Mitchell Way
Peaches and Lydia Chanterelle were sisters who were my age. They were each blessed by having beautiful voices. At the time, I had a gospel singing group which toured the northwest corner of the US, and the Chanterelles sang with me.
Author’s note: In 1990, I wrote this bedtime story for my two year old daughter. Tucked into the covers next to her were Mr. Monkey and the Wooly Bear and on her bedroom floor, the biplane. I hope that your children and grandchildren will enjoy hearing it too.
Rocking horses and Teddy Bears are scattered around the floor in her room upstairs and little Kalene lies sleeping in her crib. There is an airplane mobile flying overhead, protecting the airspace above her bed and a music box across the room plays gentle music.
The components of a great comedy skit must include some, if not all the following suggestions to be successful. By not meeting these criteria, you may well receive blank looks from your audience and the possibility of being booed off the stage (believe me, I know.) The list is as follows:
There was a period in my life, during the teens and twenties, when I was going through the Monty Python/ Maxwell Smart phase. It just so happened that everyone in my college group was going through it also, so we became an improv act.
All our skits were clean humored because we were, after all, a college church group. We started out with small announcement skits at the morning church service. After proving ourselves, and getting laughs, we were soon asked to create skits for multiple events around the church throughout the year.
We had a program for elementary age children called Junior Church. It was an alternative for them, which got them out of the adult service on Sunday mornings. The ages of the kids ranged from kindergarten through fifth grade. Stories from the Bible were taught so that a child could understand them. There was also a time for crafts.
Because there was a shortage of older adults who were willing to be leaders for Junior Church, I volunteered. My wife, Cheryl, reminds me that I was the perfect fit since I also had the maturity of an elementary school student. Each week we would creatively come up with skits and crafts to entertain ten to fifteen children. For the most part, they were all good kids, or rascals, depending on how you looked at them. The only boy who challenged me was an imp named Silas Wiseacre.
Silas was a red-headed third grader covered in freckles. With his oversized crooked adult teeth coming in and his baby teeth falling out, he had quite a smile. He had quite an oversized attitude also and Silas and I faced off many times.
“You better not, Silas!” I’d growl.
“What are you going to do if I do,” he’d ask, just to see how far he could go. It was frustrating.
So, just because I could, I played tricks on him, which I found out backfired, because he realized that he could also play tricks on me.
Now, one of the guys in the college group named Johnny Z had a mother whose name was Shirley. Shirley had the position in the church of being the Sunday School Superintendent, meaning that she set up all the programs for the youth. Realizing that we were starting to gain fame from our skits, she asked Johnny if we would do a series of four skits during the adult morning services. A whole month of skits. They should have a continuing story line with a message and all the Junior Church kids would be present. The kids would be able to see what happens in the adult church and the adults would be able to share in the kid’s program.
It sounded like the church had finally accepted and respected our talent. We accepted Shirley’s offer.
First, we got the whole crew together and came up with a four-week story line. It was of course, a storyline which bordered on the ridiculous. There would be a villain, a dimple-chinned would-be hero, a maiden in distress, and a horse named Fetalbalm. The rest of the crew would be off stage in charge of props and sound effects.
Of course we couldn’t have a real horse inside the church building, so we created one. Fetalbalm had a burlap bag for a head. Inside, the head was stuffed with straw. There were two red apples for eyes which were held onto the head with long pieces of string. If we wanted to, we could put slack in one of the pieces of string and slowly lower an apple to the floor.
Notice that we now had two of the required criteria: a story line, and sight gags.
A push broom head inside of the top of the bag gave Fetalbalm’s head its shape, and the handle allowed the operator to rotate the head. A brown Army blanket formed the body, and underneath, to provide the legs were two men; Mason who worked the front end, and me as the rump. Since we were always covered, no one in the audience knew who was playing those parts under the horse.
I might add here that my wife Cheryl has called me multiple variations of a horse’s rump over the last 40 years.
This is a brief synopsis of the storyline as I remember it:
The villain kidnaps the fair maiden, and each week the dimple-chinned hero and his faithful horse try to save her. During week four she is rescued, much to the delight of the crowd. Of course, each act included many sight gags and witty dialog which only the adults understood.
One of the gimmicks we used each week was that Fetalbalm would be missing his tail at the start of the skit. It was hidden somewhere on the stage. If one of the children could see the tail on the platform from his seat, he could point it out to the hero and then come up on the stage and tape the tail onto the rump of the horse. This made them excited to come to the skits because they might be the one to tape the tail on the horse.
Now here is something of interest I found about being the rump of a horse: flatulence, not from the back of the horse but from the guy in the front of the horse. The guy in the back of the horse is in no position to get out of the way of the guy in the front of the horse. I can remember being in position inside the horse one Sunday when a foul odor filled the inside of the blanket.
“Oomph! For crying out loud, Mason. What did you have to eat last night?”
“Quiet,” he whispered. “The kids will hear you – and it was Sauerkraut.”
Silas was there each Sunday of the skits, and he sat in the same aisle seat. So, each week to annoy him and get a laugh from the audience, as the horse walked past him, I would swing the horse’s butt into his back, or step on his shoe with my hoof. I’m realizing that I would not get away with a prank like that today because Silas is a 50-year-old truck driver who would most likely pound me into the carpet. As of week three, Silas had not been the first to spot the horse tail and he would shout something sarcastic at the child who did find it. It was during week four, our final skit, that things changed for us all.
