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End of an Era
Today is a sad day in television, because this day officially marks the end of the Supershooter 22 era for me. Supershooter 22, the production mobile unit of the WWE for the past six years will be retiring from this show at the end of the year. Starting in 2008, our former home will become,at least initially, the control room for a game show.
Never good at long goodbyes, I’ll be away on vacation for the official SS-22 farewell shows after Christmas.
March 6th, 2001 – Back when the mobile unit was new, and the WWE was still called the World Wildlife Fund
SS-22 Today – Six Years, 392 Show, 500,000+ Miles and One Corporation Name Change Later
SS-22’s Blogger Central Master Control
My Job – Taming the Spaghetti
Look Closely – I’m In There
And some times I have to step up into the ‘Big Chair’ and mix the show. Unless something extremely drastic happens, my last WWE show as a mixer on SS-22’s Calrec Q-2 audio console happened two weeks ago in North Charleston.
Good Bye Q-2.
The New Home of Frenchy’s Rant
WWE’s Supershooter Jelly – Still Wrapped in Plastic
Since we are going all-digital all-the-time, our Q-2 console needed to be upgraded. We opted for another Calrec, the excellent Alpha Bluefin series.
Bluefin – Still Under Construction.
Santa’s Elves, Hard at Work.
Medical Visual Language Translator
They make other helpful pamphlets, such as the Modern Standard Arabic Medical Visual Language Translator!
This useful little wonder could be a lifesaver in a foreign country, especially if the medics don’t speak your language, because all you’d have to do is point to the picture of your problem, and help and a proper medical diagnosis would be only a cartoon away.
For example:
Find yourself dreaming about beds? Water? Food? Point to the appropriate picture. How much can you bench press? What else can you figure out on this page?
Ever been to Fat Head’s in Pittsburgh and tried Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride? Feel like this afterwards?
Cut by a broken bottle? No, it was more of a pocket knife, well… maybe it was scimitar? I was burned by beakers of red and green acid – you know, the Christmas-y kind of acid used in ‘interrogations.’
My baby has a questionable tummy. Maybe I need to change it’s batteries?
I will feed my child some thumbtacks, or perhaps a fish skeleton. That should help!
If you have a sick cat, you’re shit out of luck.
Heart attack, or just broken hearted? Hit with a rock? A bat? Electrocuted? By what? Curious that the electrically wired ‘interrogation’ bed frame is missing from the list.
Even more curious, the artists really seem to know how to do lines and cook a nice spoon of high grade heroin.
Are you able to relocate your heart? How far do you bend over when you puke? Ever feel like the Patient in the game Operation?
Have you eaten Indian food lately?
I told you that you were out of luck. Your cat needs an MRI, but since there isn’t one in this entire country, we are going to stick a candy cane in your ass instead.
Your guess is as good as mine about whether or not these ‘treatments’ will work, or if they are just designed to get you to confess some imaginary crime. The moral of the story is don’t get sick in a foreign land without a helpful medical comic book.
Goin’ Out in Yinsburgh, Annat!
Many times when something interesting or funny happens, people who know about my blog will say, “Oh! That’s great! You should put that on your blog!” Most of those times the event is only funny if you were there, and would take longer to explain than it’s worth.
Last night was probably one of those times, but nothing else really interesting has happened since our little field trip to the desert last week, and I have a few pictures from last night, and a lame-o shitty blog post is better than a picture only post, so… on with the story.
This week is Armageddon, the WWE’s hundredth Pay Per View of the year (it seems). Armageddon is in the lovely city of Pittsburgh. When I think of Pittsburgh, I think of old steel mill workers that love their Steelers and Penguins and drink Yuengling by the case while eating their Primanti Brothers cheese steak sammiches, call each other ‘Yins‘ instead of ‘Youse‘ then go home and debate which to brush first, the tooth or the mullet.
Some times a night out is just a night out, other times a night out can lead to life changing realizations. Tonight fell into the latter category.
After the set day ended, Abi and I ventured out into the cold Pittsburgh sleet. We stopped first for dinner at Nakama Sushi bar. Not only was the food excellent, but the entertainment was top notch too. By entertainment, I mean both the non-stop flow of absolutely stunning women (no mullets, full sets of teeth and everything) and the magician that was roaming the inside of the bar, performing amazing card tricks for a couple of bucks a pop.
I won’t bore with the details, since it’s one of those you-had-to-be there kind of things, but suffice to say a good time was had by all.
Next stop on the tour was down the street at a place called Fat Head’s. Fat Head’s is about as close to heaven as I’ll ever come, with more than two hundred different types of beer available. The small upstairs section had the widest selection of bottles I’ve ever seen. For $10, you could put together your very own six pack. As my ever-expanding waistline proves, I’ve been a fan of beer for the past twenty or so years, and I’d never seen hardly ANY of the multitude of beers in the fridge.
Heaven is a cold refrigerator in da BurghThe entertainment in Fat Head’s was at least as good, if not better than the sushi restaurant, though minus the magician. After a few glasses of the aptly named ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride’ – a potent potion made of 89% deliciousness and 11% alcohol, it was time to leave.
Reeling from my Wild Ride, yet still up for more liver abuse, Abi and I went into a third, decidedly less upscale bar, for two reasons. First and most important, we wanted to see if the entertainment was on par with the previous two establishments, and if not, we wanted to try and find at least one mullet headed Steelers fan.
It was in this establishment, properly lubricated by more than enough pints, I had what turns out to be probably the worst realization of my life. As I looked around the room at the hundreds of young, beautiful, mullet-free people out having a good time, it hit me – I was the oldest person in the entire bar.
