Joan, I'm glad the story held up for someone who is both an L&C and a TZ fan. I had fun with this crossover.
Mouserocks, I'm relieved that the story does seem acceptable for the challenge, despite there being very little to do with summer in it. (Well, except for what was seen on the tape.) Now I'm looking forward to seeing someone stealing second under blue skies.
Laura, it's nice to see it made you smile. Bringing smiles is a goal of mine for almost all my stories.
Michael, if you ever get a chance to watch the Twilight Zone, I highly recommend it. It first aired about half a century ago. The special effects are dated, but the plots still hold up incredibly well. The basic premise of the show is that the Twilight Zone is a place where bizarre, usually unexplained, things happen, and the main character has to deal with them. Except for the narrator Rod Serling, there was a different cast each week. If I had to sum the show up in one word, it would probably be "eerie." The endings often had a surprising twist of some sort. A couple of example plots:
1) A white supremacist suddenly winds up becoming an African American and finding out first-hand what racism is like from the other side. (Although there was an obvious moral to this particular episode, the show was far from preachy.)
***What follows is a serious spoiler for what was, IMHO, one of the best stand-alone episodes of any series, ever. If you want to be spoiler-free for the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man," stop reading here***
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2) Aliens come to earth and cure all diseases, solve all food shortages, and generally make the world a Utopia. At set intervals, people are chosen to be able to visit the alien home world. The aliens carry around a huge book written in their native language. One of the protagonists is a linguist who was trying to figure out what the book said. He cracked the title, "To Serve Man," fairly early on. Just as the other protagonist is about to enter a ship to fly to the aliens' world, the linguist comes rushing up to him screaming the final line of the show: "IT'S A COOKBOOK!" (Incidentally, this episode is adapted from a short story by Fredric Brown. He was a master of short-short stories (often less than one side of one page of a paperback) that had surprise endings and that made one think long after one put them down. A lot of his stories are cliched now, but in the same way that Shakespeare's works are -- so many people borrowed his ideas that that he was the originator of what became cliches. His works were a huge influence on my own writing.)
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I hope my story was able to stand up at least reasonably well even for someone who didn't know the Twilight Zone.
If you remember what made you think at first the story was set in S4 or later, would you let me know? Thanks.
BTW, I love the picture. I was thinking of the story as more of a hall of mirrors than Groundhog Day, but I can see the similarity to that, too.
Joy,
Lynn
Too clever!! And great kick off to the summer ficathon!
Michael