Where the Wild Ideas Are

It started with an email…

My friend Kelly sent me an email with these pictures of a supposedly very dangerous route to a mountaintop restaurant in China.

The kicker is that if you make it all the way up, your food is free.  Right off, it sounded to me like one of those ridiculous email things that goes around, completely mis-captioned.  But still, the shots looked real enough to me.  Thus began the following email exchange…

But first, some back-story:

I used to work with Kelly and we had lunch together most every day.  Lunchtime talk usually centered on her dating and love life, which was far more interesting and bizarre than my own.  We eventually decided that her life was the basis for a great sit-com.  All we had to do was (barely) tweak the stuff that actually happened to her, or just expand on some of our lunchtime conversations.

At the moment, we have a document that’s over 6 pages, full of story ideas, running jokes, gags and what not.  Whenever something happens, we’re like, “That’s an episode!”

I’ve already used one here once before… Last September I included a bit about how I had a friend that wanted Penguins season tickets, just so when the Pens players personally delivered the ticket package (as they do with some packages every year) she could lure Kris Letang into the Silence of the Lambs pit she intended to dig in her basement.  (The very last line of the post was her line and it makes me laugh every single time I think about it.)

Obviously, we’re never going to actually do anything with this “series”, although she thinks we should get it done with animation.  I think it only works with real actors, because so much of it is nothing but spoofing the television medium itself. 

One of the downsides is that from time to time, we find our jokes being used on other TV shows.  Kelly saw a show a week or two ago that featured a debate on having a specific side of the bed.  It featured a character having her alarm go off with her on the unfamiliar side and consequently clubbing her bedmate about the head trying to turn it off.

I totally thought of that 2 years ago, as part of a montage of things that could go wrong if one was stuck on their “off side” of the bed.  The last of which was the alarm going off, “Kelly” clubbing her bedmate repeatedly as the alarm continued to blare, followed by a quick cut to the bedmate sitting in the kitchen with rolled up tissue stuffed up each nostril, saying, “OK, you can have that side of the bed.”

OK, with all this in mind, Kelly having sent me this email about the mountaintop Chinese restaurant, and understanding that real Kelly as well as character “Kelly” are staunch vegetarians, we had the following email exchange:

Bluz: One quibble though… if everyone that reaches the restaurant gets free food, then who is it that gets charged?  I wanna check Snopes to see if that’s as dangerous as it looks.

(I did check… I couldn't find it on the site.)

Kelly: I’m guessing there is a way to get there that is less dangerous.  If you go that route, you pay for your meal, which they probably charge enough to cover free meals.

Bluz: Helicopter and a rope ladder?  Hang gliders?  Parachutes?

Hey, episode idea… “Kelly” hears that they serve the world’s best (insert something non-meaty) so she makes the trip.  Along the way, she keeps bumping people off that are coming the other way… We’d have to come up with some bizarre scenarios… maybe it’s just like eating potato chips…

Then when she gets to the top, they’re all out of (whatever) so they’re serving bacon-wrapped kittens or something… (omg, I’m laughing out loud at that)

Oh God… when she comes up to the place, they have a whole pen full of kittens outside, she says “Oh, isn’t that cute… they have “Welcoming Kittens”

Kelly: That’s not funny…

Bluz: Are you kidding me?  I’m on the floor here… OK, so it’s a little “dark”…

Kelly: Eating kittens IS NOT a laughing matter…

Bluz: Of course it is… everyone knows it’s dogs they eat… Eating kittens is ridiculous, which is why it works.  Maybe substitute hamsters or ferrets or something else…

Kelly: No!!  No animals… 

Bluz: It wouldn’t be funny with tofu.

Kelly: We can use cardboard or tree branches or chalk …  just no animals!!

It’s China – we can use bamboo.

Bluz: OK, what is it that you would be horrified to eat, upon getting to the top of the mountain?  I mean; that’s the point… it has to be something you’d never eat in a million years.

Kelly: Hmmm…. I’ll have to think…  Babies would be better than kittens…

Bluz: Remember, you’ve been nudging people off the cliff all day…

Kelly: I don’t like this episode…  Is this how writing teams break up?

Bluz: OK, how bout this… once “Kelly” gets to the top, sees the kittens, learns they’re about to be wrapped in bacon, she sets them all free.

Then on the way down, she sees them all jumping off the edge of the cliff, like lemmings.

Kelly: Kinda funny…

Bluz: See?  There you go! 

It would be all feel-goody… setting all the kittens free… then the very last shot, you see this curtain of CGI kittens (or even obviously stuffed animal toy kittens) raining off the cliff.  Because nothing ever goes as planned for our “Kelly”, as you know…

Kelly: I’ll have to think about it…

Bluz: Well, we could always just talk about it in the episode… kelly sees this email and wonders what they serve… the rest of the plot points come up as a conversation being had…

It’s just that the mental image of bacon-wrapped kittens is so wrong it just cracks me up.

Hey, Bacon Wrapped Kittens would be a good punk-band name…

And so it ended.  For the record, I haven’t added this idea to our “Episode Document.”  After all, I’m not completely insensitive…

Note:  No actual kittens were hurt during the creation of this bit, and that’s actually chicken under all that bacon.  Because we all know we only worry about killing the cute animals.