One of the more fruitful creative wells I’ve supped from (ugh, metaphor) is my weekly lunch-time drive around the city with my pal of pals, Dave Stewart. While driving, we gab and complain and make jokes and come up with ideas that run the gamut from asinine to amazing. Many of my favourite sketches that I’ve written over the years have emerged from these lunch-time free-for-alls.
The last time (I think it was the last time) we had one of these drives, before the pandemic boom hit, I was just about to drop him off at work. We had been talking, I believe, about things I could do in my new role as Writer-In-Residence at The Guild. I had been mentioning my desire to create some sort of video series that could incorporate talents, or lack-of-talents as the case may be, of fellow Islanders. As he was leaving the car, he says something like “what about a talent show with you as host – like a Rob’s Video Island Jamboree”. Something like that.
The idea immediately appealed to me, and after a few hours of thought, and a few title changes, it transformed into “Moe’s Island Jamboree”.
The idea would be that my character from years ago, Moe Gorman, would host an online entertainment show. Moe would host and sing a song or recite a poem or whatever, and then introduce that episode’s special guest.
Moe is a guy who fancies himself a poet/songwriter who specializes in works about people who piss him off
Upon approval from Alanna Jankov at The Guild, the call went out, to friends mostly, asking people to send in videos of themselves being entertaining in some way.
Not long after, we got our first contribution, from MaryAnne FitzPatrick, who decided this was a perfect opportunity to jump out of her comfort zone and commited to singing a song – something she loved to do in a past life but hadn’t done much singing recently. That first episode of Moe’s Island Jamboree is below. I’m happy to report that MaryAnne has continued with her Singing While Cooking videos on Facebook, and am thrilled that she seems to have rediscovered her love of singing!
This is the first episode in the series, and its rawness can be exemplified in many elements within, not in the least the unadorned theme song. I (or I should say Moe) wrote the poem about Malcolm McKearney a month or so before this was shot. I didn’t have it memorized, didn’t have the desire to memorize it, and so I came up with the clunky editing style you see here. I would go on to utilize this “line at a time” editing style in many of Moe’s videos.
More on more of Moe’s Island Jamboree episodes, and other things, in future posts.
The Annekenstein Monster 