STAND UP EGG

Eggbert was a very normal egg. Sure, he was smooth and white and shined a little bit in the morning sun, but mostly he was incredibly normal.

Eggbert’s one true wish was to be something special. He watched all the other folks going about their days, happy and content and he told himself that he should be happier too. But he wasn’t.

One day, out of a desperate need to do something, he decided to place a large red dot on the top of his shell. This, he knew, would mark him as someone special, someone important.

All day long Eggbert waited for someone to notice his special red dot. But, no one did.

Finally, tired and frustrated he went to see his mother Eggdwina and when she saw him she opened her arms to give him a big hug, but before Eggbert could reach his mother’s comforting shell, she flicked the red dot from his head and said, “Oh, Eggbert. You’ve got some schmutz.”

Eggbert endured the hug and quickly left for home. On his long unhappy walk he saw a flyer on a telephone poll, it read, “Open Mike Night at Ye Olde Muffin bar and stand up club, tomorrow night.”

Eggbert felt his insides churn, this was it. He was going to be a stand up comedian and everyone would see how special he was. Running at full speed, he stopped at the book store, bought a joke book and ran home.

Eggbert stayed up all night reading the jokes and all day memorizing them for the show.

When the time came to go to the club, Eggbert was bleary eyed, but excited. This was going to be the big day!

After the first two acts finished, Eggbert took the stage. In a small and almost whiny voice he recited the first joke from his book. “Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?” he asked the audience.

He was met with utter quiet. No one in the audience responded. “Um, because he didn’t have the guts!” Eggbert said all at once. Again, no reaction from the audience.

Eggbert continued, unable to bare the silence, “You see, skeletons have no body, and so they literally have no guts and guts also means bravery, like being brave enough to cross the road…”

Someone in the back of the crowd let out a huge, “Boo!!! Get off the stage! You stink!”

Eggbert tried to continue, stammering, his hands shaking he began again, “What goes stomp, stomp, stomp, squish?” He looked out into the crowd for a friendly face.

“You do!” a woman shouted from the left side of the audience. Then the first spit wad sailed up on to the stage and splattered against Eggbert’s side.

His confidence failing, Eggbert slunk off stage to a nearby bar stool.

****

After his first drink he heard a warm and mellow voice at his side, “Hey there, Mate. Hang in there.”

“The name’s Toasters. I am the English Muffin who owns this comedy club.”

Eggbert looked over at the source of the voice, and sure enough, a distinguished looking English Muffin sat perched upon the bar stool to his left.

“Hello, Toasters,” Eggbert mentioned without any enthusiasm.

“Open microphone night not up to snuff for you, eh?” Toaster asked, his buttery shine glimmering with mischief.

“I was horrible,” Eggbert said, his tone indicating that his state of horribleness was what always was and what always will be.

“Chin up, Mate. All you did was get it wrong the first try, who doesn’t? You got to see it as one step in the overall process, not as failure.”

“You think I’m a failure?” Eggbert whined.

“Not unless you sit on the stool for the rest of your life whining about how you stink. See here. The trick with the comedy is to talk about stuff which is very much about you. Not just reading jokes out of a book. What works for me might now work for you.”

Dragging the words out of some deep place in his soul Eggbert asked, “What works for you?”

“What works for me, is being me! Think about it. What kind of jokes do you think I did when I was doing stand up?”

“Knock-knock jokes,” Eggbert asked cautiously.

“No, of course not! I’m an English muffin, so I come out on stage and tell them that it’s easy to be a comic, there’s muffin to it.”

Eggbert smiled a bit. “I get it, Muffin to it and you are a muffin.”

“That’s right.”

“And your name is Toasters!”

“Because I am a muffin and because I own a bar.”

Eggbert’s voice gained a note of excitement, “Two jokes!”

“Yes, but sadly being an English muffin does not provide as much material as I would have hoped.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be, I own the bar and am very happy, but you my friend, are an egg!”

Eggbert stared at Toasters without comprehension. “You mean I have to be a muffin to be funny?”

“No, you are an egg and when you find the humor in being an egg…”

“I’ll really be funny!”

“That’s right. Will you come back and try next week?”

“But I don’t know what I will say; I don’t know what the jokes will be.”

Toaster slid off the bar stool and began to walk away, “You’ll think of it. See you next week, kid.”

