As the pandemic plays out, I see a lot of people reporting vivid dreams. I for one have had quite a few of these in the past few weeks. The most recurring one is that I’m wandering around the Horseshoe on the UofSC campus looking for a final exam. And of course, I am not prepared for it.
I’ve had this dream before, many times but in the age of the Coronavirus it has stepped up its game. Instead of being in the warmth of a spring day, it is in the middle of winter and I’m struggling with a hat, scarf, gloves and a London Fog Trench coat. I keep dropping my books on the brick pathway and have to take off my gloves so I can pick them up. When I bend over, my hat falls off and my scarf slips off my neck and piles up on the bricks. You get the picture, it takes me forever to get it all together and once I do, I can only take a few steps before I have to repeat the process.
The class in question is usually my History 101 class which was taught by Dr. Coolidge in the big auditorium on the first floor of Davis College. There were over 100 students in that class and I always sat near the back of that cavernous room. The reason for that was that I was habitually late for class. I had just started working the All-Night Satellite at WCOS and had just enough time to get off work at 7 AM, get home and wolf down some breakfast before the 9 AM class started. I think this is the reason my psyche picked on this particular class. I have yet to make it to that final exam in that dream.
There is one recurring dream of which I have been anticipating the “COVID-19” episode. I call it “THAT DREAM”.
“THAT DREAM” is the one that is talked about by all the old school radio DJs that I know. We often talk about it in gathering such as the Slightly Legendary Old Broadcasters (SLOB) breakfasts. We all have similar versions. We are on the air live at one of our old stations. In my case, I’m at the Western Electric Board in the Master Control Room of WCOS on the second floor of the Cornell Arms Apartment Building on the Corner of Pendleton and Sumter Streets in Columbia SC. I’m new, so my boss Woody Windham is sitting in the production control room watching me through the glass. All of a sudden, the song on the air is ending and I have nothing queued up; no jingle, no commercial cart and no record picked out to play next. I’m forced to open up the microphone and ad-lib while I search for the commercial cart. Alas, it is not in the easily reachable wire rack in front of me, and I’m forced to kick back the air check to reach the carousel rack behind the cart machines. As I do so, my headphones are ripped off my head as the short cord reaches its limit. At the same time, at the other end of the headphone cord the plug pulls out of the jack and it all falls to the linoleum tile with a huge crash. I can tell that the crash was heard loudly on the air because the VU meter on the board pegged at full volume. Without the headphones I’m deaf to what is on the air, and I can’t easily get connected because I just accidentally kicked the loose headphone under the audio board as I located the cart and jammed it in the player and started it. With the mic off now, I can find a record, cue it up but I have to do a cold announcement to start it because I still can’t hear anything with my headphones on the floor.
With the music finally playing I can now retrieve the Tripp headphones off the floor and put them back on. At that time I notice the expression on Woody’s face as he face-palms wondering how did he ever hire such a clutz.
So you can imagine just how much I was anticipating the COVID enhanced version of this dream. It finally happened on Friday night and it was not a disappointment. I had applied for a combination on-air / engineering job at WIS Radio which was noted for its smooth professional jocks with a no – nonsense approach to their shows. They were satisfied with my engineering experience and decided that I would do a live audition for the on-air side of the job. I was sent out to their remote broadcast booth in a restaurant somewhere in Irmo to do a show. When I opened the door to the booth, I was greeted by an old rotary pot grey monster of a board that looked something like the old Collins Board I had used in the past. I say “something like” because none of the controls were where I remembered them and nothing was labeled. So I had just a couple of minutes to figure out what was what. The cart machines had openings only a tall as a CD player, so I couldn’t play the commercials. The turntables were older than the ones that I had at WCOS and it looked like the tone arms would destroy any record that was played on them. The microphone was not on a boom but instead was hand held and resembled a Shure SM 58. Yikes, I would need to operate the console with one hand and hold the mic with the other.
The management of the restaurant was super happy to see me and wanted to know if I needed anything. So I ordered a hot dog with mustard, onion and chili, a large Coke and a slice of strawberry pie. The food was delivered just as I started the show with a record on the right turntable. I got tied up paying the waitress and the song ran out as she left the booth. I grabbed an album and slapped it down on the left turntable, right on top of the whole strawberry pie the waitress had left on it as the song on the right turntable faded out. I grabbed the microphone in my left hand which was now coated with strawberries and whipped cream. What a sticky mess. I flipped on the microphone switch just as the wind screen on the microphone popped off and I was staring at the naked guts of the still working Shure in my other hand.
Needless to say the show proceeded to go downhill from there and pretty soon there was a line of cars filled with people who came down to see my on air struggle in person. As the show finally mercifully came to an end, I could see the station’s program manager and the owner of the restaurant approaching the booth. I just knew that any chance I had of working there was gone. But they were both beaming; the restaurant had the best night ever in the history of their business because of all the people coming by to see the disaster in the making. The program director told me that the ratings were out of the roof and that he wanted me to do the show full time in addition to my full time engineering duties. And one more thing, I was not to fix or replace any of the equipment in the booth, they wanted the show to be the same disaster every weeknight from then on; thus perpetuating my agony. Can you say “Groundhog Day?”
See what I mean about the COVID version of “THAT DREAM” did not disappoint. To set the record straight, I never had to apply for the Chief Engineer’s job at WIS-Radio, I was promoted from the engineering staff at WIS-TV. And I never had to audition for on the air over there, that came to me from the “other duties as required” clause of my job description. When the program director at WIS Radio found out I had air experience he asked me to fill in from time to time when the DJs on the staff couldn’t do their shows. There was never a remote booth at a restaurant somewhere in Irmo and the equipment in the WIS-Radio master control room on the banks of the Saluda River always behaved for me. If not, I knew where I kept my screwdrivers on the workbench in the next room. Oh MY!
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