Maybe it is all of the television show-themed events that I’ve been assigned to this week, but I’ve come up with a new game show for television, which was spurred on by a surprising piece of reality. I’m calling the show, “What I Wouldn’t Do To Text.”
First, the inspiration for my new hit:
On Oct. 27 in El Cajon (that’s near San Diego), Vera Oliphant, a 16-year-old girl was searching for a cell phone signal so she could, “call [her] mom and text [her] boyfriend,” when she stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes and was bitten six times.
“I didn’t see them until I already stepped on their nest and I felt them biting me,” said Oliphant.
Her vision started to leave her almost immediately, but she made her way back to her uncle’s home. He took her to a nearby hospital, where she was in the intensive care unit for four days.
We already know that teenagers will put themselves in fatal levels of danger in order to text whatever minutia is currently occupying their hormone-addled brains. My show will exploit that weakness by seeing just how far teens will go to text.
This is how I see it working out.
A teenager is provided with a cell phone and told a piece of information “pertinent” to their life. However, the cell phone will only be able to function if the teen is willing to pass through some dangerous series of obstacles to the “signal zone.”
Here is where it gets interesting.
The first level could be something like, “there will be a pop quiz in science tomorrow.”
They might jaywalk across a couple of lanes for that. Not exciting, right?
But what if they hear something like, “your boyfriend went to the movies with some floozy that goes to a different high school.”
Do you think the average teen would walk through fire to be able to text that? Or swim through a pool of urine?
I think the American public would like to find out.
So, look out this Spring for “What I Wouldn’t Do to Text,” the newest hit on network television.
It’ll probably be on Fox.

Printed in the November 22, 2012 edition