How sad. This realization was so depressing, I had to leave.
Then, right outside the bar, I saw it. The vision of my possible but now-not-too-distant post-retirement occupation.
It was soooo funny, but maybe you had to be there.
Back To Iraq Five – The Tribute And the Return Home
Any good freelancer knows the best remedy for a late night is an early crew call, and with the Tribute to the Troops scheduled for noon, we had to be in very early on Friday to make sure everything was ready. So, still sore from the night before on the roof, I dragged my hurting carcass out of bed, enjoyed cold yet invigorating shower, then some more delicious DFAC chow before reporting to the Production Tent.
Standing outside and waiting for the rest of the crew to freshen up, a soldier walked up to me. As we talked about the improvements to Humvee armor and flak jackets, I heard a loud but distant boom. I got ready to run into the nearest hardened structure, but when the solder didn’t react, I relaxed. Then – boom- I heard – boom – three loud – BOOMS – in rapid succession. I looked at the soldier who helpfully offered, “Don’t worry, those are probably controlled explosions.” He paused for a second then added, “But they usually announce those over the radio, and I didn’t hear anything, did you?”
Uhh, come to think of it, NO!
The booms ended, at least for then.
Even though we were close to ready, there are always a million or so more things to do. I was knee deep in oh-by-the-ways when SFC Marx walked in.
“Dude, remember where you guys dropped me off last night? They found a bomb twenty feet from there this morning!”
A what? He had to be kidding.
“The Explosive Ordinance Disposal guys are there now with a robot to disarm it.”
He wasn’t kidding. Wow. This place is still as crazy as ever.
After last year’s close call, I’ve learned this simple trick: don’t think about it. If you do, you’ll end up a whimpering mess huddled in a quivering heap on the floor. So rather than think of what could happen, I concentrated on what needed to happen to pull off the show.
The soldiers that helped us set up were back. They unloaded plastic barricades from a pickup truck. Each barricade that hit the ground outside the tent sounded like thunder. Needless to say, we were all a bit jumpy that morning. Marty even remarked, “Lots of booms today, dontcha think?” Maybe we were overly sensitive to it, maybe there really were a lot of explosions (and barricades hitting the ground!) Who can say for sure? Everyone was a bit on edge. What a terrible way to live.
With a few hours still to go before the show started, Abi and I took our long-standing animosity to the ring. The match, a no disqualification anything-goes all-out battle was for the International Heavy Lightweight Title, and it was a close contest.
Fearsome Frenchy demonstrates the Second Rope Death Drop on poor Muhammed Abi.
Due to sticky confidentiality and tricky liability legalities, I’m not at liberty to say who won the match, but suffice to say it was the first and possibly only French victory in Iraq, or in any battle for that matter.
Cameraman Sean Makes a Grand Entrance.
I told some of the late-arriving crew about SFC Marx’s early morning bomb story. They’d already heard about it. It turned out that the ‘bomb’ was, in fact, a discarded plastic PVC pipe. When I told SFC Marx about that morning’s bomb being a hoax, he immediately replied, “Which bomb?”
How sad is that?
Before we knew it, it was noon, and, just like that, the show started. If time takes on the quality of molasses in a cargo plane, it takes on the exact opposite quality during any live show. For the next two hours, as exhausted as everyone was, we entertained the troops the best way we knew how. I probably have said this every year, but I sincerely think this show was our best effort yet. And hopefully, we managed to distract the soldiers, at least for a few hours, from the place they currently have to call home.
As soon as it started, it seemed, it was over. The final fade to black was called, a round of thanks and congratulations went around, and then it was time to disassemble everything. In two hours we disconnected, unplugged, wrapped, packed up and palletized what took us two full days to build.
Before I knew it, we were back on the bus headed for the flight line. Of course, in accordance with our time zone, Military Daylight Wasting Time, we sat on that bus for two hours while they loaded our gear on the plane, but still, compared to years past – when we waited a full day to leave, we were ahead of schedule. Two hours behind? Right on time!
Our previously unbroken broken plane in Germany streak was finally broken. Maybe the pilots really wanted to get home too, maybe we were just lucky, but whatever the reason, for a nice change, we did zero damage to our aircraft. And possibly most important of all, I got to enjoy a nice, cold half gallon of beautiful German Bitburger beer, the next best thing to Guinness.
Nothing out of the routine happened for the rest of the trip. Time stood still as we were encapsulated in our flying steel tomb. Mercifully, I was unconscious for nearly the entire seventeen and a half hour flight home.
A tanker, freshly de-iced from whatever snowy base it came from met us, which meant no more stopping, no more wasting time. Unbelievably, we actually managed to land at Andrews Air Force Base two hours ahead of schedule. Buses were waiting for most of us to take us to commercial airports to get home – while a private jet awaited a lucky few – and as quickly as it started, the Tribute to the Troops show came to a safe and successful end.
As a personal post script, Frenchy’s First Law of Travel bit me once again, as somehow, amazingly, United Airlines managed to misplace the co-pilot for my flight home. Though the Air Force stepped up and got us back to the USA ahead of schedule, I still wasted seven hours waiting in Dulles for my flight home. Such is the price to pay for transitioning from Daylight Wasting Time to United’s Daylight Screw-You Time.
All of this aside, if there is a Tribute to the Troops VI next year, I will be there, unless of course I get fired for writing this blog. And just for the record, Patrick never did pay me that dollar!
The Tribute to the Troops show airs on the USA network Christmas Eve at 9 PM.
All photos in this report courtesy Jason Robinson, Patrick McManus, Cary Stedman, Scott Superka, Muhammed Abi and John Cone. Thanks!
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