sundry items

So I am once again vexed with a small case of insomnia, so here we are at 12:48 AM and I am writing. What spurred this, you may ask? Well a number of things. I can never sleep the day before I leave for vacation and this at age 25 is no different than age 4 when I went to Ocean City for the first time, still get excited and I still hate to leave. It's not like it costs me anything to go anymore, either. My folks have a house down there so I can mooch off that as much as I want but that long drive back to Baltimore on Rt. 50 with everyone else is just a downer. You can see it in the eyes of the other motorists heading back to Catonsville or Edgemere or BelAir or wherever - boxes of Candy Kitchen stuff and tubs of Fisher's Popcorn and some Thrashers in the tummy its a sad ride but at least you know you had a good time. I still get the same feeling even though I know I will be back soon. Ocean City, MD is the place to be. Period. Best thing I have seen on the boardwalk in a while was two things, OK so maybe it wasn't one but one was funny and the other was disturbing as well as funny. The first was spyed two weeks ago when I walked past one of the various pizza parlors on the boards with a sandwich board that read "Authentic New York Style 'PIZZA'" "Pizza"??? Why the quotes? Is it not legally allowed to be called pizza? A pizza-like substance that tastes remarkably like pizza? What gives?

This past weekend was spotted an old woman wearing a bright blue t-shirt with the words in all caps "JUST DO ME" . Ocean City - class all the way.

The other reason I wrote was to tell a fun story about my days as a DJ at our crappy campus radio station at dear old MWC. The station management had told us in a meeting that we could put the studio monitors (that's radio talk for speakers) out the window if the weather was nice. What I neglected to hear was "...if the weather is nice on a Friday afternoon after 5PM..." This would not have been a problem if I had one of those coveted time slots but nay nay, my show, "Paper or Plastic" aired every Monday morning at 9AM. So one brisk October morning I got in early and wired up the studio monitors and propped them into the little attic windows up in the 3rd floor of Lee Hall. All seemed well. No calls then suddenly the switchboard lit up. Interesting because we figured no one would be listening let alone near a phone to call in a request. Turns out it was some professor in Trinkle Hall next door screaming at me to turn the music down. I told him that I was allowed to broadcast the radio station and that if he did'nt like it - he could call station management. Well - he bypassed them and went to the police who in about 30 seconds attempted to break down the studio door. I went and let him in and he had his handcuffs out and threatened to arrest me on the spot for GodKnowsWhat if I didn't turn the music off and get the speakers out of the window. So seeing reason I complied and WMWC went off the air for about 22 minutes whilst the officers stood over me as I dismantled my speaker set-up.

I was thinking about this as I realized the other day that as Lee Hall is being renovated from top to bottom the old radio studio is gone now. It was definitely this side of crappy but I think that's what made it real to me. Old concert posters on the walls - defunct radio station stickers all over the mixing boards - bad carpeting and worse furniture and the studio door covered with the autographs of all the musicians and groups who had visited the station - apparently all have hit the scrap heap. Definitely the end of an era - the station had been broadcasting from the attic of Lee Hall since 1946 - just over 50 years isn't bad I guess. I can close my eyes and be back in that crappy little studio doing my show that no one heard and loving every minute of it. We had a brand new instant replay machine sitting on top of a mixing board from about 1985 next to a couple of turntables and a cartridge machine. I used to play the same station promos all the time and I got yelled at for it - but come on, how you could not love a Run DMC station promo? We also had to run a couple of PSA's (public service announcements) and again I played the same one over and over - about clean water. It had this scary music in the background with this little girl's voice asking "for a dwink of water". "DO YOU WANT TO HAVE CLEAN WATER FOR YOUR CHILDREN??????" and so on. Brilliant. I found a couple of the old station promos on their crappy website - definitely haven't heard them in about 8 years so it was a neat flashback. Also, the fact that WMWC's website is crappy tells me that things are just fine and the same as always.

That'll do it for today folks - I'm Bryan Fischer and thanks for listening to Paper or Plastic on WMWC 91.5 Stereo FM.