The Last Interview of Mister Bill

mister-bill

PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

Mister Bill’s plush body sat in a trendy Hollywood restaurant. The interview about his career was finished, but awakened dormant memories of his 1970s glory days at SNL. Sure, the stunts were dangerous, but money and fame didn’t come cheap.

It nearly ended in 1980, but Chevy rescued him from a garbage can. After that he moved to L.A. By the end of the 1990s, it was over. He’d been surprised by the journalist asking to see him. His old nemesis, Mister Hand was so old now.

“Guess it’s time we both retired.” Bill held his dear friend’s wrinkled hand.

The doll in the photo won’t be familiar to younger people, but I remember the early days of “Saturday Night Live” and the hilarious antics of Mr. Bill, who always ended up smashed, dismembered (he was originally made of clay), or otherwise violently put upon by his foes “Mr. Hand” and “Sluggo.”

Yes, it’s Wednesday, and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 3 May Edition of Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

You can find the history of Mr. Bill at Wikipedia and a short Google search will pull up some of his SNL skits on YouTube. It don’t know if they will be funny if you don’t have the history I have watching the show fifty years ago (has it been that long?), but it brings back fond memories of times when I could stay awake past eight or nine at night.

I thought it fitting to focus my wee tale on an aging actor’s retirement and the reconciliation of two “people” who had once been bitter foes.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

I’m continuing my announcement of the publication of my 16 chapter story on the Kindle Vella platform based on the old “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” TV show.

Each new episode drops on Saturday and four of them are currently available. Having tested the link both on my PC and my Kindle Fire tablet, I can confirm that you can read each chapter FOR FREE!

Please support your friendly neighborhood indie SciFi author by reading the chapters, press the “like” or “thumbs up” button (if you like what you read) for each individual “episode” and don’t forget to leave a comment for each chapter.

This weekend, Episode 5: “Monolith on Mars” drops adding to the mystery.

Visit Our Legacy, The Stars: A Tom Corbett Adventure and start having fun.

40 thoughts on “The Last Interview of Mister Bill”

  2. Yes, I recognized him and followed a similar path. I could put out any clever ideas, so I wrote about that… Anyway, good to see Mr. Bill and Mr. Hands finally at peace with one another.

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  5. What a tender tale about two old actors, and well-told. Imagining other famous pairings like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, Wile E Coyote and The Roadrunner…

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    • I’m running off of 50 year old memories, but I guess I thought it was funny that he got mashed up in terror all the time, but it was okay because he was just clay. Kind of how it was okay for the Roadrunner to lure the Coyote off of a 5,000 foot ledge and have him fall and go splat. He always recovered by the next scene.

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