A Tale of Any Two Guys

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Convention skit
TitleA Tale of Any Two Guys
Author(s)Flamingo and Rosemary C.
Date(s)2007
Location(s)the final ZebraCon
Related articles on Fanlore.

A Tale of Any Two Guys is a 2007 con skit by Rosemary C. and Flamingo, who took over the task after Paula Smith was unable.

It was performed at the final ZebraCon and was a production of BAAD SH Theatre, and slightly rewritten for Sharecon 2008.

The play takes place in a San Francisco bar called "Babylon...Five' where Huggy Bear worked. There, a mysterious assailant (dubbed by the press as the "Gen Avenger") was drugging the unsuspecting clients "turning the victims from carefree, fun-loving dancing boys into grim, sloe-eyed, dangerous... log cabin Republicans." In the end, two characters from Bones who solve the crime.

The play is a form of meta as many con skits are. It name-checks many fandoms, tropes, and winks at many things fans recognized, such as undercover in a gay bar, epithets, nods to famous scenes in episodes.

Comments by One of the Skit's Creators

From Flamingo:

[After Paula Smith was unable to do the con skit], Ro and I sat at the table and wrote one and I sent a note to Karen who was grateful. We did the play the way we usually did Baaaad SH theater where a narrator read everything and the actors just had to improvise to what the narrator was reading, with a lot of over the top responses and slow uptakes. Kath Moonshine (Baravan) read it like a Brit announcer on Masterpiece Theater (we always played the Masterpiece theater music at the beginning as the narrator mounted the podium). It had a large cast as we were trying to include all the slash pairings we could think of: Starsky and Hutch of course, the Pros partners, Due South with two Rays (who wore signs around their necks with both names on them which they kept switching around -- Molo was the mounty), The Sentinel guys (my wife, Anne, played Blair was over a head taller than the actor playing Jim) and we even included Booth and Bones from the show Bones, with many joking complaints about how they weren't a slash couple. I was playing whatever music was needed so was in the audience and the reaction was very good from the audience who thought it was hilarious. (We had a running joke about "cerulean" eyes as so many of the characters were blue eyed, and then a sneering reference to Booth's (David Boreanaz) brown eyes: "They're not brown, they're chocolate!" which brought the house down.) I'm as sure as I can be that Terri Beckett played one of the Pros partners and we reenacted the famous scene from that show where one of the partners had a bomb in a backpack strapped to his back and kept running away from the other partner who wanted to get it off him. He ran of course for fear his partner would be killed with him trying to save him. It's a fan favorite scene so we had the two of them running all through the audience and when they finally got on stage all the other "heroes" got as far from them as they could (instead of trying to help) and the bomb was a dud. Karen loved it and only regretted there wouldn't be more zcons for our plays. It was very gratifying since it was born from panic. [1]

Characters

Excerpts

It was the best of crimes. It was the worst of crimes. It was the age of classic zine fic on the internet; it was the age of flash-fic on live-journal. It was the epoch of Google; it was the epoch of eBay.

It was the season of light with slash discussed openly in the media and studied in academia, it was the season of Darkness as the powers-that-be destroyed the concept of one-true-pairings with ensemble shows, casts and characters that changed willy-nilly, and by killing off fan favorites for no real reason... but enough about StarGate Atlantis.

It was the best of crimes because a group of famous law enforcement partners were working undercover as gay lovers in a gay bar. How's that for an original plot line? These partners were selected because they weren't like other partners. They were close. Very close. Closer than brothers... unless the brothers were named Cartwright, Simon, Weasley or... Winchester...

But I digress. Trapped in an assignment that should've been hell for any red-blooded straight-laced macho cop, these partners realized that they suddenly had the perfect opportunity to explore the suppressed — I said suppressed — passions simmering under the surface of their unique, extremely close partnership ...

Recognizing a hurt/comfort moment [from the light from a disco ball], Blair rushed to Jim's side. "Easy, big fella," the long-haired anthropologist murmured soothingly, placing the flat of his palms on Jim's bulging pectorals... and immediately throwing a rod. "What is it? Did you overhear that nefarious criminal, the Gen Avenger, planning his dastardly deeds?"

Jim could only shake his head and clutch his pillows tighter.

"Are you worried we'll be turned into log cabin Republicans?" Blair queried as stared into Jim's cerulean eyes. "That's the worst thing I can imagine, but, you're already pretty conservative..."

Suddenly Doyle had a flash back to a moment in the show when he was able to get physically close to his partner — you remember the scene — you've seen it in a million song vids — Bodie, his arms tied behind him, a bomb strapped to his chest, running hell bent for leather so that no one else would be hurt when it exploded, with Doyle racing madly after him to pull the bomb off him...

As Blair implored his partner to share his feelings, the hulking Sentinel turned to his beloved Guide, his cerulean eyes growing soft and misty. "Chief, I just realized... I love you... and I don't care who knows it... sweetie pie," he purred swishily.

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Blair, drawing all cerulean and emerald eyes to them. "The Gen Avenger has poisoned my Sentinel! And since he already was a conservative, it's turning him into a radical left wing anarchist!"

[...]

"Tequila Sunrises for everyone!" Jim suddenly declared. "Come on, Blair, let's run away to Massachusetts and get married. Then after that, we can go to the beach and throw our badges in the ocean."

Starsky protested vehemently, "Hey, that's our gig!"

