Rejected Opening Monologues for The Waltons

• Everyone always remembers the shining moment when they pass from childhood to adulthood; and although I experienced over eighteen hundred of these moments during my time on Walton's Mountain, each more definitive and poignant than the last, it would be difficult to surpass my first cautious forays into the warm embrace of homosexuality.

• Becoming an adult means learning to accept the shades of grey in the moral spectrum, and although nobody knew this better than my father, a convicted arsonist, I will always honor the values that he worked so hard to instill in his fourteen children. I will never forget that moment, strapped into the lie detector test, when the interrogator demanded "Are you John-boy?" and I was able to respond, without compromising my integrity, "No," for I knew then that I was John-Man.

• I will always be grateful that I grew up in a family filled with so much laughter and love. Even when I was fighting with my siblings, I knew I would never trade any of them in for the world, except Jason. Fuck that guy.

• Growing up on Walton's Mountain with sixty or seventy brothers and sisters, four parents, two dogs, and a handful of frisky goats, we became accustomed to never having enough to go around. I'll never forget the day Mother suggested the modest proposal that would solve all of our problems, but which would, eventually, lead to our downfall.

• The Depression was a dark time in our nation's history, but secluded as we were on our mountain paradise, my brothers and sisters and I were sheltered from the worst ravages of the storm. Looking back now, I honor my parents' ingenuity in keeping us so well protected; though at the time, we all wondered about the world beyond Charlottesville, and why all the "letters" Ike at the general store gave us were written in the same handwriting, why there were no references in books or newspapers to those mysterious monsters who lived in the woods, and why our parents sometimes seemed to smile at nobody in particular while holding up products with the brand name facing out.

• Growing up on Walton's Mountain during the Depression was a constant struggle, until the fateful day I found a remote control with power over space and time.

• Growing up on Walton's Mountain with ninety-twelve brothers and sisters can be a challenge, especially when one of those brothers and sisters is a murderer, and there is no way to tell which one.

• I'll always remember one hot, dusty afternoon in the summer of 1933 as the day I almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow.

• The day the mother ship came was hard for all of us, not the least my sister Sue Ellen, whose attachments to worldly pleasures like baseball and kissing kept her from ever achieving the glorific state of Pnag'Nfgar again.

• "Vengeance is mine!" shouted Grandma, holding Yancy Tucker's still beating heart in her gore-splattered hand.

• I'm Earl Hamner, and I'm not wearing any pants.

• Growing up on Walton's Mountain with Xⁿ brothers and sisters, it could be difficult to find time alone, time which I desperately needed as a budding young writer. I suppose I will always blame that fact for my psychotic break.