Today I got the following letter. It came from a longtime fan of both Scam School and BBLiveshow/NSFW who I had not heard from in almost a year... and now I understand why. Please note: the following story is so outrageous, I was convinced it had to be fake, but after several exchanges with the first-hand party, I'm slowly realizing that the following story appears to be 100% absolutely true:
Brian,
I am a Peace Corps volunteer, and recently did a year 'deployment' to the Dominican Republic. The village where I lived was, by all classical definitions of the word, remote. No electricity, no plumbing, and all the water comes from a hand-crank well. They grow their own crops and, literally, hunt their own dinner on a daily basis. Houses here are made by hand from mud brick and straw. The nearest established 'modern' city, La Vega, is 4 hours away by auto.
After my year, I had grown quite close with many of the people of this community. It was one of the best experiences of my life. The community had a big gala celebration in my honor on my final night before leaving to come back to the States. During the course of the evening, I did an impromptu magic show, made up mostly of things I learned watching Scam School, tweaking and changed to better fit my audience Well, that was the plan, anyhow.
About 6 tricks in, I still hadn't gotten much of a response. I'd gotten a few smatterings of courtesy chuckles, but not much more than crickets. Literally, crickets. I was pretty sure I was not making any kind of cultural faux pas, so I took a moment and asked one of the elders why nobody seemed that interested or really entertained by what I was doing. His response?
In broken English he said, "Your tricks are very good, but we have seen them many times before on the internet. Most of us go to La Vega every few months. We always go to the library and use the computers. One of the children found a great American show called Scam School. Maybe you watch it too when you get back to your home and one day be much better magician."
Really. God's honest truth, that happened.
As an interesting sidenote, you might also be interested in knowing that many of the parents in the village tease their children into behaving and going to bed on time with mocking threats of being visited by "El Diablo de Mano" (The hand devil)... AKA Mr. Happypants.
Yes, Brian, you are known and influencing culture in remote places where even Survivorman wouldn't go. Good job! I had to write and let you know.
Congratulations, by the way, on NSFW and all the HUGE advancements you've made while I was gone. I'm looking forward to getting back into my usual routine and catching the BBliveshow. We'll always have Chadsgap. ;-)
Sincerely,
C. Thomas Kennybrook
AKA The guy that shopped the "toddler beating on a drum" picture
No surprise here: my first response was to completely disbelieve everything... but I slowly began to accept the truth when I received the followup email:
Good sir Brian,
That story is 110% true, although I may have mangled the exact literal quote of the village elder. I mean, there I was, in a place where they could have easily filmed Gilligan's Island, and I've got some local village elder basically telling me, "Don't quit your day job, kid. You're no Brushwood." Totally surreal.
The funny thing about El Diablo de Mano is that I had heard it more than a handful of times while I was there, and never paid any real attention to it. Every place on Earth has their own little specific cultural nuances, and I had just kinda accepted El Diablo de Mano as one of theirs without any real thought. Once the Scam School bomb got dropped that last night, it fell into place in my head not unlike a flashback montage from some Hollywood thriller with a big reveal like The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable.
Actually, the village does have *some* electricity via four diesel generators, supplied by the Peace Corps. And they have two televisions and two Ipods (also supplied by the PC). One is in the school, and the other is in a communal "movie tent" of sorts. Every few weeks on a R&R trip into La Vega, one of the PC volunteers (there were three of us) will take the Ipods to the library in La Vega and load them with educational videos (for the school) and entertainment (for the movie tent). Apparently, I learned, one of the volunteers who had rotated in and back out before me used to load the entertainment Ipod with Scam School. Silly me, I always picked old black and white movies. The PC has a program for educating people from the community and getting them college scholarships in the US. It's your basic investment strategy to help the community help itself. As part of lessening the culture shock, we show entertainment that not only entertains, but also is relevant with contemporary American culture. So, that's how Scam School (and Totally Rad Show) found their way into the wilds of the Dominican Republic.
I honestly don't know what to say about this, except this is a million times better than whatever my childhood dreams were.
-Brian
March 28