Eggbert felt the beginnings of excitement as he raced home to discover the jokes that came with being an egg.

****

And Eggbert thought about it until he thought he would explode. He thought about jokes which would be right for him in the morning when he showered. He thought about jokes during lunch. He thought about jokes when he drove around to get his shell polished and he thought about jokes all night long in his dreams.

Every time he thought he had the right kind of joke he would decide that it wasn’t exactly what he wanted.

****

Finally the day of the show arrived and Eggbert nervously got himself to the club, he wanted his jokes to be exactly the right kind. Even his mother Eggdwina was in the audience this time. He could not have possible been more nervous.

The act before him was a real ham and the audience looked angry. Carefully, with slow and deliberate movement Eggbert approached the microphone. The sharp whine of amplified feedback nearly caused him to run from the stage, but he held his ground.

Nervously he began, “Hello, folks. My name is Eggbert.”

The audience quieted with expectation and Eggbert was sure he remembered a few people from the week before. No one smiled.

“My name is Eggbert, and I am here to CRACK you up!” Eggbert yelled into the microphone. His last word echoed into the silence as the audience stared at him without expression.

Eggbert felt his heart drop to the floor and was about to continue when he heard someone in the audience yell out, “Oh, I get it. You are an egg and you are going to crack us up!”

Someone else in the audience laughed. “It’s a joke.”

Eggbert wasn’t sure if this was working, so he decided to charge on ahead.

“Anyway, I am so EGG-cited to be here tonight!”

Again, it was quiet for a moment and then a small group of folks in the audience laughed. “He’s an egg and he’s egg-cited!” one of them said through his chuckles.

“You guessed it,” Eggbert replied, “I guess the YOLK is on me!”

At this half of the audience began to laugh.

“Hmm,” Eggbert said, pretended to not know what to say, “What SHELL I say next?”

Now the other half of the audience began to laugh.

“Seriously,” Eggbert continued, getting exited, “I am SCRAMBLING for another joke!”

Now the audience was howling with laughter. They were falling out of their chairs and slapping each other on the back with delight.

Eggbert yelled to the audience’s delight. “Hey you guys are great, I wasn’t sure that I would like you, but you won me OVER EASY!”

The audience was in a frenzy now, chanting, “Eggbert! Eggbert! Eggbert!”

Toaster joined Eggbert on the stage and took the microphone, “Brilliant. How about a big hand for Eggbert everybody!” and the applause was deafening.

As Eggbert made his way off the stage, Toaster called to him, “You did it kid, you looked deep inside and you found your very own voice!”

Eggbert smiled and called over his shoulder, “EGG-zactly.”

Oh, Reality

by Marcy

Everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug, but try as they might they could not get him to trip up and do something stupid.  Annoying he was, and rank smelly, but he was a smart player with no scruples.  He was made for reality television, and he was the person on the show that everyone - on the show with him or at home watching - loved to hate.

Eddie was manipulative.  He wooed Charice in the first three episodes just to turn on her when she lost the mud race challenge in episode four.  And you would think that his betrayal of Charice would have set off alarms for Bran and Alyssa, his closest cohorts in the tribe, but he outsmarted each of them in turn to win immunity and eventually lead to their being voted off.  The others tried to gain his trust in an attempt to figure out his motives, but he cut them down with his strategies week by week, one by one.  They had been on the deserted island twenty-five days, and Eddie still had yet to take a bath or shower.  Rhonda was convinced he had something growing out of his toes.  She never got the chance to investigate it, as she was booted off the island on the fifteenth day.

On day thirty one there were three people left; Eddie, Martin, and Kataya.  In an unprecedented three-way tie, all three had immunity necklaces and therefore could not be voted off.  The rules of the game stated that should a stalemate like this occur, the remaining contestants must stay on the island as long as possible, and the last one to leave the island would be crowned the victor.  Kataya was sunburned and starving, and Martin had sprained his ankle in the last challenge wherein he won his immunity.  Eddie, aside from his toe fungus, was still intact and completely convinced of his victory.  After fifty-four days, Kataya finally gave in to the elements and begged to be removed from the island.  Martin and Eddie were the only ones left.  

The viewers at home were rapt with attention as the show moved into day fifty-four.  How long would they last?  And who were they rooting for at this point?  Eddie had played an incredible game, and the viewers at home had seen his masterful manipulation of the game unfold from the comfort of their own couches.  But Martin had played true.  He was the good guy.  But still, Eddie was captivating.

