Nuked

I'd somehow survived the nuclear holocaust, but was badly burned and the doctors didn't think I was going to make it. They had me laid out on a mattress pad inside a glass capsule that was warm and quiet and actually pretty cozy.

My wife and daughter were in similar capsules across the room somewhere, and the doctors, followed by the camera, were supposed to pass by my capsule, look down at me through the glass lying there, then move along to the capsules containing my wife and daughter, where they'd stand at designated spots alongside the capsules and carry on their scripted conversation about what to do with our bodies once we died.

Or something like that. Since I didn't have any lines in the scene, I hadn't bothered to read the rewrites when I'd gotten to my hotel room the night before. It had been very late and id been very sleepy, and I was STILL very sleepy the next morning, lying there in that glass capsule pretending to be a man who was going to die a few pages later in the episode.

Very sleepy and very cozy.

All I was supposed to do was lie there very still with my eyes half open, and when I felt the shadows of the two doctors and the cameraman pass across my capsule, followed by the sound man holding his boom mike out over the doctors' heads, I was supposed loll my bandaged head towards them and open my eyes wide as though frightened and in pain.

So...

"ROLL SOUND! CAMERA...
ACTION!"

Here they came, pausing for a moment beside my capsule to consult their clipboards as I lolled my head and opened wide my eyes in pain, then the doctors, cameraman and boom man moved on past my line of sight and began filming the conversation over beside my wife and daughter's capsules.

So far so good. I'd timed my head loll just right, so that they didn't have to cut camera and start all over again because of me—which would have cost them about 40 extra minutes of expensive studio time and would have irritated the high strung director, whose main priority was to finish the part of the scene involving the two doctors talking beside my wife's capsule before lunch. Time is money.

Now that I was off-camera, all I had to do was lie there in my cozy capsule for the rest of the scene—about 5 minutes. Or maybe a little longer. In my warm little bed...

"MR KNOX! ... MR KNOX!"

Someone was rapping sharply on the glass of my capsule. It was the sound guy with his boom mike tilted downward and one of his earphones askew, pulled away from his ear.

He was was pissed.

"You're snoring, Mr. Knox.

We picked it up on our mike. We gotta reset and go again from the top."

I guess I'd gotten too comfortable three pages before I was supposed to die.

TDK '65''

• Last Time Around
  
• Charlie Nevins
  
• Young Men And Fire
  
• Austin Healy
  
• Cathy
  
• David River's Birthday
  
• Han's Pavilion
  
• Muscles, Our Neighbor
  
• John Browne, Learning to Dance
  
• Your Brother Mark Browne
  
• Buster
  
• Celluloid Lies
  
• Nuked
  
• Learning to Box
  
• Dog and Goose
  
• Buses and Such
  
• Stealing
  
• Hookybobbing
  
• Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment
  
• Sign Of The Time
  
• Learning to Drive