After the debacle that was the first episode of Me and the Old Woman May the Devil Take Her the network decided to pull the plug, even though we already had 6 episodes in the can. They asked me “whose ideas was it to kill off the main character in the first episode?”, and this was a valid point. Instead of apologizing, like maybe I should have, I pretended to get indignant and just screamed “Shakespeare! Dante! Miller! Flannery O’Connor! Chaucer! The Bible, for Christ’s sake! Steinbeck!”

They didn’t know what to say to this, and even I was a little embarassed at the outburst. It was too late to start defending the show anyway, and besides, I wasn’t sure how much of what I’d said was true; I’d never even read any Flannery O’Connor. I stood there shaking with rage and plain old embarassment.

The part about the Bible maybe deserved some credit, though, as they did kill off Jesus—maybe not in the first episode, but quickly.

“The old man is like Jesus,” I found myself saying, to everyone’s surprise, “we’ll bring him back from the dead next episode.”

Their mouths started quivering.

“The show is cancelled. That’s it. No negotiations at this point, sorry.”

But ironically, that very instant, an unseasonal blizzard swept through town, and we were all snowed in the building for 22 hours. During that time, we all became very close: Jesse, Mark, Marybeth, David, Eddie, Gordon, Stacey, and both Todds. Marybeth and I made love between two vending machines as the wind howled outside, and I burned my hand in a trash bin fire to prove how strong my love was. We had to kill Eddie because he was infected with the alien parasite, but somewhere deep down in the part of his mind that was still human, we knew he understood we had no choice. When they dug us out later, we all told the same story about how the janitor had killed him, for we were all in it together now.

And so my brief foray into network television ended. It was tough to break it to the actors. I always felt if we could only have had a second shot at getting the chemistry right, it could have been a hit. Who knows, it’s a strange game.