Impact 2002 Sheild About Me

2002: Shield About Me: Welcome to the board David Rubio! Man what a great addition he is. It is hard to remember back before the David’s came aboard now. The skits were good they were a "Holy Grail" spoof with Rubio as Lancelot, Skid as Arthur, and I as Galahad, Patrick Chapel made his skit debut as "The Black Knight", and Sean Algier of Watershed played King Arthur's squire. We had a great time. Rubio brought so much energy to Skids "poopie guy act" and my "voice of the audience". David Rubio is the first person Skid and I have completely trusted to do his own thing without reviewing it. If Rubes does a video on his own I know it will be good. I don't even ask Rubio to see it first, because I want to enjoy it for the first time with the campers. Speaking of video we also welcomed David Driver to the team, as Steve Bodiford retired. Driver does a great job filming every baptism. You call him on the radio day or night and he is there. He has also been the architect of other Impact staples like the "Fathers Day video". That year he took over putting together the Impact video. His most visible job though has to be putting together the grand opening video with all the different movie clips. This year was the first year for that popular clip video. I do remember what a tough time Skid had with the set, that castle was a beast. It took 60 hours or so non stop building. He started building days before at his house and eventually moved it to Lipscomb. A girl from art school came in to help him and get school credit for the set building process her name was April. She was good friends with Paul Skidmore. Oddly enough she was not a Christian and she did not become a believer that week either. But years down the road I think in 2006 after doing her own investigating and remembering back she has since become a Christian. Paul Skidmore recently flew out to California to baptize her. We were so busy with the business of making movies and skits that I barely remember the theme or the sessions. We did a gimmick called "Ohio day" based on the tradition of yelling out state names at Impact. A tradition carried out in many different incarnations throughout the U.S. All you had to do was simply say Alabama and the kids from that state would go wild, then Skid would say Tennessee and the same would happen. We would then cycle through the states represented by teens, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Texas etc.... As it happened we would never yell Ohio, but we had a couple of large groups from there every other year. We got a complaint letter about it, so we decided to honor Ohio with their own day this year. We dropped the state flag, showed a video we filmed in Cincinnati just for that day, and made a phone call to the "Governor" live on stage. It was great as Skid talked to the governor I would heckle him. Funny side note to this is that this was the one year just one teen from Ohio was there. This year was the year of the "Daividson Cup". This was a live survivor game where representatives from each state would compete for state supremacy. I have no idea who won and it was rather boring. We sold these bandanas for each state that were different camo colors. I had used them in my camp the week before and we had many extras so we used them. I do remember one video a mentos spoof we did aptly named "Impactos". As far as the climax of the skit we had this kid play Yoda. He came in limping on the cane in full costume with the Star Wars theme blaring and smoke floating around. This was one of the loudest "pops" as Skid and I call it, we ever heard. A "pop" is an old Pro Wrestling term for when the crowd goes nuts. At the end of that years skit we decided to keep bringing out old Impact characters like the superheroes from 99 and the Baron from "Ten". With each appearance the "pop" got louder till it was an eruption when Yoda came out. He limped out and started whacking everybody even the heroes. I also do remember the foam swords we gave out as the memory item. We had eight different colors. I still have some in my office, in fact I saw my son, Battle playing with one recently.