...oh, snap...

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“That’s nice kid.  Pitch me.”

Here I was, all twenty two years of do-nothing know-nothing, and a series of strange handshakes had me pitching a TV show to a guy who made them for a living.  From the power of hotel eggs I wiped the salt from my lips and let out the first idea that came into my brain.

“I want to make a TV show about a guy who has a talking turtle for a dick.  In the first episode you think it is his internal narrator talking to him, but the episode ends with him going to the bathroom on a first date and taking out his turtle head.  The turtle smokes cigars and talks like Don Rickles.  As the series develops he joins a men’s group and meets other people with animal dicks.  The turtle is a metaphor for coming out of our shells.  It is a snapping turtle.  The show is called “OH, SNAP” because the turtle’s name is Snap.  Kind of like if ALF was an STD.”

I had other show ideas I had held back at that moment.  A Mr. T hosted educational children’s show called “I Pity The School”.  A sitcom set around a psychic comedy writer’s room at a coffee house called “Medium Roast”.  A reality TV series about Jon Lovitz learning to be a lounge singer called “I, Lovitz”. 

But instead I pitched a show about a guy who has a talking turtle for a dick.

The man scraped the stains of ketchup underneath the last two bites of hash and eggs on his plate.  I could see by the look on his head sweat that my poorly planned pitch didn’t land.  He licked the breakfast off of his lips and made a sighing sound like someone who had heard worse, but not much worse.

“Kid.  The next time someone asks you to pitch them, don’t make it about your dick.  And whatever is going on down there you should go get it looked at.  Let’s have lunch again sometime.”

And with that he stood up, crumpled a rose paper napkin onto his plate, and scooped a fedora onto his combover.  He shook my hand but not until he had put on a leather glove and tucked in his chair.  I was confused that he thought I had an STD.  I was confused that he thought the turtle was my dick.  I was confused that he thought breakfast was lunch.  It was barely a twelve minute meal, the result of two months and twenty different meetings, and my networking had resulted in nothing that might get me closer to getting on a network. 

The man never had lunch with me again, but he once texted me asking me if i would send him a picture of my dick.  I sent him a picture of the turtle prop I was envisioning and asked him “What if we called the show Young Sheldon instead?”.  That was the last we ever talked, but I am pretty sure he ripped me off and made a different sitcom with that exact title.  A show that would definitely be better if it had a talking turtle dick.