MVHS Senior Achieves Notoriety On AFV Program

By NICK YAMASHITA

The Progress

“It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
Last year, Moapa Valley High School senior McKinley Bledsoe learned, or rather crashed into, the meaning of this famous quote by Marilyn Monroe.

Bledsoe recently had a video recording of her prior “ridiculousness” appear on the famed television show America’s Funniest Videos on Sunday, April 3.

The video was actually filmed in May 2020, during the pandemic quarantine. McKinley was left at home alone, and was bored. She decided to do a sequel to a previous Tik Tok video. The video included a laundry basket, a 49’ers kids football helmet, and a treadmill.

“We weren’t even around,” said McKinley’s mother Brooklyn Redd. “We were up in Utah celebrating our anniversary. She called. And all she said is: ‘I think I have a concussion.’”

In an earlier video, McKinley decided to ride in a laundry basket on a treadmill. She went from 1 mph to 10 mph, but many of the viewers of the video questioned if it really was going at 10 mph.

So she decided she would silence the doubters by making a follow-up video. This time, she would prove that she was indeed going 10 mph in a laundry basket on the treadmill.

Good thing she thought of safety first. Wearing the collectible kid’s 49ers helmet, she avoided the concussion. Though she did get a knock on the head. Her grandpa, Stace Pulsipher had to come to the rescue to check on her to confirm that.

“She sent me the video and I rewatched it like 10 times, just laughing,” said Redd. “She sat down on the basket and flew off the treadmill.”

The treadmill had been placed in McKinley’s room because she liked to run. “We never thought she would use it like that!” Redd said.

Once posted online, the video of her treadmill experiment went viral. So, Redd thought it would be fun to submit it to the holy grail of home video shows: America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Shortly after that, she got a response. It read, “Hello Brooke, this is Meg from AFV! I wanted to let you know your video will be airing on America’s Funniest Home Videos!”

“We were excited,” said Redd. “It is fun to see kids being creative and doing things again. Being kids.”
On the show, the well-known host, Alphonso Ribeiro, introduced McKinley’s video by stating: “Boneheads are, shall we say, a few hamburgers short of a picnic.”

The video aired and almost immediately the Redds got messages and calls from friends and family who recognized McKinley.

By the way, this wasn’t the first time that McKinley’s videos have gone viral. When she was younger, she put out a video where she used a potato piece named “Artie” to suck the oils out of a zit. She has become known to her 44,000 Tik Tok followers as “Potato Girl”.

When asked about the lesson she learned from her treadmill experience, McKinley simply replied, “Never leave me home alone unattended.”
“This is not the end of it, this is just a prequel,” predicted Redd. “Coming soon: the college 2021 sequel. After all, it is McKinley we are talking about. It fits her personality.”

To view McKinley’s videos, visit the following links: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMe98skKD/ and https://vmtiktok.com/ZMe9Rpcoe/.