"What Do We Do Now?"
The year was 1997. I was out of radio, working for a publishing company. My wife, who had spent the last several years managing a retail store, was working for an insurance company. For many years before, Christmas Eve had been a regular working day for both of us. I would almost always be on the air on Christmas Eve; as a retail manager, she had to stay until the store closed, plus a couple of additional hours to get ready for the after-Christmas sale on the 26th. (When did you think the stores set up for the after-Christmas sale?) It was not unusual for it to be 8:00 or later until both of us were home. Sometimes, we'd immediately hop back in the car and drive to my parents', which was two or three hours away, depending on what year and where we lived at the time. In other years, we'd throw together some kind of simple dinner (simple because neither of us wanted to invest much time in cooking), maybe open a gift or two, and doze off in our chairs by 10:00 so we could get up early and make the drive to Mom and Dad's in the morning.
Then came 1997. Each of our offices closed at noon. We had lunch together, and afterward we did some last-minute shopping. It must have been 3:00 in the afternoon when we got home and put all of our purchases away. Then we looked at each other and said: "What do we do now?" It had been so long since we hadn't had one of those harried, haggard, hurry-up Christmas Eves that we weren't sure how to go about it.
We figured it out, of course. She's managed to stay out of retail since then. I, however, got back into radio a few years later, one thing led to another, and here it is 2014. And as it happens, I'll be on the air on Magic on Christmas Eve from 3 until 6 in the afternoon. That's not a bad thing. Christmas Eve is my favorite day to be on the radio, and I especially like to be on as the sun goes down and nighttime arrives. (The reason is too extensive to get into in this space. To read more about it, go here.) So while you're setting the table for your Christmas Eve dinner, coming or going to a church service, and/or trying to keep the kids from losing their minds with excitement, turn Magic on. It'll be great.
Whoa! I'm Back … I think.
I just got an email from a friend that said, 'Lanette … update your blog. Otherwise it looks like you're dangerously overdue.' It took me a second … 'Oh yeah! I have a blog!' Lately it seems as if my mind and my body are in two different places at all times, but it's all coming back to me – I think.
I was back in the office and on the air the week of Thanksgiving. I left the house that Monday morning with my workbag, untouched since August 26th, a breast pump and a gigantic lump in my throat … none of which are things that lead to a successful workday, but I did it. I got in my car and drove away from my babies. In jeans three sizes bigger than before, breast pads stuffed in my bra so I don't leak all over everyone and a Tupperware container full of the family meal I had gotten used to making while on maternity leave. (It was chili – and it would later spill all over in my workbag. Awesome.)
How on Earth will I keep life in order while working full-time, trying to run a household and keeping up with appointments and events? With a Command Center of course! Yep, a dry erase calendar in which everyone in the family has a different color marker and a 'Notes' section filled with things like 'turn crock pot to warm at 3pm please.' It's definitely an attempt at making sure everyone is on the same page. And we get to say we have something nifty called a 'Command Center.'
Now for the things we CAN'T control. Both boys are sick right now. Everett with his fourth cold in three months and Roman with his third. I've gotten a total of about three hours of sleep the last couple nights and although I've never had a sty in my eye, so I can't say for sure, but I think I have one now. Showering a couple times a week is the new norm and I'm so thankful I have two dogs to eat everything from dropped Cheerios to spit up off the floor because cleaning the house seems to keep falling further and further down the list of importance. BUT…I'm smiling. I'm smiling big time. I have two boys that knock my socks off. My husband and I go to sleep at night, usually a few feet apart because of the three year-old between us, knowing that we wouldn't have it any other way. So I'm back! On the air, in the office and … whoops! Gotta go. My breast pump is calling my name.
Party Time
Consider the office Christmas party. Your employer forks out for dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant, and you can let your hair down for a while with your fellow compadres. Sounds like a good thing—so how come so many parties are so awful?
Maybe 25 years ago, the owner of the radio station I worked for scheduled our Christmas party for a mom-and-pop restaurant willing to trade the cost of the dinner for advertising on our station. Imagine having the party at Denny’s, only with a limited menu, and you’re getting close to the vibe. The message to the staff was pretty clear—this is all you’re worth to me. And maybe it dawned on him that he’d skimped, because the next year, the party was scheduled for the most exclusive restaurant in the city. As the waitstaff brought the menus that night, the thought flashed from table to table instantaneously—let’s stick it to him. And so everyone ordered appetizers and bottles of wine, expensive entrees and desserts. Ann and I racked up the most expensive dinner we’ve ever had, one that probably still holds the record after all these years.
