is bad, what people should or should not buy. One is reminded of Ayn Rand’s amazingly over-the-top, blowhard architectural critic character from “The Fountainhead”, Ellsworth Toohey.

See how that goes? You have the right to like or dislike anything being sold to the public, because you are the public, and freedom of choice is the core of a free market!*

*Unless you dislike Jackie Stallone’s ass reading business, in which case you ARE OUT OF LINE, MOTHERFUCKER

Yes, Jackie Stallone is terrifying, I’ll give you that. But I’m about to unleash something even more frightening than an old woman with a face full of poison trying to get you to send her photos of your ass.

You’re about to hear Sylvester Stallone attempt to sing.

Im going to warn you straight off: this is not good. For anyone. These are outtakes from a recording session where Sylvester Stallone gamely tried to make his way through a song called “Comin’ Down With a Bad Case of Love.”

As Sly talkmumblesings, “I can feel it growing inside me.”

I’m not sure what it is, but I think its malignant.

Isn’t that kind of cute? We were so young and silly then. We had no idea that Kim Kardashian’s giant vagina was just around the corner, and Paris would seem like Susan Boyle by comparison.

In any case, here’s a sensitively retouched glamour shot from her storage unit:

As you can plainly see, Paris has very little going on upstairs. And her tits aren’t very big either.

Now here’s the shot that got people talking, taken during an Adderall-fueled blowjob tournament at Koi:

Now, I don’t know much about a whole host of subjects, but I know tits. And those are not hers. Well no, they’re hers in that she purchased them and has the paperwork. But that’s not original equipment.

Paris didn’t get a lot of support in the press about her new additions, but I thought it was wonderful news. For all of us. Anything to take the focus off that lazy eye.

Speaking of which, doesn’t it seem to you that fixing that wonky peeper might have been a better use of Gore-Tex? Seriously, How does she look at herself every day in the mirror over her bed and not start doing that Popeye laugh?

I’ve always thought she’d look better if both eyes were part of the same face. I guess the biggest obstacle would be choosing which eye to change.

She could go with the good eye, and get a sort of fresh-faced Teen People thing:

Or she could swap out the weird one for more of a Lucy Liu flavor:

Interesting, don’t you think? That’s probably my favorite. It almost makes her look like she’s thinking about something. Which as you know, is clinically impossible.

And while she’s under the knife, she might ask them to take a little off the schnauzer:

Look at the transformation! She’s delicate and feminine. You could almost envision her using a napkin instead of a sleeve. Why, she’s the living embodiment of Grace Kelly, if Grace Kelly did blow off the back of the toilet.

And this brings me to a conversation John and I had in Target the other day.

We were browsing through the books and magazines, when John pointed to Christian Bale on the cover of some entertainment rag.

“Why doesn’t he fix that?”

I looked at the magazine but I didn’t see what he was referring to. So John carefully pointed to an area near Christian Bale’s right eye. I was stunned.

I never noticed it before, but apparently Christian Bale has a Rice Krispie stuck to his face.

This is one of life’s biggest mysteries.

I will never understand why famous people, who make their living being photographed, don’t fix obvious flaws that distract the audience from the work they do.

This doesn’t really apply to Paris Hilton, I suppose, since she doesn’t actually work. And the films she’s famous for don’t feature her face.

To be fair, it doesn’t really apply to Christian Bale either, since a little thing like that is hardly noticeable.

But what the hell is Russell Crowe’s excuse?

How do you ignore that? That fat knot between his eyebrows is just enormous. It’s becoming another face. He’s got a conjoined twin up there, for God’s sake. He could star in The Odd Couple by himself.

Do you see how much better he looks without it? You have to agree it’s an improvement, and there’s just no excuse for not taking care of it. He could zip into the dermatologist and have that thing scooped out with a melon baller in 10 minutes.

Now, I know some of you reading this will say that flaws are human and give us character, and to a certain extent, I agree. I’m not suggesting that everyone get their brows lifted into an expression of permanent surprise. I don’t think every woman over 40 needs to have her skin rubbed off with a grinder or have acid painted onto her face. I don’t have a problem with laugh lines, gray hair and imperfect bodies, and in fact, I think many celebrities have actually ruined their appearance in the quest for youthful perfection.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about this.

Seriously, what the fuck is that?

Go ahead, make a case for leaving that thing intact with a straight face.

BRING IT ON

While I go through the bucket of comedy by-product currently stinking up my office, here are some photos I can’t explain and have no business showing you.

I have no idea who took these or where. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say Europe. Because, come on.

I know know one thing, though. There are people out there who work with bigger assholes than you do.

Click thumbnails for larger images, if you must

AND IN RELATED NEWS…

I have to admit, I didn’t get it. To me, it looked like someone picked up a few thousand size 0 slippers in China and had to come up with some angle to unload them.

But maybe I was overlooking the obvious. Maybe every time you get up to go to the refrigerator, you fall. And that slows you down a little.

So I decided to read the copy:

With Get Slim Slippers, you will not go on a diet, change your eating habits, take any medicine or do lots of exercises just to get slim.

The six powerful magnets located near the surface of the slippers will, when walking, stimulate the nerve endings in the soles and increase blood circulation.

This effect will speed up your metabolism and improve digestion and elimination.

Hang on . . . you’re saying that simply by walking, you can increase your metabolism?

Obviously, I had no choice but to go on the radio and ridicule these people and their bullshit slippers. And to my surprise, they sent me an email afterward.

Subject: Your Shoe on December 7
From: Digicom Matsu Industries Inc.
To: April Winchell

Dear April

On the 7th of December, you have mentioned the Get Slim Slippers on your show.

We produce and sell the slippers, and do not recall selling to you a pair. Did you really tried the slippers, or just felt like saying something “So Nice” about the slippers. I really wish you could try the slippers, or any other product before you choose to criticize.

Your prompt reply will be appreciated,

Regards,

C Chalamish, CEO
Digicom Matsu Industries Inc.

Subject: My Shoe on December 7
From: April Winchell
To: Digicom Matsu Industries Inc.

- April

- See all 9 pages here