By Pam Stone

So there you are, sitting around in your underwear, watching the tube and discussing why anyone would be nuts enough to appear on ‘Naked and Afraid,’ when they receive no monetary compensation whatsoever (I know, right?), and the phone rings with an offer to reappear on a sitcom you did 20 years ago.

 

You say, “Yes, please,” fly out to Los Angeles, learn your lines (blessedly few), rehearse for four days and on the fifth, shoot the pilot in front of a live audience. There’s tons of laughter and applause, and everyone – including network and studio execs – agrees it is a solid, worthy, family-friendly effort annnnd….

 

NBC does a 180 and pulls it, as well as the 13 episodes it had ordered and paid for.

 

Luckily, this ain’t my first rodeo. So I’m not gutted as you might suppose. Of course we were mightily surprised in a head shaking sort of way that fades into a wry half smile and a shrug, followed by, “That’s show biz!”

 

I was in Philadelphia when I got the call, hours before the news broke in the great old bastions of the industry, ‘Variety,’ and ‘The Hollywood Reporter,’ followed by a dozen on-line entertainment websites essentially churning out the same story, verbatim: ‘NBC Axes Coach,’ and ‘Coach Sidelined!’

 

Honestly, I was at peace and, besides, I was in the middle of another ‘pinch me’ moment. I was having dinner with Mary Wilson (yes, that Mary Wilson, of The Supremes) as we were performing at a private, corporate date at the downtown convention center, had just flown in and were starving.

 

(Y’all: on stage the following afternoon, goofing around, I got to croak out, “Stop! In the naaame of looove,” when she invited me to join in. I was really bad, which is why I’m a comic, but c’mon, that was really cool!)

 

That evening, I caught a late flight back to Greenville, S.C. and pulled into our long drive around midnight, the path ahead lit by a three quarter moon. Tires crunching to a halt, I stepped out of the truck and drunk in the view around me: freshly mown fields, carefully tended, tidy borders of perennials and roses reawakening for a second, profuse, autumnal blooming, porch light burning to guide me up the front steps and inside, a good man and explosive terriers to greet me.

 

So our sitcom pilot was pulled before it even got a chance to air. It was still an awful lot of fun to play Cinderella (or, more realistically, a far less buxom Ellie Mae Clampett, worried to death about all her critters) for a week and best of all give and receive bear hugs from dear, old, friends. But looking around now at this sleeping, modest, farm, all I can think is…

 

What a lucky, lucky, girl I am.