I'm On A Mexican Radio pt III
I'm on a wave length far from home
College, for me, was really about reinventing myself. I'd started doing that to some degree in high school, but leaving the home town and going to a new school really gave me a clean slate to work with. The school I went to was only 50 miles from where I grew up, but there was only one other person from my high school who also opted to go there. No one knew who I was.
Awesome.
I think I've talked about the knuckleheads that I lived with during my freshman year elsewhere in the world, so I won't rehash it all, but I'll just say that the Washington 2nd Floor Looney Bin was a great place to live with a great (mostly) group of guys. Of the 28 people on the floor, probably 20 of us hung out regularly. We'd take group field trips to the dining hall together, had our own intermural football team, and would often shake light posts together.
Tim was a guy (still is actually) who lived down the hall from me. I don't recall how it happened or really why, but Tim thought it'd be fun to have a college radio show. I thought it would be fun as well. At George Mason University, in order to have a radio show you had to be taking some sort of COM301 class... or have the balls to just go into the station and put yourself on the schedule. We literally wandered into the radio station and looked at the application form on the desk and the big chalkboard on the wall that was partitioned up into various time slots and skipped the application and just wrote our names on the board. Thus our radioshow was authorized. The name of the show... Late Night Chaos.
That was easily the most appropriate name for the show. Neither of us really knew what we were doing and the technical skill to actually run a radio board was more difficult than it looked. As such, most of our shows were stupid amatuerish stuff to say the least... but people did listen.
We were on every Saturday from 9pm-Midnight. Prime radio time if ever there was such a thing. We figured our audience was the weekend campus binge drinking crowd. It was. Tim became Bosco P. Melloncamp and I became Floyd W. Floyd. Late Night Chaos with Floyd W Floyd and Bosco P. Melloncamp would run for several months unnoticed by the authorities until one fateful evening one of the callers into the show dropped the "f-bomb" three times. There was no delay or way to stop that sort of thing and the following week when we showed up at the station, there was a new girl in our place.
We had a fun cast of characters on the show. In addition to Floyd and Bosco there was Matt with the News. We had a poetry feature from The Iceman routinely and frequent visitors such as Simon, Stymie, and Shingo. The latter of them former the "Superfans" who would call in to cover the Washington Looney Bin football games.
The humor was juveniles at best. An example... Matt would read the news (always a day late) and we'd just make random comments in the middle of it or play stupid sound effects or records over him (like Scooby Doo). My favorite comment in the history of the show came from such an exchange though.
Matt: And over the weekend some equipment from Def Leopard was stolen...
Floyd W. Floyd (aside): Someone stole the drummer's arm.
It was not uncommon for us to call random dorm rooms and try to flirt with girls for 30 minutes at a time or put on an album and leave to go get something to eat.
I miss doing that show. I have a couple of tapes of the show that I listen to every now and then. Aside from reminding me what a bad radio program we had, it reminded me that we had a blast doing it. Listening to a group of friends 17 years ago goofing around without a care in the world made me think about getting back into radio.
I really never was "in" to radio, but the audio format in general was enjoyable.
The purpose of this three part series was to announce that I'd be putting together sporadic audio shows as a counterpart to drinkrum.org. I've changed formats a bit since the start of these posts. Drinkrum will still be a personal blog site, but most of my general humor stuff has moved over to posthumorous.org. The audio show, will be hosted there.
I haven't made a general announcement about it yet, so this is an early alert for loyal fans of drinkrum.org.
Look for the unnamed audio feature to appear in the next few weeks.