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

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Episode 206 – Bill Talks a Good Game

So poor Graham, who plays Trent, had a pretty bad Tuesday the week we shot this episode. TBS asked us to write a special promo to air during the NBA playoffs. If you missed it, it’s basically a thirty-second scene where Trent and Bill are watching the playoffs, rooting for different teams. Bill is a Lakers fan, so he was always going to wear a Lakers jersey. And when we wrote the promo, the Hornets were still in the mix, so the idea was that we would put Graham in a Hornets jersey, since he’s from New Orleans.

Then Monday rolled around and, of course, the Spurs took the Hornets out in Game 7 of the western conference semifinals, effectively crushing Graham’s will to live. But we still had a promo to shoot, so unfortunately Graham showed up the next morning at the hair and makeup trailer to learn that 1) he was going to be shooting an extra promo for the NBA playoffs and 2) he was going to be doing it in a Spurs jersey. Oh, and 3) it was going to air during the playoffs, so 100% of his friends would be able to see it.

To his credit, Graham took the news like a pro, although he refused to put on the jersey until the last possible second before we started shooting. Little did he know that his day was only going to get worse.

We had to pre-shoot the scenes where Bill and Trent play basketball, because they were set outdoors and were probably too complicated to shoot live, anyway. Sometime during the shoot, production decided that Bill would need a body mic to be heard, so Bill took off his shirt to let them tape it on. But the tape wasn’t sticking, so they actually had to shave a patch of his chest hair off to get it to adhere properly, and Graham was standing nearby, hating his life and cursing the Spurs, apparently with his mouth open, and apparently downwind. Yup. He got a mouthful of chest hairs, hairs that Bill personally described as “really gnarly ones.” And hopefully that’s the worst thing that will ever happen to Graham, at work or in life in general.

That’s about it for this week… tune in next week, when you’ll be treated to one episode written by yours truly. Are you excited? My mom sure is.


The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer/speaker and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc.”