Deadlines: Past Due Notices From Myself

by Wendel Potter




This column is overdue.  My deadline was eight days ago.  Trouble is, the deadline was self-imposed. 

I should have rode herd on myself, but I’m not a good boss.  I look in the mirror and say, “Who the hell listens to you?”

Now I do manage to meet most deadlines.  I  have my taxes paid by April 15.  If a refund is due, I file long before the deadline.

I registered for the military draft when I was eighteen years old, just as the law states.  Not that I was anxiously awaiting Uncle Sam’s greetings, beckoning me to join him in Viet Nam.  But the law is the law.

Meeting a deadline set by the government is not a problem.  Wave the red flag in front of me that says “Fines and Penalties Owed”  or “Punishable by Castration” and you have my attention.

I even filled out my Census 2010 form and returned it the very day it came in the mail.  Except for five minutes of my time, it cost me nothing (that’s a big drawing card for me).

What really upsets me is that it’s now costing taxpayers $56 per household to send out the door knocking census workers to visit those who didn’t mail back the form. 

I’m sorry, but I think the federal government should pay me fifty six bucks for meeting the deadline.  And fine or castrate those who didn’t.

I don’t recall ever being late for school.  I always had my homework turned in on time.  All those years, I didn’t miss a deadline.

In the game of comedy writing, deadlines became an important part of my schedule, if I was going to sell jokes and make money. 

When I first went to work for Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff, he was doing a segment in his Branson stage show that called for fresh jokes daily on the most current political topics.  This is how it worked:

Yakov would phone me around noon.  We’d spend five or ten minutes going over the national headlines.  He would indicate which stories he’d like to see material on.  He would need them by two o’clock.

I would then write up ten or fifteen jokes, fax  them over to his producer, and then, while still chewing on a peanut butter sandwich, head back to my day job. 

I never missed a 2 pm deadline.  However, I still have peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth.

By the way, if you’re wondering what’s become of Yakov Smirnoff lately, he’s currently being held in an Arizona jail on suspicion of being an illegal alien.

Jay Leno’s deadlines were not severe.  His monologue coordinator suggested that you have the jokes faxed in around ten am LA time.  The deal there was “first come first served”. 

It’s very possible that two or three writers might come up with the same joke on a particular topic.  If Jay liked the joke, then credit (and a check) went to the early bird whose submission showed up first on the Tonight Show’s fax machine.

So the deadline was money driven.  And that was drive enough for me.

I spent ten years writing a weekly humor column for a newspaper.  Deadlines were important there.   There was no “hold the presses” at the newspaper.

My column ran on Sundays.  My editor needed the column on Thursday. 

I never missed a deadline.  That’s not to say there weren’t days of mental anguish, trying to come up with something to write about that qualified as “humor”. 

So even though I had a week between columns, many of them were written in their entirety on Wednesday night, beginning with a cold, blank page. 

When the newspaper terminated my column on the grounds of numerous offenses (none of which were missed deadlines), a couple of friends developed www.wendelpotter.com, so I could continue publishing my essays unfettered.

Trouble is,  as I discovered, I needed some fetters.  A deadline was one of them.

So for five years now my weekly column has been diminished to a few cameo appearances.  I’ve spent more time lately working on my “late night style monologue jokes” that I post on my blog.  But between you and me, the column life has been calling me back.

Hopefully, I’m turning a corner.  The appetite for writing essays has returned.  The ideas are bouncing around. 

All I need to do now is set a deadline and meet it.  But I think I need a new boss.


----


Copyright 2010  Wendel Potter