Even though I loved many of the people I worked with, the company Christmas parties at my post-radio jobs were almost always dreadful. Dinner and drinks were fine. Even the little speech by the company president was OK. But when the party was planned by a committee, there always had to be an entertainment program of some kind—and I am convinced that there’s never in history been an office-party entertainment program that’s actually entertaining. Memo to party planners everywhere: don’t waste money hiring a hypnotist or some similar thing—just reopen the bar and let people hang out together.
At my last corporate job, over a decade ago, I resolved to skip the holiday parties–but I soon found the company did not approve of party-skipping. The HR manager actually visited the cubicles of those of us who had declined the invitation to find out why. (Sometimes I had a good reason, and sometimes I lied.) There's no such pressure here at Mid-West Family Broadcasting, because we don't do the formal, after-hours, at-a-restaurant holiday party anymore. We do a during-the-workday potluck, which is a thousand times better, even accounting for the fact that there's no bar.
If you have a really good (or really crazy) office party story, I'd love to hear it. E-mail it to jim.bartlett@magic98.com.
The Day I Helped Coach the Badger Women's Hockey Team
(Pictured: the La Bahn Arena Zamboni, as seen from the public address announcer's position on the ice.)
I have a personal blog that's mostly about music but sometimes about radio and occasionally about other things, and I hope you'll click over and read it sometime. I wrote a post there this week about my experiences as a public-address announcer for the Badger women's hockey team and a recent fill-in doing a women's basketball game. If you read it, I think you'll find out there is both more and less to the job than it might seem to you as a fan. Here's a story that I didn't have room for in that post.
When I first started doing hockey a few years ago, it was the PA announcer's job to find the coaches and get the starting lineups. (We don't have to do it anymore; the game's official scorer does it now.) There's a protocol for doing this. Coaches are not obligated to share their lineups until after the pregame warmups, which end 24 minutes before the scheduled face-off time. The PA job gets busy about 10 minutes before face-off time, so there was a very brief window for scaring up the lineups. Not only that, but the visiting team always gives theirs first, so that was always the first coach I had to find. And the first coach I had to find at my very first game was Jackie Barto of Ohio State, one of the most successful coaches in the history of the sport at the college level. Outside the Ohio State locker room, they told me she was in the stands, where she had been watching warmups, which she was. What they didn't tell me was that she was positively radiating pregame intensity, giving off a serious don't-bug-me vibe. But up I went. After withstanding a withering look (one that didn't really subside much after I explained that I had a legitimate purpose for talking to her), she gave me what I needed and I went on my way.
If you can believe it, I was actually more nervous about looking up Mark Johnson—Badger legend, Miracle on Ice veteran, you know who he is. But Coach Johnson is also one of the most gracious people I've ever met in any walk of life, and he was certainly kind to the new PA guy. His usual routine was to give me the two forwards and the center, then turn to his top assistant, Dan Koch, and have him give me the two defensemen. One time, after we went through this routine, Coach Johnson said to me, "Who should I start in goal?"
Given that this was the season in which Jessie Vetter was earning the Patty Kazmaier award as the top player in the country, I went with her. It turned out to be a good call. The Badgers won that day.
No Baby Yet??
"No baby yet?" This is a question I never had to hear with my first born, because Everett decided to make his grand entrance a month early. It makes me smile how everyone walks slowly around the corner – hoping to not see me at work – and then when I'm here they say something to the tune of, "Nothing?" It's such disappointment to see their dear co-worker, Lanette.
It's okay. I'm very aware that with each child – heck with each dog and cat – I fell lower and lower on the Totem pole. As we round the corner to my due date, I'm thinking I should put a jar on my desk that says, "Yes I'm still here. Put some chocolate in this here jar for even thinking about asking me when my due date is and how I'm feeling."
PS: If you happen to bring wine instead of chocolate, I won't be disappointed. I can't wait to share with you the amazing news that Roman is here!
Circle of Family
Whenever I come into the office lately, the first thing I do is check to see if Lanette is still here, or if her baby has decided it's time to have his birthday. It occurred to me the other day that apart from when I was six and my mother was expecting with my youngest brother, it's the closest relationship I've ever had with a pregnant woman. Years ago I shared an office cubicle with a woman who quit her job the same week she announced she was pregnant, so I'm happy to be carrying this relationship with Lanette to term.
