My son was watching Guy Fieri's Salute to Fried Baloney, or something. In the course of the episode, Fieri talked to some restaurant owner endlessly about how the owner had been with his girlfriend for five years, but had never asked her to marry him. Then they kept cutting to more and more scenes where the restaurant guy was showing the engagement ring to the camera, and they'd cut back to it later and Fieri would bring it up again, like, "Dude, when are you going to propose?" And the guy would have some sheepish response and then Fieri would say, "Dude, don't wait too long, trust me, etc."
Later in the segment, the owner got down on one knee and proposed to his lady, and Guy Fieri mugged for the camera and said something like, "I never would have seen that coming in a million years."
It all reminded me of that Chekhov thing, where Chekhov would introduce a gun in the first act of a play, and then have 92% of the dialogue be about guns, and firing guns, and gun ownership, and how wild would it be if someone actually picked up that gun at some point and fired it, that would be CRAZY, dude, and then all the Russian characters would sit around eating little cakes shaped like guns, and use expressions like "I've really just felt under the gun lately," and if the hired hand was driving the fucking wagon too slowly on the way to pick up some more vodka, a character would tell him to "gun it!" and the characters would all have names like Gunnar, and Gunyakov Gunyakovovich, and the like. At the end, someone named Gunny would mug toward the audience and then hold up the gun and people would say Wooooooooooo like it was a Laverne and Shirley episode, and then the gun would be fired.
I'd forgotten how much I dig Chekhov.
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