I was in Trevor’s office today going over some production details on episode #3 when, partway through our Harry Potter discussion, I noticed two of my female co-workers staring out the window.
“Ooooh, loooook!”cooed one.
“Soooo cute!”, the other.
I hurried over to join them, peering out and scanning the area across the street for a glimpse of the adorable puppy – to no avail. All I could see was a group of people and a woman holding a baby. WTF?
“Where’s the dog?”I asked.
“What dog?”wondered co-worker #1.
“The cute dog that has you guys all excited.”
“It’s not a dog. It’s the baby.”
I took a second, longer look. The baby wasn’t doing anything particularly amusing like projectile vomiting or driving a car. It was just there, hanging off its mother’s arm like a loaf of soggy bread. Maybe I’d missed it.
“What did it do?”I asked.
“What do you mean ‘what did it do’?”
“I mean what did it do that was so funny?”
“It didn’t do anything.” Then, fixing me with an admonishing look. “It’s just a cute baby.”
“It is?” It looked pretty much like any other baby to me.
“Babies are cute,”co-worker #2 informed me with the conviction of, say, a “Bananas are yellow” or a “Vegetarians are flatulent”.
“They are?”
In response, I received the type of glares usually reserved for clumsy drunks.
Anyway, all this to ask: Did I miss something? Is it widely accepted that all babies are cute by the simple virtue of being babies? Does the fact that every infant looks exactly the same to me – with the exception of those wide-eyed goofy ones – suggest I lack the paternal gene (to compliment my jazz deficiency)? I mean, I can certainly sympathize with an individual’s desire to produce an offspring who’ll feel obligated to mark their birthday each year with a requisite salutary phone call and/or banish them to the appropriate nursing home when the time comes but I still don’t quite get it. For my part, I’m more of a dog guy though, admittedly, dogs do require a little more effort than kids. It’s not like you can just line the kitchen with newspaper, put out some food and water, and then go away for the weekend and expect them to fend for themselves. That would be fine for a child but dogs require companionship and the occasional belly rub.
Anyway, speaking of babies, the wife of one of my co-workers – Executive Producers’ Assistant Trevor – is having a baby and, next week, they find out the sex of their child. Which got me thinking…this would be a perfect opportunity to hold a little contest.
Slap on your creative caps and start thinking as this blog kicks off the: NAME TREVOR’S BABY CONTEST!
First post, first served, so if you want to claim the rights to a name early (I’ve already taken Rubella and Spearmint), start posting. I’ll choose the top three candidates from the list of suggestions after which it will be up to YOU to vote in a winner!
“Hey, wait a minute!”some of you are no doubt saying. “We thought Joe fired Trevor!”. Well, I certainly should have after THIS incident (June 9, 2011: Oatmeal Snowman! Trevor screws up my page count! Stargate: SG-1 season 9! News of note!) but soon after letting him go, I was informed that it’s actually cheaper for the production to keep him. Apparently, his departure would require us to purchase a scarecrow to prop up in his workspace to keep the wolverines at bay (and away from our lunches). And so, I had to re-hire him.
Of course no sooner was Trevor back in the office than he was up to his old tricks. After hopping onto my laptop and fixing a formatting glitch with my screenwriter software, he starts explaining what the issue was and how he’d fixed it. “Look,”I told him, “don’t come to me with problems. Or explanations of solutions to problems. Just come to me with solutions.”
Geez!
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