Lost and Found

Lost and Found is a pilot shooting for next season.

What a day this was.

First, the location was in Venice Beach, about a block from the ocean...so Venice Beach for Minnesota. Interesting.

Backing up a little. When I called in and heard the call for this show, the specific info on what types they were looking for was right up my alley. Minnesota Vikings bar, need to look white and northern (essentially what they said), and need to look blue collar, nothing trendy...so think construction, factory workers, truckers.

Ding, ding.

I called in and got it, and all I had to do was bring Me to the set. I almost had too many choices for wardrobe.

So we hung out in a beach parking lot for most of the morning, waiting to be needed. (In case you haven't noticed yet, there's a lot of waiting to be needed.)

I thought that was going to be as cool as it got...wearing my own comfortable clothes, chilling on the beach (on. the. BEACH.) at work. But no, it got epic.

Early in the evening, we set up a shot where the principle (Katie Sackhoff) is telling a story to a bunch of enraptured Vikings fans in this sports bar. Okay, that's cool. I get placed directly in front of the stool where she sits (and her stand-in sits when we're not shooting). Awesome. Screen time, close to moderately famous people...this is exhilarating stuff.

Coup de grace time. Up on the big flat screen tv pop these words:

Skol Vikings, let's win this game
Skol Vikings, honor your name
Go get that first down
Then get a touchdown
Rock 'em! Sock 'em!
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

followed immediately by the AD wondering aloud, "How are we going to do this?"

Now, for those who might be unfamiliar, that little poem happens to be the Vikings fight song, which you have (perhaps drunkenly) sung if you've ever attended a Vikings home game as a home team fan.

They wanted a roomful full of Angelinos to sing the Vikings fight song.

I quietly let the AD know that I knew the song (practically by heart). He said, "That's okay, we haven't got the rights to the Vikings, so we'll have to make something up."

I was a little crestfallen, but legal is legal...or so I thought.

Ten or twenty minutes later, with me sardined literally in the middle of a circle of people capped by the principle (still the stand-in). The AD goes, "Okay, we're going to sing this thing...and..."

He pauses, and the rest of the extras in the room kind of give this nervous laugh, like, "What? We're improvising a melody to a song with the word Skol in it? Isn't that a chewing tobacco?"

Awkward pause over, AD goes, "Where's my Minnesota guy? That knows it?"

I raised my hand.

"Right, how does it go?"

So I taught sixty some odd people the Vikings fight song melody.

Not only did I get a chance to preserve the Purple and Gold dignity, when Ms. Sackhoff found out I was a genuine Minnesotan (since she was sitting literally eight inches to my right) she said, "Oh, God! I'm gonna embarrass you with my Fargo accent!"

Frankly, I think I made her a little nervous. She had to pull a "yooper", which, given her own testimony, was the only way she could sound like she was from the Northland. If she scaled it back, it sounded like she was from New York.

So, apparently, subtle Minnesota dialect is difficult to pull off.

It'll pass for Hollywood, and, as usual, there'll be a couple of thousand pissed off Minnesotans when it airs, because they're convinced that because they don't sound like that, nobody sounds like that. Everybody else won't notice.

So if I'm not on Lost and Found this fall, they've cut an entire sequence from the script...after they've shot it.

Short version: I'll be on the Lost and Found pilot.