December 06, 2005
I Don't Want A Lot For Christmas, I Won't Even Wish For a Video
The crazy thing about Katrina is that it makes me feel like my life is in suspended animation -- and we're three months post-landfall. Case in point: Christmas. Yes, the stores are all decorated with Santas and red things. Yes, there's Christmas music playing on the radio (XM has five channels of it). And yes, it's cold outside. (I know New Orleans isn't that cold. Yes, yes, we're all weather weenies down here. I know we southerners would never survive a winter in a location that actually has winter. Just let me pretend we're experiencing winter weather, okay? I mean, this is my blog.) But I just can't get in the spirit.
The closest I've come so far was at the end of last week at work, of all places. I got an e-mail early in the day, sent to a handful of lawyers, saying, "We need some people to help out from 4:00 until 5:00 today with sock puppets. Let us know if you're free." If you work at my office, nothing says Christmas like sock puppets.
Every year (except for last year, and the years we don't feel like it), we have a sooper-secret committee that writes, directs, films and basically creates a video that we reveal at the Christmas party. The purpose of the video is to make fun of those who run the place (we figure that anyone who's in charge is fair game). Much like an episode of Saturday Night Live, we usually piece together a number of unrelated skits. This makes the film easier to make (since we don't have to worry about any continuity or pesky themes) and it allows us to lampoon a number of different topics all in the same project.
We came up with the idea of the sock puppets a couple of years ago when we had some ideas that were great, but too lewd to actually film. To be fair, "we" (meaning the video committee) didn't come up with the sock puppet idea. One guy came up with it, suggested it to us, and we all dismissed him as being mentally ill. After thinking about it, we finally realized the genius of it. Part of the problem with many of our great ideas for skits was that for most of them, you need real live people to play the roles. So, you see the problem. The beauty of the sock puppets is that you can have the puppets do things you could never get real people to do. And there's a much greater chance that you can do a sock puppet skit and not get fired.
So this is how I found myself spending the better part of an hour last week lying on the floor underneath a conference room table, squinched together with two guys, hands (clad in sock puppets) thrust over our heads, saying our lines into the mics on the floor and trying not to laugh. And the best part about it was that even though the time wasn't billable or productive or even professional, it felt like home. And that's about as close to a typical Christmas as I think I'll get this year.
Posted by Kitty at December 6, 2005 10:03 PM
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