I always had a thing for Penny

Ventriloquist's Week indeed...

Holy God.

Someone has taken my most frightening childhood nightmares and put them onscreen.

As if they weren't terrifying enough in my head. As if it wasn't bad enough when R.L. Stine put out no less than three incarnations of this nightmare in print form. As if one psychotic ventriloquist's dummy attacking you wouldn't be scary enough.

This movie has literally one hundred such dummies - come to life, running around, cutting people's tongues out.

Plus, it stars Donnie Wahlberg.

Please people, do not force me to watch this movie. The trailer alone gave me nightmares. I questioned my motives the entire time. "Why are you watching this, Tim? This is a terrible idea. Please stop. You can close the tab at any time. JUST STOP OH GOD THERE'S A HUNDRED OF THEM!"

That must have been a fun pitch meeting.

"Okay, I grant that a living dummy is scary, but Chucky's been done. We need to up the ante."

"How about more dummies? How about 10?"

"Make it a hundred and you've got yourself a picture."


P.S. I'm pretty sure it was a hundred but I'm sure as hell not going to watch the trailer again to fact check it.

Improv babies

One of my teammates on The Senate recently had a baby. As any proud parent would, he brought the little thing to rehearsal last week.

This is little Evangeline. She's a whopping three weeks old now and less alien-looking than this picture would have you believe. Completely adorable. She barely made a peep the entire two-hour rehearsal and when she did, it was a brilliant initiation.

Seriously, she gave you a lot to work with. Great stage presence too.

Of course, we were all instantly reduced to cooing adorers, which I'm sure was interesting to the three new people sitting in with us. Irene held her for so long, we thought she was going to run off with her. It would be just like Irene to turn into a baby stealer.

Evangeline's head is still pretty soft. That's fun.