My wife and I don't have children. (I can barely take care of a cat.) But we have eight nephews and three nieces, plus a few godchildren and an ever-growing gaggle of honorary grandchildren. The oldest of the latter will be turning eight next month, which means it's been about eight years since we were first referred to as "Grandpa Jim and Grandma Ann," which freaked both of us out a little bit.
The oldest kid in the whole circle of family and friends is our nephew, who is 22, working his first real job out of school, living with his girlfriend and enjoying life immensely. We've got another nephew who'll be a junior in college, and who just spent a semester doing a prestigious internship at Walt Disney World in Florida. (I wonder how many interns there think about going back north–to Michigan, in our nephew's case–and think to themselves, "Heck with it, I'm staying here.") Still another has just graduated high school and will be going to college next month. We're done with high-school graduations for a while, but only for a brief while.
I had a lot of nephews before I got my first niece, so my nieces are special to me. They are 12, almost 10, and 3. The three-year-old is the youngest kid in my circle of family and friends–although I haven't seen Lanette for almost an hour now, so maybe not.
My New Nephew
I am feeling so blessed to be able to share with you the arrival of my sweet nephew, Nathaniel James. Notice I didn't use the word 'little' in his description? This gorgeous boy was born on July 20th weighing 10 pounds, 8.6 ounces and was 22 inches long. I've looked, but there are no greeting cards that say "Congratulations, you have a six week-old!"
I'm just beside myself with love and gratitude for him and my brother and sister-in-law. It's been almost two years since they allowed their son, Sammy, to earn his angel wings and fly. I'm sure Nathaniel will hear all about his brother and feel his presence often. And come the teenage years … none of us will mind that he'll have quite the guardian angel when he makes the dumb choices that teenagers 'sometimes' make. ?
The Way It Used to Be
I hope you saw the article in Isthmus recently about the great Lost Madison Facebook community–and that you've checked out Lost Madison yourself. It's full of pictures and memories of Madison the way it used to be, and an excellent source of information about the city's past.
In the summer, I find myself thinking about Madison as it used to be, because when I was a kid, I spent more time here in the summer than in any other season. My aunt and uncle lived here, first on Segoe Road and later just off Whitney Way, and I'd spend a few days each summer with my cousin. He was pretty good at navigating the bus system, so we'd ride all over the city. We loved to hang out on State Street, and we spent a lot of time at Hilldale. They had 10-cent movies at Hilldale back then, and my cousin and I agreed that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was overpriced at a dime. We liked Jaws much better–in the summer of 1975 we stood in line outside what is now the Bartell Theater, but was then the Esquire, to see the movie absolutely everybody was talking about.
Long before that, however, I was a visitor to Madison. After West Towne opened in 1970, my family would pile in the car on a Sunday afternoon, drive up from Monroe, and wander the mall. Over the years, I spent a large percentage of my allowance at Victor Music, and it's still the place I see in my head when I imagine what a music store is supposed to look like. In those days, the mall was on the very edge of the city. There were farms to the west and the south. Not long ago, I was traveling down Fish Hatchery Road in Fitchburg and the same thought occurred to me–I could remember when this was somebody's cornfield.
There are more interesting memories of Madison's past at Lost Madison. You should click over there right now.
New Playground … At Least for Us
My husband stumbled across an awesome playground in Cottage Grove. It's the Phoebe Bulman Bakken Memorial Park … and this place is cool. There's lots of great climbing and running and sliding and swinging. And it got extra cool when I found out that it was a park built just a few years ago solely on donor money and volunteers to actually put it all together.
You always hope your kid will get along with and be accepted by other kids, so I was just a beaming momma when Everett ran up to a boy and a girl and said, "Hey guys! Look at me!" The little girl said, "Wanna play tag?" Now whether Everett truly knows what tag is or not, he lept up and screamed enthusiastically, "YEAH!" And off they went playing tag and running around. When he decided the big, covered slide was too big, this sweet new friend said, "That's okay, we can come over here to the smaller one." I wanted to scoop up this brother and sister, who we later found out were named Emma and Devin, and give them big, huge hugs. Then they all decided it was time to swing. Everett and Devin sang the Thomas the Train theme song together while Marc and I tried to keep up and push all three of them on the swings.
It was a great morning for so many reasons: Everett was a sweaty, hungry mess – so we got home, ate lunch and he crashed for a couple hours. And also because I got to see what great kids are capable of. These two kids didn't have to play with Everett, but they did and with such sweetness that I can only hope that this will be the kind of people that Everett will befriend along his way in life.
Thank you to the parents, too … job well done!