Week seventy-two finally saw a victor, in the form of a poisonous marple snake who took both Eddie and Martin in their sleep.  It was the highest rated and most critically panned episode of reality television to date.  Until next season when Bret Michaels attempts the same game on the same island with a group of crazy half naked former strippers in search of attention and 15 minutes of fame.  

Everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug, but try as they might they could not get him to stop giving honest answers when asked how he was doing. You see, Eddie always had one tragedy or another hanging over his head and he was always just moments away from turning it all around. When innocently asked how he was doing he would invariably come back with” Horrible. But…” and fill in some grand plan for turning his life around.

Now, Eddie’s four best friends from growing up would never dream of making him leave their little group. They had all been friends since the kindergarten, when Eddie had thrown up from eating too much paste and stuck the five of them together, quite literally, for the first time.

But Edie, Nora, Jeff, 'Cisco and Andrea were all in the mid forties now and at least 80% of the paste friends had long ago tired of Eddie’s neurotic compulsion to tell everyone exactly how bad things were and how great they were going to be. Eddies plans never turned out and the lamentation of their failure was utterly draining to endure.

When Eddie was 27 he was made manager of the video store where he worked. He was convinced that he had finally turned a corner. Then, of course, his store shut down because no one rented videos from a store any more and Eddie was laid off. Everyone got an ear full on that one for about a million years.

So, it was with some surprise that non long after the four friends were about to retire and slow down to a rather modest and fixes income that their fifth friend, good old Eddie Glug bough himself a winning lottery ticket; 24 million dollars after taxes.

It came to pass that for the next two years everyone was sick and tired o Eddie Glug because you could not get him to stop answering the question, “How you doing?” With the answer, Fantastic! But…” and then he would drone on endlessly about taxes and solicitors hitting him up for donations and how much stress he was under from having his new mansion renovated.

So the paste friends killed him.

They made it look like an accident. They convinced Eddie that he should leave all his money to them in equal parts because they were his only and best life long friends. And they killed him.

Which of course was a huge mistake, because within a month everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug’s ghost because they could not get him to stop haunting them every moment of every day and whining about how he was killed by his friends just as things were finally turning around for him. But… just as soon as he was done haunting them, he would get to go to heaven and then everything would finally be great.

-Brihac

Make Mine Rare

By Steve Mast

Belinda Budge was as stubborn as her last name implied, and on this particular day she was resolute in refusing to eat her dinner. Melinda Budge, the porky fiend’s mother, was staring in disbelief at her husband, who was, apparently, allowing their daughter to misbehave.
Melinda’s arms were crossed and she kicked the thin, shrunken and balding man under the table. There was a loud “THUMP” and a tiny cry of pain emanated from what looked to be more of a corpse than a man. “DO something about your daughter,” the woman growled, and tilted her head at the girl, who was sitting in a cross armed imitation of her mother, her lower lip stuck out, staring at her food.
The corpse gave a hint of a consolatory smile and glanced back and forth between mother and daughter, as if trying to decide which was the lesser evil to talk to. “Now sweetie,” he said, settling on the daughter, “Why don’t you at least try your ham?”
The little girl raised her pudgy eyebrows to her father and said, “I don’t LIKE this ham. I don’t WANT this ham! I want PIE!” Her voice raised in volume and pitch with every phrase.
“But honey-pumpkin – you asked for the ham – you LIKE ham.”
“This ham is OVERCOOKED! I want RARE ham!”
“But lubby-hunkins – nobody eats ham rare – you have to cook it to be sure it’s…”
“I’ll eat a WHOLE FUCKING PIG ALIVE if I want to – I won’t eat this overcooked processed FILTH!” The mammoth child was shouting. She picked up a fistful of peas and mashed potatoes and flung it at her father. Half the food stuck to his chest and face and the other half splattered around the room.
Melinda, seeing the scene begin to get out of hand, grabbed her purse and swung it at the corpse’s head. He ducked but too late and there was the noise of glass breaking as it struck him solidly in the ear. Her own shouting matched her daughter’s. “Why are you doing this to her? Just order her some GOD DAMNED PIE, you GOD DAMNED IDIOT!”
The corpse looked down at the table but put a hand up until he had somebody’s attention. “Waiter, we’d like to order some desert now.”