Look, Ma, I’m on the radio
Monday, I was on KDKA radio discussing my book, “Below Average Genius,” with guest host John McIntire. I was with my mom when McIntire called me. He asked, “Can you come down to the studio tonight? I’ll ask you questions about you and the book.”
Promote my book? Talk about myself for an hour? I jumped at the chance. When I hung up my cellphone, I turned to my mom and said, “I’m going to be on the radio tonight!”
She said, “Someone must have canceled.”
Deflated. Nothing is more humbling than family.
I walked into KDKA’s offices. They have a sports station, a talk station and a country station all going at once over there. All I know about radio is from sitcoms like “News Radio,” “Sports Night” and “Frasier.” Imagine all three shows happening on the same floor of an office building (put Kelsey Grammer in a cowboy hat) and you have KDKA.
McIntire introduced me around and took me to the booth. It was a table with areas for standing and sitting around a gaggle of microphones. It looked a lot like the fishbowls you see on those aforementioned shows, but with more microphones. McIntire was a convivial host. He asked me questions and quizzed me about the book. He’d name random chapters and I had to provide a synopsis for each. I was afraid he’d come across a chapter I didn’t remember. I don’t tend to look at the book much. Every time I do, I find a typo I missed after rereading it 10 times before it went to the printer. It pinches every time I find something I missed.
McIntire would say, “How about ‘The Day I Didn’t Meet George Clooney’?” And I would explain the story of my near-encounter with the famous celebrity. All of the stories started out as columns in this very newspaper. I explained it was the lazy man’s guide to writing a book, “Five hundred words, once a week, compiled over a year, and boom! Book.”
We had a few conversations during the commercial breaks, and I’m a little fuzzy on what I said on air and what I said off. The weird thing is, I don’t normally swear, but somehow, being where it was forbidden made me want to curse. It’s sort of like when you have inappropriate thoughts in church, or when you go to the observation deck of a tall building and think about jumping. Um. Maybe that’s just me.
The hour went quickly. He was wrapping it up and said to me, “You write a humor column every week?”
I nodded, which is a really bad thing to do when you’re on the radio. I said, “Yep. Three years, every Saturday. I haven’t missed one week.”
He then said, “How do you come up with an idea every week?”
I replied, “It’s kind of easy. Like last week, I didn’t know what I was going to write about, then I got hit by a car. Voila! Column.”
When I got in the car, I thought, “Now that he put me on the spot, I probably won’t be able to come up with a column this week.”
And then a light bulb went on. No, really. I turned the engine on and the light bulb went on (I haven’t really figured out the rental car, yet). Then, I thought, “I know! I’ll write about being on the radio. It’s so meta.” And then I did. See above.