Classic comedy makes national video program

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Lindsay Widener of Chilhowie stars in a scary movie but it has nothing to do with Halloween.
At a film festival, it would be in the category for short films. It runs all of nine seconds.
Like many good scary movies, it’s set at a summer camp.
It is a true story. And it’s kind of funny in an uncomfortable way, like many of the clips on television’s America’s Funniest Videos featuring comedic catastrophes that leave viewers wincing, grimacing and laughing nervously out of relief that what they just saw didn’t happen to them.
In fact the producers of AFV thought the clip fit their show so well, they aired it at the top of the nationally broadcast ABC network program Sunday night.
Widener sat at her family’s dining room table Monday afternoon with her computer and the clip cued on the AFV Web site. It showed several young people on a field, and what looks to be an eight-foot diameter beach ball. A group of young people stand behind the huge ball in a defensive line. A smaller, offensive team of four rushes the ball, and a girl gets to it at the same moment unseen defenders behind the ball reach it. The ball surges toward the camera and against the girl who is almost lifted off the ground as she topples backward, her head bouncing on the ground as she lands. The ball rolls and the players run off camera, and finally a girl kneels beside the one on the ground.
“That’s me,” Widener said, pointing to the fallen figure as the footage ends.
Widener would lie there another five minutes on that day back in June, laughing and crying at the same time, she said. It would be two days before the resulting headache, the worst she ever had, went away. Fearing a concussion, the leaders at Camp Evangel in Pounding Mill where she was in her last year as a camper would not let Widener sleep for hours following the incident.
“I really was kind of scared,” Widener said.
Now, she laughs every time she views the mishap movie filmed by her friend, Chilhowie High School junior Myra Gentry. Widener, who graduated from Chilhowie this year, has no ill effects now from the collision and is a student at Virginia Highlands Community College.
The big crash was the big joke for that camp session, Widener said, recalling the clip playing on a big screen in the camp chapel. “Everybody said send it to America’s Funniest Videos,” she said.
Back home from camp, she went on the AFV Web site and did just that, uploading the clip on June 20.
In September Widener got a phone call from a woman saying the video had been accepted. “I thought it was a joke, somebody who knew about it,” said Widener. Then she realized the woman was in fact with AFV.
They talked for about an hour, Widener said, and then came the incident’s second headache: the show would require a signed release form from everyone visible in the clip before using it.
“Everybody in the video had to send in a release,” Widener said. “We had people from North Carolina and Ohio. I spent a week and a half trying to contact them.”
She managed to get several releases, and the show’s editors blurred the faces of those from whom releases were not secured.
A week before the show on Sunday, she got another call alerting her to the air date of the program that would include her clip.
She did not know where in the show it would appear. It was the first.
“I almost missed it,” Widener said.
Show host Tom Bergeron commented about the clip. “The bigger the ball, the harder the fall,” Widener recalled him saying.
After the clip was accepted, Widener saw an opportunity to help her former youth minister, Mack Herrell, at Chilhowie Baptist Church raise money for his mission work in Peru. The best compete for three $100,000 prizes and a grand prize in each season.
“I told God, ’If you will let me win, I’ll give all the money to Brother Mack,’” Widener said.
As it turned out her entry didn’t win the show’s $10,000 prize and the opportunity for more. But it showed Widener that people who think they have a funny or unique video should submit it to the show. Having a video selected, she believes, is not against the odds.
“I didn’t think it would make it,” Widener said. “Others on the show are not that funny to me, but they could be to somebody else. The chance is likely for a video to get on there.”
And the show encourages submissions that are its content and lifeblood.
“The lady told me to keep sending videos,” Widener said. “But you only get hit like that once.”
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