About

The not-so-short story of Trashwire.com:

Trashwire.com began with the video short “Suburbia Undercover” in 2000. After a day of reading teen magazines and noticing their unique take on drug addiction (they claimed abuse of nearly every single drug resulted in obesity) then 16-year-old Alexis Gentry, her mother Pat Sue Gentry, and family friend Greg Garner wrote a quick script for the fake talk show.

After making a run to the Salvation Army Thrift Store to purchase the wardrobe, the trio headed down to Boulder’s public access TV studio, CATV 54 (now BTV) at the Dairy Center in Boulder, Colorado to shoot the sketch. Alexis’ friends Meredith Wilson and Kyle Palmer assisted on cameras and the part for Fumiko Yoshikawa was developed on the spot.

The short was a mock talk show called “Suburbia Undercover” that discussed social issues. On this edition, the topic of the day was “Teen Substance Abuse and Tragedy”. Alexis played LaTaviya Goldstein-Martinez, the multi-ethnic host. Her mother Pat Sue played the part of Debbie Lynn Skokie from Waco, Texas, a woman whose daughter had become “fat and dead” after trying drugs. Garner was Carson Gregory, a teen psychologist and substance abuse expert from the Southern Home-school Institute of Technology, the initials of which spelled out something amusing. Dr. Gregory was on the show promoting his new book, “Tiffany is Fat and Dead”, which chronicled teen girls named Tiffany who had tried drugs and, as the magazines warned, got fat and died.

In the first segment, Dr. Gregory discussed the trouble facing America’s youth, even reading the actual drug result list from one of the teen magazines that had inspired the sketch. Debbie Lynn was brought on to discuss her personal story, admitting that she never believed in looking after her daughter because she “knew Jesus would”. After her daughter Tiffany tried drugs, she began shopping in the plus-size section of the store and soon ended up fat and dead.

In the second segment, Yoshikawa appeared as Tamiea Kawasaki, a Japanese mother who spoke no English. She came on the show to share her story, which was also documented in Dr. Gregory’s other book “Sayuri is Skinny and Dead”. This book described several overachieving girls who had suddenly got less-than-perfect grades in school and ended up skinny and dead. During this segment, Dr. Gregory served as translator for Tamiea claiming to speak Japanese. In actuality, all his lines were gibberish, though Yoshikawa was speaking Japanese to him.

At one point, she is asked if she blames herself. Her reply is a very long answer in which she says in Japanese that she was tricked into doing the show and that the producers told her she would be a big movie star like Julia Roberts. At the end of her long answer, Dr. Gregory translates it to mean simply, “no.” This old comedy staple resulted in an audible laugh from a CATV employee sitting in the control room watching the show.

After completing their short film, Gentry purchased the domain name Trashwire.com and created a site to post funny articles she and Garner had written. Some of the earliest stories on Trashwire were comments about funny local news pieces such as “Meat juice leads to stolen property”. There were also some recurring themes such as “Clive and Jasmine”, a narrative style series in which a couple of lovebirds were constantly coming under attack from whatever natural wonder was in the news at the time. Another recurring story on the site was the saga of Miss Bulgaria, which Garner began after finding old pictures of Eastern European beauty queens on the internet. In that series, Miss Bulgaria was living in a generic place called Metro Area and constantly battling her nemesis, Pavla Nimcova.

Since those early days, Trashwire has moved from fictional pieces to more news oriented material, undergoing many design changes along the way as technology grew. It has also changed locations from Boulder to Washington DC to Denver, Colorado. Currently, the site contains movie, tv, and concert reviews, comedian interviews, local entertainment info, and general entertainment news as well as intense coverage of the CBS reality show Big Brother, devoting a whole new section of the site to the show and featuring daily updates, live feed videos, screen captures and other show-related news.

Trashwire has an estimated monthly readership of approximately 10,000-12,000 unique viewers and features work by Alexis Gentry, who is also the editor, and several guest writers.

You can find out more about Trashwire on our MySpace Page.You can also IM us on AIM. Our screenname is Trashwire.

The current design was launched in early of 2008. For details about Trashwire, including advertising information, please use the contact page to send and email to the editor, Alexis Gentry.

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