An Early Christmas Present

It’s funny the stuff that sticks with you... Anyone remember Night Court? Silly little (if long running) sit-com from the 80’s with Harry Anderson, John Larroquette and Richard Moll? If you don’t remember it (and really, I wouldn’t blame you if you purged your hard drives of such useless information), you can click here and watch the first episode on YouTube.

I remember, as a kid, watching that first episode; and the show’s end is one of those memories that re-asserts itself from time to time (could I remember the Gettysburg Address or the Preamble to the Constitution? Noooooooooo… I remember the first episode of Night Court. Go figure). After wacky judge Harold Stone(Anderson) does his wacky thing at his new court gig, the prosecutor (Larroquette) asks him, "How did you get this job?"

"Funny story," says Stone (I’m paraphrasing here; click here to watch the third part of the episode that has these scenes in it - it starts about 6 minutes and 30 seconds in). "On the mayor’s last day – a Sunday - he had a vacancy to fill, so he sat down with a list of about a thousand names and started making calls. I was at the bottom of that list… and I was the only one who picked up the phone." Later, he says to his court clerk "I was at the bottom of the list… but I was on that list."

Today was one of those times that memory reasserted itself. I heard my cell phone go off in the office this morning. I was busy making coffee, building a fire in the fireplace, or some such… so the call went to voicemail. I walked into the office as my voicemail alert sounded, so I picked up the phone and checked the message.

It was my agent, Kaili. She’d just gotten word that a client of hers had an actor drop out of a shoot scheduled for tomorrow; and she was calling me to see if I might be available. I called her right back.

"Of course I’m available," I said.

"Well, it’s not confirmed yet, but I’ll let the client know you’re available in case they want to use you."

Sure enough, later this afternoon I got an email saying that I was booked for the spot. So, from 2pm ‘til late into the evening tomorrow I’ll be shooting a spot for Tricounty Temp Control that will be shown on Comcast Spotlight (local ads that play on the cable channels after the national spots run).

I don’t know how many other people were on the list… I don’t know how many of them got called, or who might have been ahead of me. I’d expect that more than a couple of people were out of town, traveling for the holidays.

But… I was on the list. And that makes me feel pretty good.

I’ll let you know when the spot is airing; hopefully I’ll get a copy that I can post on haroldphillips.net.

-Harold