Peter Parkers remote camera shot of the blessed event described below can be viewed by finding it in my pictures!

Since Sean's death almost 2 years ago, I have been putting a lot of thought into the future of Dark Horse. I decided to go back to school for Respiratory Therapy to earn more money in case I was never able to make any money making music. Without Sean's superior moral structure to guide me, I finally decided to sell out the band in order to make a lot of money fast. I have been using my student loan money to promote the band, deciding to pull out all of the stops and push the band into the spotlight of super-stardom.

This email chronicles the first chapter of Dark Horse's rise to the top of the music heap, so to speak.

First I hired a manager, the best that money could buy. Jack first acquired money and fame as the spokesman for Jack-in-the-box hamburger restaurants popular in California and other parts of the country. But when people got sick from bad mayo on their hamburgers, the chain of restaurants suffered huge losses in income and Jack got the axe, plunging him into the pits of despair. When I found him he was living in a half-way house in L.A., struggling with a horrible addiction to rotten tomatoes. But his new affiliation with Dark Horse gave him new purpose and drive, and he's back to stay!

Jack's first task as our manager was to organize this high-profile band promotional gig shown in the enclosed attachment. I had decided to retire as a guitarist and singer due to my age and my life-long addiction to sucking on old cigarette butts that I found in the gutter, so we needed all new talent. We decided to go for a AC/DC type sound and image, because of their long lasting popularity in the hard rock music business. The first to audition were the california raisin brothers, Roy and Robbie. We hired them on and gave Roy a Billy Idol / Bon Scott / Brian Johnson type image as the new singer of the band. Brother Robbie could rip up the fretboard, so we decided on a Angus Young image for him.

The cookie monster found us. We were having a band meeting over milk and cookies and he smelled his way to the meeting. Like most drummers, he's not a real musician, but just an animal who joins a band to get what he wants. Most drummers go for fast cars and wild women, but MONSTER, as we re-named him, just wanted cookies. We promised him all he could eat, and he was putty (or should I say cookie dough) in our hands.

Last and definitely least, we needed another guitarist. Jack nabbed a contract with Fender for free guitars and amps, and since Gumby was the only one we could find who was big enough to play the strat we got from Fender, he was in like flint. We didn't let it bother us that he didn't know how to play the guitar, or that he didn't even have fingers, all we cared about was how good he looked wearing that strat!

Jack lined up our first promotional gig at the prestigious Diningroomtable ampitheatre (henceforth referred to as "DRT"), and we were off to the races! Jack was even able to get a special round, spinning stage for our first new gig!

He wasn't sure, however, that our old band image of a rearing stallion would be enough. So we agreed to hire "The Rock" as a second band image, much like Iron Maiden's undead skeleton "Eddie". We decide that driving a golden spike down right through the middle of his body was a perfect way to give him that "undead" look that worked so well for Iron Maiden.

Thinking that "the more mascots the merrier" was definitely true, we added one more evil death metal type mascot. "El Salvadoran hand-made snake" (henceforth referred to as "Snakey") came to us cheap and fit the bill perfectly, and besides, our rearing Dark Horse (henceforth referred to as "Ol' Dark Horse") and "Snakey" hit it off from the minute they met, becoming life-long buds.

Selecting the audience we gave the free promotional tickets to was easy. Everyone knows how much dinosaurs love hard rock and metal, so it was just a matter of finding the closest "forgotten valley", and wham!: instant audience. But, everyone also knows that once dinosaurs have a few beers in them all hell can break loose in the audience, so we hired the beast from "Beauty and the Beast" and a troll we found wondering around at Hollywood & Vine to be the bouncers and maintain order.

I almost forgot our good fortune in finding a great photographer. Jack used his Hollywood and New York contacts to find Peter Parker to visually document the event. Petey not only did a great job as photographer, but he also was our ace in the hole when it came to crowd management. If Beast and Troll couldnt handle a crowd crisis, Petey could have changed to Spider Man instantaneously and confined the perp(s) to a spider web cocoon. This came along with a exclusive deal with Jonah Jameson to use his newspaper to promote the event in New York. Having business partners at the east coast along with the west coast was an unimaginable boon to the venture! Since the band already had a huge following in the midwest, we were able to reach new fans all over the country. We warned Peter not to photograph the troll in action, however, because the trolls sheer nakedness would have surely broken his camera!

All we needed now was to find someone to vend the beer and popsicles to make back the money we spent organizing the event. It occurred to us that the Warner Brothers and sister "Dot" had been out of work for quite a while, so we contacted them and they were happy to handle concessions. Since Dot was the cutest of the trio, she was chosen to work the stand. She used her feminine charms to lure the dinosaurs into buying tons of beer and popsicles, so we pulled in a hefty profit from concessions.

The show went great. Despite some minor brawls in which some of the carnivores tried to eat the herbivores, the audience was terrific. If Beast had trouble breaking up an altercation, the troll came over with his baseball bat and the crisis ended abruptly. It was only afterwards that we figured out that it wasn't the bat that de-fused the violence, it was the troll's sheer nakedness that shocked the dinosaurs back to sanity.

Roy put on the show of his life, and Robbie spent the whole gig spinning around in circles on the floor like Angus Young as he played, never missing a note. Of course he had to play this way because he lost a leg in the Vietnam war and could not stand up. Gumby just stood there pretending to play, but man, did he look great! We had a small problem with MONSTER eating his cymbals, but Jack had also landed a contract with Keebler with provisions for all the cookie cymbals he could play and eat, so our foresight prevented a disaster. Also, since MONSTER ate so many cymbals, he didnt spontaneously combust like so many metal drummers do.

All in all, Jack and I decided the event was an overwhelming success, or at least overwhelming in general. With this momentous first comeback gig under our belts, we moved to the next order of business, the painful but necessary task of giving our personnel the harsh eye of scrutiny...

Don't miss Chapter II: MONSTER's cookie addiction bites back!



See ya bye. Deranged delivery driver Dan.