"Hey, you guys, we don't serve your kind in here!", [Huggy exclaimed].

Everyone at the bar gasped, as Huggy displayed a shockingly unknown streak of discriminatory behavior.

"I tol' you this the last time you snuck in here," Huggy continued. "We only allow One True Pairings in here. No triads, no groups, none o' that kinky stuff!"

It was true. That was excuse they had used to keep out Fox Mulder & his assorted bizarre lovers: Skinner, Krychek, and that little grey alien guy; the Miami Vice triad: Sonny, Marty, and Rico; all those various and sundry Harry Potter marauders, too many to name; some very confused Pirates from the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Commodore Norrington; whole crews from the various Stargates: Colonel/General Jack O'Neill and his boyfriends Daniel, T'ealc, Mayborn, and Thor, that little grey alien guy (possibly cheating on Fox Mulder), Colonel John Shephard and Rodney McKay, Ronin, Tela, Elizabeth, and everyone else in the Pegasus universe; and let us not forget all those myriad pointy-eared, light-sabre toting sci-fi guys who had been barred from Zebracon for years until a certain Jedi master and his padawan shattered those sacred traditions, opening the door for dwarves, elves, Dunedin's, the lords of Gondor, especially the Amir brothers, Bora and Fara, and even the stray hobbit or three. Kirk and Spock never got over their exclusion and are even now picketing outside.

... Starsky was watching Hutch with deep concern in his dark-lashed cerulean eyes. "We're all in the same boat, fellas," the curly headed detective insisted. "Hutch hasn't got a prejudice bone in his body, but he's ready to tar and feather a Canadian and 2 guys from Chicago. He was always the liberal one, but now look at him."

Just then, Hutch noticed Jim and his feather boa. "Hey, aren't you from Seattle?" he growled threateningly, narrowing his cerulean eyes suspiciously. "I should've been able to tell by the feather boa."

"What a minute!" Starsky shouted, demanding silence. "Do you mean to tell me that after 30 years of dissing the Feds, after every episode that showed them to be pansy-assed, unreliable, dishonest, self-serving creeps, that a Fed is gonna solve a case none of us traditional slash pairs could solve?"

"It's okay, Starsk," Hutch soothed his partner. "They're red-blooded Americans working for our country. We can trust them."

Starsky stroked Hutch's fevered brow. "You really are all drugged up, aren't you, babe. If you're trusting the feds, this is worse than when you were on that heroin jag. Without all the fun rolling-around-in-the-sack scenes."

Hutch, dismayed, betrayed, and parlayed... sorry, wrong fandom... looked his old bartender friend in his bottomless obsidian onyx eyes and asked in a quavering voice, "Huggy... why? Why???"

"Why?" Huggy sneered sarcastically. "I'll tell you why! Because for 30 damn years I've been the power behind the throne, the dude who always made sure y'all got that critical information without which the case would be lost. Information I never got paid for, thanked for, or given a commendation for. Because while I was your trusted friend, and reliable informant, I was still nothing more than a plot device. It was bad enough on the show, where I got the crap beat out of me every other episode, and never even got laid. But even in fanfic, I'm nothing more than a tool to make sure one of you buys a clue as to your true sexuality so you'll end up in bed together."

"Man, talk about irony," Blair articulated as Bones and Booth led Huggy Bear away. All the partners turned to him, confused. "The only partners who could solve the crime were the only pair still in denial of their one true pairing status and who weren't involved in a slash relationship."

"This could set fandom back 30 years," Hutch gasped.

"Forty," Starsky corrected him. "Back to when Kirk and Spock were just two ordinary StarFleet officers... "

But then Blair mused thoughtfully, “But would that be such a bad thing?”

“Whadaya mean?” inquired Starsky, his cerulean eyes bright.

“I mean, they were pretty good years,” Blair opined. “If we went back to the beginning time, it would sorta be like—”

“Yeah?” Bodie and Doyle chorused together.

“—Like being a virgin again,” Hutch whispered reverently.

“Everything old would be new again,” Blair added in a hushed tone of wonder.

Jim began to sniffle. "That’s beautiful…I think I'm gonna cry, Chief."

Indeed, the entire room of cerulean and emerald eyes seemed to mist over as one.

Fan Comments

[The last Zcon was] one hell of a party. Nearly everyone was dressed to the nines in black and white with glitter and sparkles. There was a champagne toast to Zebracon, and an hysterical Baaad Zebracon Theater play that included Starsky and Hutch, Bodie and Doyle, Blair and Jim, Fraser and his two Rays plus Huggy, Booth and Bones (played by me!) [2]

The play was slightly rewritten for Sharecon 2008 and is described by Dawn:

Starsky...and Hutch...were undercover in a bar where the Bay City Avenger was trying to turn all liberals and gays into conservatives. There was much mugging and goofy double-entendres but eventually (gasp) it was revealed that Huggy Bear was the culprit. His mustard green soup was found in the bodies of all the victims. He was fed up with being a plot device for thirty years and wanted his revenge.[3]

References

  1. ^ from Flamingo, email to MPH, quoted with permission (February 7, 2023)
  2. ^ Dawn Rice Zcon 18 post to the Loveofmeandthee mailing list dated Sept 17, 2007, quoted with permission.
  3. ^ from her August 26, 2008 post to the Loveofmeandthee mailing list, quoted with permission
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