| My
fascination with broadcasting began at an early age--it probably
had something to do with the radio station and transmitter
tower that were a scant 200 yards from the backyard of my
childhood home. It was always in the periphery as I’d
swim in our pool or play in the backyard, and at night I’d
sometimes just like to stare at the slowly pulsing red aircraft
safety light on top of the tower. Of course, after I got a
little older I realized that the “really cool”
radio station beyond my backyard was in all actuality a run-down
blue shack that was broadcasting an AM signal that could probably
only travel 80 feet, and that’s if it was thrown by
an Olympic athlete. I remember trying to pick up the station’s
signal one day, using a little red pocket radio that someone
had given me as a gift--static. To be perfectly fair though,
it might have been the fault of my cheap kiddie radio…
but then again maybe not, since the radio was so
cheap, it would pick up signals that might have been generated
from someone flushing a toilet two doors down. If your AM
signal can’t beat that out, you’ve got some issues.
But all the same, the interest in broadcasting was planted
somewhere in me, a seed buried inside of me that would lay
dormant until… well, it’s actually still dormant.
Working in radio or television never really became anything
more than a passing interest to me. I still think it would
be really fun to be on the air, but nothing’s ever come
of it aside from a few near misses and one small moment of
broadcasted glory.
The near misses began in high school: one of the usual summer
activities that my buddy Mike and I would enjoy was to travel
North to catch a Cleveland Indians game. We’d get up
there early, bum around the park and get home far later than
we probably should have (mostly because you just can’t
avoid hitting Denny’s for some late-night breakfast
food when you’re halfway home). Back in those early
days of the new Cleveland ballpark, Jacobs Field, one of the
promotions that you’d hear the most about was the opportunity
to get on the radio and actually call the game for
the sixth inning. Granted, it wasn’t for the big radio
affiliate networ k--r ather a secondary local AM station…
but still--to actually call an entire inning of major league
baseball? Wow. Granted, I would have been the color commentator,
the guy that provided somewhat useful information to reinforce
what the lead commentator was saying. The lead job had Mike’s
name written all over it, because while I might have been
a little better with grammar usage, he at least had some ability
to get a good running call of the action. Still, I could just
imagine myself sitting at the desk in the open-air radio suite,
furiously looking up stats and trying to remember the players’
names on the opposing team, as Mike would be excitedly rattling
off the play on the field. Thankfully, more for the sake of
the listeners than anything, our discussion about how awesome
it would be to actually do an inning’s broadcast never
made it out of the planning stages.
The high school era also featured a few other notable scrapes
with getting on the air, one of which was a live broadcast
of one of our varsity basketball games. We weren’t one
of the bigger schools in the area, so it was pretty unusual
to be in the situation where a game was actually picked up--but
this game was an out-of-conference affair against one of the
big schools. As a result of fortune, or maybe just the whim
of my occasionally sadistic choir director, I was lined up
to sing the National Anthem for the game… which was
subsequently broadcast. Pretty incidental, though.
Moving slightly forward to the sunset of my high school days,
the biggest broadcasting breakthrough I’d ever had occurred.
My schedule for senior year was a tad on the light side, so
rather than doom myself to the purgatory of blocks of Study
Hall, I filled up my time with elective courses. Succumbing
to the cry of my inner A/V nerd, I took an entire year of
Television Broadcasting--which had the surprising effect of
actually raising my social standing in the building.
(Because if you’re popular and in high school, the guy
holding the camera is your best friend.) The broadcasting
class gave the participating students the valuable experience
of producing an honest-to-goodness news show (well, as much
as the morning announcements could be news) that was piped
into every classroom each morning. It was the job of the broadcasting
class to sail the ship, while the “on air talent”
was provided by another class of kids, mostly comprised of
students from the speech team. Each class was to know their
place--broadcasters behind the camera, anchors in front. Then
the day came when suddenly there were no anchors.
 It
was the penultimate day for my senior class, a day where screwing
around and doing nothing useful is almost expected of a nearly-graduated
student. The crew I was assigned to wasn’t scheduled
to tape the show that day, so we were lounging around the
control room with the on-duty crew, blatantly ignoring whatever
it was that we were supposed to be working on. All the prep
was done for the recording, but we had yet to see any anchors
turn up in the studio. Finally, halfway though the period,
the director decided to recruit two of the techs to do the
broadcast: one was Seth, a fairly popular guy who was well-known
for playing tennis and being a likeable goof. The other ended
up being me. I got nervous to the point of not really remembering
the actual experience, save for the fact that I had a 35mm
camera with me that day, and I actually took a picture during
the broadcast. We didn’t really care a great deal about
production quality since we all assumed that because there
were no official anchors on hand, they’d just do the
morning announcements live over the classroom PA system. We
were all kind of surprised when the broadcast ran as usual
the next morning, featuring outgoing seniors Seth and Dustin
on their last day at school. So it was my television broadcast
debut--but to a captive audience that probably wasn’t
paying attention anyhow. Can’t give it full credit.
But eventually, I would have my crowning achievement--my legitimate
one-time break into the medium of radio. I was in the middle
of a long stint of working the box office for a regional opera
company, the same company that I had performed with back in
college. The organization had recently begun a new “branding”
campaign in an attempt to reach out to new audiences and to
show the public that opera was hip, fun, and not at all about
the usual stereotypes associated with the art form. It was
on a quiet afternoon when my boss, the marketing director,
appeared in my office with a piece of paper that she instructed
me to read out loud. I started to run down the text, realizing
about two sentences in that I was reading a proof of on-air
copy for a radio spot. So I went at it with my usual performance
gusto. When I finished the spot, I handed the paper back,
expecting her to ask me what I thought of the writing or maybe
to ask about the pacing or something similar.
“Great. You’re doing it.”
Huh?!?
Apparently she wasn’t looking for an opinion on the
piece, she had written it with the idea in mind that I could
do the actual recording of the spot, thus saving valuable
dollars over hiring someone with voice-over experience. My
reading wasn’t a proofing in as much as an audition.
Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.
Several days later I was situated in a professional recording
studio with a microphone in front of me and the sound of my
own voice coming back to me through a large set of headphones.
The commercial was actually a spot that featured two actors--the
“sales pitch” itself was being done by another
one of the opera’s frequent performers, a gal by the
name of Jen, and it was my role to play the skeptic to her
message of “opera is hip and fun.” So one of the
first sentences of my radio exposure was “Bah, opera’s
for women!” Career-launching material, that line. All
told, I spent about 20 minutes in the booth recording my material,
then a comparatively short 45 minutes of waiting while the
post-production was done before I heard the results. We were
called into the editing bay, and the technician clicked the
“play” button…
…I was going to be a cult icon. I just knew it.
But in the end, I only ever got a comment from one person
outside of my workplace. The spot aired on one of the mainstream
commercial stations in town, so all of my hipster, trendy
friends--some of the very people the ad was trying to target--didn’t
hear it, as they didn’t listen to commercial radio.
My break into radio was a failure, so with my deflated ego
in hand, I went back to my office and got back to my menial
work.
So to this day, my “passing interest” in broadcasting
remains just that. The on-air life just isn’t meant
for me--better that I stay safely behind the voiceless clickety-clack
of the keyboard. No battered blue shack of an AM station will
be my home. From now on, the closest I’ll come to being
on the air is sponsoring my local NPR station, and watching
re-runs of WKRP in Cincinnati. |
