So, yeah. We made this. I can’t believe it was a year ago now- for about four or five months after the original was taken off Youtube, I kind of forgot about it actually. You get to a point when you never want to hear Unk’s anthem ever again in your life.

Let me break it down for you. If this were a website, Craig would insist on a timeline so let’s do a timeline.

June 2007- Marty finds a video on Youtube called Mexican Breakfast. It features a young Gwen Verdon and two of her Fosse-dancing cohorts on the Ed Sullivan show. Marty and I are pretty much the only people in the office who think the original video is hilarious. Michael deems it “unimpressive.”

Harlow (who’s since moved on- I mean to another job. He’s not dead or anything.) randomly plays Unk’s “Walk It Out” over Thump the Trunk*. A random group of us realize that the video actually syncs up really well with the song. Like eerily well. Morgan yells at us to stop watching Youtube and get back to work.

June 8, 2007- I email the original poster of the Mexican Breakfast video and ask him if he’d send me the original file. Being the kind of guy who posts up old Gwen Verdon videos in his spare time, he is intrigued and very nicely sends me the file. I do a little mixing on iMovie while Morgan’s at lunch.

June 14, 2007- We post “Walk It Out, Fosse” on Youtube. Nothing really happens except we all keep musing about how well it all syncs together. Morgan yells for us to get back to work.

June 15-19, 2007- We decide to start to sending the video to a few blogs. Well, to be more specific- mostly gay blogs. Luckily, I know a few gays who read a lot of gay blogs. Among the precious kittens who first posted the video- WOW Report, Lady Bunny, PopBytes and RockHeals. Timmy starts tracking the traffic on some chart to check out the progress. Probably in the thousands at this point.

July 2, 2007- Wildfire on the blogosphere. Morgan catches me reading the shout-out on QueerClick which nobody tells me is basically a porn site. We are assaulted with graphic images. Morgan shakes his head at me. It’s clear he no longer knows what to do with me.

July 8, 2007- My roommate bursts into our apartment yelling incomprehensible things, ala that scene in That Thing You Do when they hear their song on the radio for the first time. Among her blather are the words, “Walk it Out, Fosse” and “Perez Hilton.” There’s a lot of screaming and jumping up and down.

July 9, 2007- Perez’s mention shoots the video into viral. Timmy’s chart is no longer effective in charting the progress. Even with a Sunday mention, we’ve shot up by about 300,000 viewers. In the midst of this, Morgan has had enough and Youtube is blocked at the office. I can only check new blog mentions between 12-2 in the afternoon.

July 10, 2007- I leave for a two week vacation, driving across country. WIO,F is still climbing. USA Today’s blog mentions it. So does Best Week Ever.com and I start having heart palpitations.

July 14, 2007- I’d like to point out that at this point my sister has just given birth and so my family has no idea any of this is happening. But then they suddenly do because NPR calls the office, asking for an interview for their new show The Bryant Park project. I do the interview in Devil’s Creek, Idaho on the side of the road, freaking out all morning as we dip in and out of cell phone reception.

Craig, also on vacation, calls Morgan and demands that he unblock Youtube after I mention on national radio that I can’t even watch my own video in the office.

August 2, 2007- WIO,F hits 1 million views. My parents call playing the “Rocky” theme over the phone. My father becomes obsessed with tracking the video on Youtube and starts referring to the people who have left comments and using words like “viral” in every day conversation.

September, 2007- Youtube takes the video down due to copyright infringement. Which is hilarious because there are about six other copies of the same video on their site. Last count of views: 1,527,950. Comments: 1,409

May 30, 2008- The most popular copy of WIO,F on Youtube has about 800,000 hits bringing the tally to well over 2 million. Morgan tells me he’s proud of me and puts his hand on my shoulder. (Ok, so that didn’t really happen but it felt so cinematic to end it that way.)

*that’s DC speak for speakers