As was usual for the scheduled format, Shirley and the Pastor took to the platform at the start of the service and Shirley welcomed the children and introduced the skit by reminding them to look for the horse’s tail. They both then sat down in their chairs on the platform facing the audience.
It is important to note here that the platform was three steps up off of the main floor where the audience sat. The skit began.
A dial telephone used as a prop, sitting on a small table on the platform, started to ring. It rang about seven times, when suddenly, the dimple chinned hero entered from a side door, dripping wet, wrapped only in a towel as if he had just stepped from the shower. He walked to the center of the platform, picked up the phone and began his dialog.
I had to hand it to Shirley. She didn’t even turn her head to look at him. She just followed him across the stage with her eyes. Her face, which some of the adults in the audience were also staring at, showed signs that she may soon pass out, but her knuckles, wrapped around the base of her seat brought out nicely the stained oak of the chair.
This was then our cue to bring Fetalbalm to the platform. Naturally, walking past Silas, I swung the horse’s rump into his back as we passed him. This got no reaction from him, but as we began climbing the stairs to the platform, he stood up and yelled, “There it is! I see the tail.”
To this day, I believe that someone in the cast told him where to look, because it wasn’t in plain sight. At any rate, Silas jumped up and ran to the platform to tape the tail onto Fetalbalm, but for Silas, it was not about winning, it was all about getting even. He took the tail to the rear of the horse and instead of taping the tail onto the rump, he reached under his coat and pulled out an upholstery stapler and fired two staples into my butt.
It is evident to me now, why the NFL has banned what they call the tush-push, where players get behind the quarterback and push him and the center far enough forward to get a first down or a touchdown. Mason was caught by surprise when I jumped forward, pushing him and I off the platform onto the floor below.
The mystery of who was under Fetalbalm was then revealed as I ran from the sanctuary trying to pull loose the Army blanket which was securely attached to my butt. Mason was left alone holding poor Fetalbalm’s head by the broom handle. As he let go of the string holding the apples and they started lowering to the floor, he grabbed one and took a bite out of it. This of course traumatized the children.
Although we fully covered all the essential criteria for a great skit, the Fetalbalm skit was our last. After receiving a tetanus shot, I gave Silas the tail to hang as a trophy on his bedroom wall and the two of us made a truce.
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
It used to be that when I was young, strong, and had hair, just walking in front of a group of women would make them stare. Now when the women stare it is usually because something is wrong. I’m not saying that I look bad in a swimsuit but last year while walking on the beach in Cancun the women secretly dressed me with their eyes. It’s because I have fashion blindness.
At Bellingham High School, the stereotypical gender pathway in the 70s was always the same; enter the school through the main doors, pass the main office following the hallway down between the auditorium and counselor’s offices. Upon reaching the next crossing hallway, the girls turn left walking north. The guys turn right or continue straight out the east end of the building. The girls were going to Home Economics and the boys to Industrial Arts.
Elwood K. Wayson was a man of the woods. He was a hunter, trapper, and fisherman. He was a spar tree setter for logging camps and later a lineman for the local power company. Elwood lived in a small house behind mine when I was growing up. Since I had no living grandfather, I adopted him to be mine.
Saturday, June 4th, 1988. Just another typical weekend morning for me. I was reclined in my lounge chair in front of the TV, sipping a cup of coffee and watching Garfield and Friends. These were the Saturdays I enjoyed. Totally relaxed, no socks on, not a care in the world.
I was an eleven-year-old in sixth grade All City band. It was two hours each Saturday that the family would not have to listen to me practice my trombone. There is only so much a parent can do to encourage a child. After that, they play a game called, “Hide the Slide.”
It was a panoramic view which I am sure most people have never witnessed. The whole of Abbotsford, B.C. and further up the Fraser Valley to Harrison Lake, south to Bellingham, Washington and west to the San Juan Islands. There I sat in the morning sun; the wind was at my back — about 80 miles per hour of wind.
In a small cabin at the Fisherman’s Cove Resort on Curlew Lake, eight men prepared for a week of deer hunting on Vulcan Mountain. This was the opening weekend. This was the final weekend of the World Series and this was the year we witnessed “The Phantom.”
“I once sucked down a whole can of sardines — heads, guts and all, while only taking one breath.”
“Ok,’ I said. ‘You’re a liar.”
My friend Rex removed a can of sardines from his backpack, peeled back the lid, took one deep breath, and proceeded to slurp down the whole can — head, guts, and all.
The slush pump, or more commonly known as the slide trombone. The instrument which has mystified children since the day it was created — “Mommy, where does that tube go when he slides it back and forth. Into his mouth?”
The instrument which mystified me for over 50 years — “Cripes, where do I position the slide so I don’t make the sound of a bellowing cow?”
It started as any of our other hunting trips — with high hopes and low expectations. Sturgis Fenton and I were going to spend three days hunting the hills of northeast Washington.
It was not unusual for mysterious events to take place around the Mitchell neighborhood in the 1970s. It appeared, to the untrained eye, to be just another group of normal homes with average families, but this was far from the case.
Poof! A chalk eraser ricocheted off the top of my head. Chalk dust settled in a cloud around my desk.
“I told you, Mitchell! I told the class that if I caught anyone looking at their keyboard, I would wing an eraser at them. There you were staring at your fingers.”
The rest of the class, afraid to look up from the test cards in front of them, nevertheless, giggled. It was after all, a timed typing test so every word counted.