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Craig Shoemaker's Favorite Memory
So, you want my favorite memory of the Outer Banks....Hmmmm so many.
How about the top 5 countdown:
5) The only club where I cooked meals for the club owners. Talk about sing for your supper. I made supper to sing (or tell jokes)!
4) Going on amusement rides with your 11 year old daughter, Erica. I tried to act cool while on the ride an astronaut wouldn't take. Confession many years later: I puked in the porta potty!
3) Hang gliding. I'm sill finding sand in my navel!
2) Sharing living quarters with family and other comics. Oh, the noises I heard! Oops -- that was my room!
1) Winning the miniature golf championship! I'm still waiting for my green jacket!
Lots of love and great memories! |
Laugh on!
Craig Shoemaker |
Grant Turner's (aka Ricky Mokel)
Favorite Memory of the Outer BanksTo veteran residents of the Outer Banks, wind is not a big deal. It is actually a big part of why they live there. People who enjoy a constant breeze, mixed with violent stinging thrusts of sea air that knock off your flip-flops and scatter your groceries all move to, or arrange to be born on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So whenever a hurricane is spotted in the Atlantic, the "locals" tend to react by doing nothing. They simply buy more booze and watch the hi-jinks of a media afraid of not causing a panic.
My favorite memory of my annual week there in Nags Head living with Anita, a woman with an acute eye for comedy talent and Sam's Club mayonnaise -- is of the time when reports of Hurricane Felix erased 97.1% of my wages. (Anita's "Acts of God" clause in her contract is a wonder to behold). Sixty million vacationers (I forget the real number) evacuated in a wind gusting to 35 mph and a light drizzle. Felix was over a hundred miles off shore moving Northeast like chilled lava.
Anyway, after 3 days and nights of this and noting to do except drink beer and bewail the sad state of a world living under the thumb of television, we jumped in the car and drove around. We had felt the real world slipping away -- had to see for ourselves the total lack of destruction that we knew was out there.
What we saw made us want to kill the TV gods. An empty town with zero damage!
Anita instinctively drove us directly to a nest of bored hypemasters (satellite trucks) swarming the Ramada. No vacationers, just brave TV crews risking their lives in order to bring us the delicious tragedies sure to come. But it was obvious that Felix was never coming. So, as we drove through the parking lot, I heckled the hypemasters milling around their white trucks with their majestic dishes on top.
In my piercing Ricky Mokel voice, I shouted, "Ain't ya'll afraid of gettin' killed? Well you sure scared the hell out of us"!
Then we parked, marched inside the Ramada and in seconds I was approaching TV crew persons and saying as Ricky, "Are you with the TV? Well ya'll better get ya' camera and get down Śda beach in about ten minutes Ścause I'm gonna body surf, and Śnair might be a tragedy ya'll want to get on film".
And the pathetic son of a bitches showed up in force!
So I put on a big show for them, stretching, jogging up and down the water's edge, looking determinedly at the 15 foot waves, praying -- until finally I heard the booming voice of an artificially concerned TV reporter ask me, "Sir, may we ask you what you are doing"?
i consider this one of my most cherished moments. Period. As Ricky I had hooked a live hypemaster. Had him wiggling in my hand.
"Well see", I began to explain, not really knowing what I was going to say next, "I'm gonna body surf. I surfed Hurricane Hugo a few years back and I only lost my watch in that one..."
"Why are you doing this?", he asked. With a dozen people and several cameras observing from the deck railing, unable to hear us down on the beach, I looked him directly in the eyes and shouted, "Cause ya'll are bored as hell"!
I was on the local news that evening. Even though I never went in the ocean above my knees, they called me a dare devil.
Any day is a good day that you can trick the media into making fun of itself. But when this happens on the Outer Banks, former home of Blackbeard, it is a peak moment. You feel imbued with a spirit of some sort of modern-day media pirate inspired to harass the King's Satellite Fleet.
Note: From Anita (club owner)
This is Grant Turner's favorite memory, and it ranks right up there as one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life, but one of my favorite memories is when Grant Turner sent me a tape as Ricky Mokel and fooled me into believing he was a struggling, not-so-funny comedian. He had been working for me as Grant for several years and I was whining about having to watch audition tapes. He sent the tape labeled, "Ricky Mokel". It was shot in a park and my first thought was, "This guy can't even get work in a club". I was a full 3 minutes into it before I realized it was Grant.
I called him and told him how he'd fooled me and encouraged him to develop the character. Ricky Mokel had a lot of potential with his skewed view of the world. Grant Turner took my advice and began to expand Ricky. Ricky Mokel (aka Grant Turner) is now the house comic for the Alabama Theater in Myrtle Beach, SC. He plays to packed houses about 330 nights a year and sells more CDs and tapes than anyone else in the show. When I went to see him and he introduced me as "Ricky Mokel's Mamma", I couldn't have been more proud of my "son".
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