Maria Ferrari is a staff writer on "The Bill Engvall Show." She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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Episode 204 – Pineblock Derby

This week, we owe a lot to our support staff. I mean, we always owe a lot to our support staff, because without them the writers would have no coffee or food and would end up fighting each other to death over yesterday’s bagels. But for this episode we got a little extra help from them.

For example, Paul’s faux lawn? One of our writers’ assistants has one and swears by it. Apparently taking care of us for ten hours a day doesn’t leave him much time for gardening. We also had a hard time coming up with the band that Trent and Lauren wanted to go see. Most of us are young enough to have opinions on what bands are cool, but not young enough to be sure that teenagers will agree with us. So a list of finalists was culled largely from Bill’s assistant’s ipod. She also made me an excellent mix CD that I think will help me pass for 25 for another year or so.

The cute guy Lauren is eyeing in the concert scene is one of our production assistants. As we were getting ready to shoot the scene we realized we didn’t have any extras who looked the right age, so we called him in at the last minute and put him on camera. Apparently when he got the call he thought he was going to have to come down to the stage and move boxes, so being sent to hair and makeup to play a character named “CUTE GUY” was quite the bonus.

Besides being a love letter to our youngest and most attractive staff members, this episode is all about being a kid and letting your parents do your projects for you. Being a girl, I never made a pineblock derby car with my dad. But according to the writer who’d made one with his son, most father/son teams had the dads do the woodwork and the sons paint, sticker and otherwise pimp their rides. I thought this was a little shady, but then again, I was the girl who showed up at the science fair with a working generator built entirely by one Bernardo Ferrari. When it was time to explain how it worked it was like come on, guys. I don’t know. I’m ten.

So those are some of the elements we were working with this week. Add to that an impressive live special effect that sent that derby car through the garage window; the fact that no one got injured despite the fact that Skyler spent a lot of rehearsal time handling power tools; and about two hundred thousand boys in “Leopard Scout” uniforms, and you get this episode. Stay tuned for next week, when the writing staff argues amongst ourselves whether there really is such a thing as a “Vanabago,” or if we just made that up.