6th
A couple projects rolling around in my head.
I’ve been in between jobs for the past three months and am coming to the conclusion that even though I want to work for the man, the man doesn’t necessarily want me.
For a guy who already has father issues, that’s disheartening.
So I am trying to figure something that will work for me as an entrepreneur. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
1. Doing public relations for puppets. I am trying to market myself as a PR guru and since, in the past, PR types have begged me for drops of my massive creativity, I figured that world would be begging for me.
Well, let’s just say the market is tight right now. So I am trying to brand myself by doing a series of PR instructional videos to puppets. We’re all puppets anyway. I’m just making it literal by using my daughter’s puppets and writing up scripts.
Esteemed actor Ron Christopher Jones (who starred in my favorite Debt Relief Legal Clinic commercial — he was the guy in the Navy T-shirt who says, “I wanted to pay my bills, but I needed more time!”) helped me in the taping and, so far, the results are just as cheesy as you’d expect.
One of the episodes (my favorite) has me helping out a lamb who wrote a tell-all book about his affair with Gene Wilder on a film set. I figure if interspecies love can’t demonstrate my innate understanding of the media, nothing will.
I put up a rough draft on YouTube and I’ve been pleased with the response. I wish I could cut the length, but then I’d have to ditch the important information (such as the small size of journalist’s brain and the Michael McDonald-esque theme song played on ukulele).
I hope to have the episodes edited and up soon because I want to help puppets pull the strings of the media.
2. I play music and write songs. I’d love to perform professionally, but haven’t ever had the guts to go broke for long periods of time. However, whenever I can, I love to get up on stage.
Now that I have kids, I try to find ways to get them to appreciate the music I love. Sometimes it’s easy. There’s this Fisher-Price toy series called Little People that releases albums (among various ancilliary gear) and while the recordings are what you expect, sometimes the musicians throw in a weird cover. For instance, one summer album included the Bob Marley song, “Three Little Birds,” and the Halloween album had “People Are Strange” by the Doors and “Boris The Spider” by the Who.
This made it easy to get my daughter’s attention when the original versions come up on the car stereo.
There are other parents like me who want to ensure their kids have taste. I hope to capitalize on them with a new group, Velvet Playground, that is devoted to kid-friendly versions of Velvet Underground songs. Right now, I am picking and choosing songs that are appropriate for kids and changing the lyrics to songs that are still too adult. For instance, we’re doing “Heroin” as “Ritalin,” and the lyric, “When I put a spike into my vein,” is now, “When I put a spike into my train.”
We hope to be performing at kid parties soon.
