My One and Only Radio Show

I’ve been thinking about this story for a while. It may have to do with sharing music here on Fridays, it seems to have reminded me of the time I did a three-hour radio show. It was back in the mid 1990s. I had been hired by a lovely woman named Tara (yup, that Tara!) as an administrative assistant for SOAR (Student Organizations and Advising Resources) at UC Santa Cruz. It was a job that had a lot of interactions with students who were involved with all the student organizations on campus, and there were a lot of them. One part of SOAR was Student Media that covered all the campus publications and radio broadcasting. They had their own director of Student Media and two advisers who specialized in either the print side of the student organizations or the broadcasting side. After a year at the front desk of SOAR, there was an opening for the Print Adviser job which I applied for and got. I was so happy. My very first college class was in Journalism, and it was a subject I dearly loved. So, I began advising students who published the campus newspapers and poetry journals. I loved that job. I was the go-to person for all their questions from how to get funding, how to find a publisher, how to pay their bills. I convened a First Amendment Seminar every quarter, and an attorney from San Francisco came to enlighten them about their rights and their limits. I loved that seminar so much.

That print advising job went well. My supervisor was so pleased that after a year or two she was able to get my job reclassified to a higher level position, and I became the Assistant Director of Student Media. There was a catch though, I had to audit a full quarter long course on Radio Broadcasting. It was an interesting course, and I learned a lot at the time. Right at this moment, I have no idea what they taught me, but I’m sure it was enlightening. The thing I do remember is that in order to complete the course I had to do a three-hour on-air show. That scared me to no end. Me on the radio? No way. I’m a very shy girl, always have been always will be. Me on the radio? Really? Do I have to? Yes, the answer was "yes" every time I asked.

So, I did the radio show. Well… sort of… I’ll confess right here that I cheated. As you already know I love music, and Roger and I had lots and lots of music in our house to choose from. I planned ahead for those three hours and made three CDs of music for the show. I dedicated the show to the music from the 1960s. One hour of CD music was of bands that were from England. You know them all— The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Procol Harum, The Moody Blues, Cream etc. One hour was music from the east coast. There was music by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. And one hour was music from the west coast. That hour had Crosby Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas, etc. We even recorded PSAs (public service announcements and press releases) right on to the CD. Roger read some of those for me. It was so much fun. So, when I did my three hours of broadcasting all I did was plug in those CDs, and then sit back and enjoy the show.

Here is a bit of the recording. That's me doing my on-air show 22 years ago, although we can't figure out why I'm talking in the beginning about trying to get this recording done. We had to upload it as a youtube video, even though it's mostly a black screen and my voice.  Blogger won't let us upload an mp3.

Now I have a nice short music show on Fridays. One song on the blog. No talking. No PSAs or press releases. Just the delight of the sound of the one thing that unites us...our universal language…music.