Doug's Private Highlight Reel

As promised, here is the link to 'Doug's Private Highlight Reel,' published in November by the Noe Valley Voice and now also available in its on-line archive. There were quite a few editing, uh, discussions, in advance of publication, but thankfully Plotnik can only find one absolutely ludicrous restating of something that made sense when he wrote it but now can only be explained as what happens when women who don't understand basketball edit a basketball story.

But no biggie. Anytime you're in print, it's good, and the Voice people are wonderful folks. Writers always bitch when editors take over but that's only because editors sometimes forget that Only God Can Plant a Tree.

It reminds Plotnik of the time he and his songwriter partner, Mud, once went to the taping of a TV Holiday Special, where none other than Domi-Nik's favorite actress Meredith Baxter Birney and her husband (What WAS His Name?) were going to sing a duet version of a song Plot and Mud had written. It was fun to be on the sound stage, and exciting to realize that any second now Birney and (What WAS?) would come out and sing Plottie's song.

...until it happened. OI but could one of these two NOT sing! The taping was stopped continually while the producers lowered their expectations, then took a break and lowered them again. It was like trying to cross an electrical fence for Plot, as each sour-r-r-r- note ripped his melody to shreds.

The connection: in the end, the song didn't turn out great, but it got done, and the show aired, and Plottie and Mud got paid and the world continued to turn. Even if the story doesn't come out the way it should have, it still gets done, and the magazine comes out and the writer gets paid and the lattes still foam in their mugs. So stop whinin'.

Yes, she certainly was, and probably still is, very pretty.