Week 12 Part 2

It was going to be the job of his dreams. After finding his own name on the termination list he executed himself at his last employment as corporate hatchet-man. In short time he landed as Chief Planner in Charge of Marketing at Mauer Associates, the sole owner of rights to the Three Stooges legacy.

In fifth grade he ran home every day through suburb streets nearby Lansing, Michigan to see the boys bonking, hammering, and poking each other. Later in life he was frustrated every time the rumors of a feature length film or a television series proved wrong. Sure, he could always find a tee shirt, a bottle opener that made Curly noises, or DVD of the old shorts at Blockbuster. But what he wanted was an hour and a half of full color mayhem in full feature presentation.

He had an epiphany on the way home after terminating himself. Stopping for a paper he saw in the bargain bin next to the magazines there was a DVD of the entire Three Stooges cartoon series for $7.99. He thumbed it back and forth in the bin lamenting the trash that emerged from the Stooges camp since he saw Larry as an old man on afternoon television talk in the seventies.

He could be the one to come up with a decent concept to revive the boys and bring the new Stooges in living color to the forefront of American pop culture. He took out his Blackberry and found the Stooges production company and made his flight reservations for Los Angeles the following day. On the flight he researched the devolution of Stooges marketing over his lifetime. He found a Los Angeles Times Sunday feature from the late eighties that fingered Moe’s son as the controlling heir who could not bring himself to sully the image of his Dad by allowing copy-cat images on the screen.

So he hatched his plan, to pitch himself truthfully as a forever fan spawned during the re-runs of the shorts every afternoon during the sixties and seventies. He would hide his ambition to see a new incarnation of the boys up on the screen but would pull every trick known once inside the organization.

It took a week for Moe’s son to spot him as a chiseler. The hand motioning up and down in his face should have warned him of the two-to-the eyes that was coming but he was blinded. Next thing he felt a boot to the pant seat and he was out the back door onto a sunny California street rubbing his eyes and wondering how it all went so wrong.