Tag: The WaZoo! Show

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Valor’s Kids is awesome!

And not just because I have a tiny role in the movie! (Mind you, it’s an animated film and I’m the voice of Viper Soldier 2, but still…)

Valor’s Kids is being screened on Thursday evening, which means I can’t be there because of school. However, I figure if I promote the movie on here, maybe I can get a couple people to take my place. It’s being done as a fundraiser for The WaZoo! Show, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with this mission statement:

The WaZoo! Show’s mission is to produce original video-based comedy shows for the general public while providing a fun and creative opportunity for members’ professional growth in the areas of writing, directing, editing, acting and post-production.

I’ve been a member for nine or ten years and it’s been a blast, but I don’t want to get off-track here. Part of the reason for the screening is to benefit WaZoo!; tickets are $5 apiece and $2 of that goes directly to the show (i.e., that amount is tax deductible).

And did I mention that the director is 15 years old? Hmmm… nope, doesn’t look like I did, so I’m mentioning it now. Kai Mariah started the project waaaaay back when she was 12 and put on the finishing touches earlier this year. I guess that between ages 12 and 15, you sometimes find things you want to change and/or improve upon. Go figure.

So if you’ve got 93 spare minutes and five bucks for a ticket (they’re only accepting cash) at 7:00pm this Thursday, November 10th, please honor Kai with your presence at the Plaza Maplewood Theater. Here’s the address with a link to Google Maps—you can get specific driving directions from there:

Plaza Maplewood Theater
1847 East Larpenteur
Maplewood, MN 55109

Title: Valor’s Kids
Time: 7:00pm start
Cost: $5 per ticket ($2 tax-deductible)
Why: Because it’s awesome

Oh, and if you’ve got a Facebook account, there’s an event notice that covers pretty much everything I’ve mentioned here. I wish I could see a bunch of you there, but since I’ll be in the middle of class, I hope Kai sees a bunch of you there instead.

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I’m bad at being bad

I went bowling with a group of 10 other people last night and we had fun. As most people should know, an essential element of having fun bowling is mocking and taunting the other players and there were plenty of opportunities. Unfortunately… well, I’ll get to that.

We went for four rounds (some people bowed out for a round or two when their hands and wrists started getting tired—the rest of us didn’t ask for any details). The first three were like normal bowling: try and get the highest score possible. We ended up doing a ranking system according to those scores so the people who did the best moved to the leftmost lane and the crappiest players ended up on the right.

The first round established the initial rankings, which was awesome. Not because I did exceptionally well, but because I had a massive comeback in the last few frames. One guy thought I’d be stuck in the middle until I pointed at the scoreboard and he realized that I had a pair of strikes in the 8th and 9th frames. I then picked up the turkey (three strikes in a row), got nine pins and cleaned up the spare in the 10th frame. Yeah, definitely a massive comeback.

So I moved over to the left lane for a game, then proceeded to do crappy enough to move back to the middle for the third (thankfully, not crappy enough to slide all the way down, but still…). That might not have been so bad considering it was the “Groundhog Day” lane—if the ball went into the gutter, it wouldn’t always register the roll. There was at least one time when someone got four rolls in a frame because he put two balls in the gutter and later got another chance to pick up a spare the same way.

But after those first three games were done, we opted to try something different: put up the bumpers and get the lowest score possible. I sucked at it. And by “sucked”, I mean I rolled a 133. If I remember right, that was my highest score of the night. But aside from that debacle, at least I had the consolation of screwing up someone else’s game.

Michael Amiri (and I’m using his name because he had it coming) was in reach of a sub-50 game in the last two frames, but I owed him. Two days earlier, we were both working on a shoot for The WaZoo! Show that involved Nerf guns with “lasers” for aiming. The lasers were part of the sketch; the Nerf darts inside the gun were not. Nor was the fact that while we were standing around between scenes, he shot me in the jaw. So I owed him.

Consequently, in the 9th frame, he was about to roll the ball down the lane when I made a comment about him being used to not scoring. I didn’t hear him laugh, but I saw seven pins fall down as well as his middle finger multiple times during the rest of the night. Remember what I said about mocking and taunting? Hell yeah…

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WaZoo is on the Internet!

They’re still working on the ability to play/pause/rewind the clips, so you’ll have to take potty breaks in a hurry, but if you should feel the undying need for some joy and laughter in your life, you can check out Episodes 1 and 2 of The WaZoo! Show here. (Unfortunately, I don’t appear in either one, but in a couple weeks, we should have Episode 3 and the Festival cut available on the website, too. At that point, you should be able to ease the undying need for joy, laughter and Shawn all at the same time…)

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Whaddya mean, “This isn’t the Oscars”?

Since I just posted all the entries regarding the WaZoo! crew’s journey to Los Angeles, I thought people might want an update on what’s happened with the Festival Cut since then. While it may not have won an award out in L.A., there are other film festivals out there (with judges who have much better taste in comedy shorts). More specifically, there is a WorldFest-Houston (The 3rd Oldest International Film Festival in North America!). Whoopee… Still, this was the 38th one, so I guess they’ve been around for a while. Plus they nominated us for an award. Whoopee!

Perhaps the best part of hearing about our nomination in Houston was that it came via e-mail. No, that’s not the reason—I don’t mind hearing false rumors as much when they come from attractive Australian women swimming in pools in posh hotels. I don’t think I mind, anyway… it’s hard to say when I only have one episode to base the entire theory on. Anyway! The reason it was cool was because the e-mail included this sentence:

“Unlike other festivals, we nominate only the four top entries, and we give Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, thus you are assured to win one of these top awards at the Gala Awards Dinner!” Boo-ya!

I doubt that appearing in one more film festival and winning an award will lead to my dream of signing women’s body parts, but… oh, what the hell, I’m gonna go to bed now so I can dream of it some more. G’night…

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Day 4 in Los Angeles

This was it: the GRAND MASTERFUL SERIOUSLY COOL FESTIVAL PREMIERE OF THE BEST SHOW IN THE UNIVERSE, THE WAZOO SHOW! (It’s already been world-premiered twice now—there had to be some other way to demonstrate its significance…) It was the culmination of our trip, the results of all our “hard” work and the chance to show off how sweet we were to more people than local Minnesotans. I think it went fairly well. People were laughing, so it couldn’t have been too bad. Continue reading “Day 4 in Los Angeles”

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Day 3 in Los Angeles

Have you ever had the housekeeping staff walk into your hotel room while you were sleeping? Have they ever cleaned the bathroom without waking you up? Have they ever wandered around the corner and seen you rolling around in your bed naked? Well, I didn’t have to worry about that last one—Matthew came back from breakfast and asked the cleaning lady to leave before she finished up in the bathroom. (Plus I was wearing boxers, but two and a half out of three is still pretty bad…) Continue reading “Day 3 in Los Angeles”