
Remember when putting words in the mouth of Academy Award Winner Morgan Freeman was a thing? Did that ever stop happening?
PLEASE NOTE: the presentation of this clipfest does not mean I’m going on hiatus until January like a network TV show. I’m still allowing for a day off each week, as I’ve been doing for the past several months, but I expect to stick around and do my part to fill the void left behind by other bloggers jetting off to Grandma’s or Antigua or whatever. To me, holidays don’t seem like a time for not writing. Also, if I take more than one day off per week, site traffic paranoia kicks in and I have to breathe into a paper bag for a few hours, until enough internet wanderers click on that one undying, year-old Wreck-It Ralph entry to make me feel useful again.
Enjoy! And if I don’t see you before then: Merry Christmas!
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* “What Christmas is All About: an Imaginary Dramatic Reading” — The meat of this entry is shown above, but the link contains a couple more notes for temporal context.

At age 16 the thought of a part-time after-school job never occurred to me until I received a letter one day from a man named David Sleppy, owner/operator of the McDonald’s down the street from my high school. His store had launched a new recruitment program that offered a higher starting wage to applicants who were on the school’s honor roll — $3.85/hour at a time when minimum wage was $3.35/hour. As an introverted, insular kid with no self-awareness and minimal exposure to social worlds beyond my own limited boundaries, it wasn’t tempting until I did the math and realized that $3.85/hour was greater than my $5/week allowance. I figured why not. And hey, the letter guaranteed the job. Back in those days, silver platters were my favorite way of receiving things.















