Several weeks ago, as you may recall, my pal Kalin Krohe taped me acting like a moron with a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of mustard and put it on his Tik Tok account.
Over 600,000 people have seen this video. One of them is an independent film director. He is currently working on a film and has decided that the perfect “closing credits sequence” for his movie is a special edition of my “ketchup and mustard” act. Kalin and I have been in contact with him for a while now and today we went to one of our favorite eateries to shoot a few takes of our little contribution.
The previous ketchup and mustard videos were all shot in this same restaurant, so we figured it would bring us good luck. Well, not so much.
The first challenge was to talk to camera while glancing to the side where my cheat sheet was. (Unlike the usual Tik Toks, this video had some pre-written dialogue.) This reminded me of student television classes in college, when I would try in vain to read off the teleprompter without scrunching my face up in some goblin-like visage to read the words.
This? This right here? This is why I chose radio!
Anyway, we did a take one and it came out pretty good. Our director was hoping for us to get three takes. We got a good take two, but then external forces began to conspire against us.
Our waitress, bless her heart, was……super-present. It seemed that she was dropping by the table every 90 seconds. She asked how things were tasting. She asked if we wanted dessert. She asked if the dessert tasted okay. And each time she arrived she interrupted a take.
If I was going to cast this little scene today as a movie, I would cast the late, great Kathleen Freeman as the waitress. Doing much the same as she is in this classic “Dick Van Dyke” episode:
Anyway, we finally got our dishes cleared and our checks on the table…..and we tried to do a take three. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I could not think of anything funny to say or do. I was, like a racehorse, spooked.
I’ll also admit that I was feeling extremely self-conscious during the entire effort. The restaurant was very crowded and I felt extremely awkward doing the scene over and over….when we’ve done the ketchup and mustard bit it runs all of 20 seconds. In and out before anybody knows what’s happened. But this was a longer process and I could feel staring eyes, real or imagined.
Well, Kalin sent the video to our director friend and we’ll see what he says. Incidentally, our payment for this effort is a free meal and other expenses. So much for TikTok being a source of income.