The Winning Is Just Beginning
The other night at Concert on the Square, one of the listeners at Table 75 asked me, "What's the best prize you've ever given away?"
I had to think about it for a minute. Making someone's $992 mortgage payment during Magic Pays Your Bills last year was fun. At another station, I once gave away $1000 to caller #106, and I've handed out a few weekend getaways. But I know a radio guy who once gave away an all-expenses-paid trip to Dublin, Ireland, to see U2 in concert, which is instantly cooler than anything I ever gave away.
A more interesting question might be, "What's the worst prize you've ever given away?"
In one town, the local movie theater gave us tickets, but asked us to give them away not in pairs, but one at a time. The theater manager said, "I don't want you to give away pairs because then I don't sell anything. Nobody goes to the movies alone, so if you give tickets away one at a time, at least I'm going to sell another ticket." (We could have made the listeners promise to buy popcorn, I guess.) In another town, an appliance dealer occasionally asked us to give away stuff he couldn't sell. I can tell you there are some things in this world that people will not only refuse to buy, but they won't even take it if you try to give it to 'em free. An electric combination hot-dog cooker and bun warmer, for example.
At Magic, we're extra-careful to make sure the prizes you can win from us are truly special, and not just junk that's lying around. And we assure you that if you ever win tickets to anything, there will always be two of them.
Last Two Months
So, here we go. Rounding the corner into the last two months of this pregnancy. I have to say that I've felt much better than when I was pregnant with Everett. I'm not swollen. I have much more energy and overall the experience has been wonderfully uneventful. Now I'm not one who loves being pregnant and thinks it's a beautiful time in a mother's life. No, but I'm so humbly honored to be able to be a mom again, so I'll take it.
Maybe you heard that we've named our son, Roman Frederick. The name floated around a bit with a couple others, but alas, this was our final choice and I'm totally in love with his name. I like to find out the sex of the baby and then I like to name them before they're born … and I have no issues with other people knowing the name, hating it, loving it … it's all okay. But last night, I saw his name pop up on a list of "Hipster baby names" for 2014 .. .along with Salinger, Lennon and Gulliver to name a few. At first I was annoyed that it was being categorized as "hipster," but then I remembered I don't even truly know what a "hipster" is … so carry on.
Anyway, in these last eight weeks, I'd like to request your positive energy, your mojo, your prayers, your whatever for these last two months to go smoothly and remain uneventful. Everett decided to make his grand entrance a month early. I'm hoping that isn't the case this time around. And in my hormonal state, I could blame you if that happens again … so get going on those good vibes. GO!
Jose, Can You See?
Every time I hear Kelly Clarkson's song "People Like Us," I don't hear it the way she sings it. I don't hear the line "We're all misfits living in a world on fire." I hear "We're all dipsticks living in a world on fire." There's a word for this phenomenon: it's called a "mondegreen," the mishearing or misinterpreting of something said or sung that gives it an entirely new meaning. (The title of this post is one.)
It seems like a lot of the best mondegreens come from the 60s and early 70s. The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" contains a line about "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes." People sometimes hear this as "the girl with colitis goes by." You'd rather have kaleidoscope eyes. When I was a kid first listening to "Get Back," I heard the line "Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner" as "Jojo was a man who thought he was a woman." The Creedence Clearwater Song "Bad Moon Rising" contains the line "There's a bad moon on the rise," which is often misheard as "There's a bathroom on the right." Elton John's "Your Song" does not go "I sat on the roof and kicked off the moths." It's AT THE MOSS. In his song "Purple Haze," rocker Jimi Hendrix sang "Scuse me while I kiss the sky," which somebody transformed into "Scuse me while I kiss this guy," which became the title of a book about musical mondegreens.
Something more recent? How about "There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do" from Toto's "Africa." It's been misheard as "There's nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do." Or Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," in which the real line "It really doesn't matter if we make it or not" is vastly different from the misheard "It doesn't really matter if we're naked or not." Because it clearly does matter.
You can browse a few hundred more of these (some rated PG-13) at KissThisGuy.com. I'm not sure all of them are real, though. It takes a pretty dim bulb to hear "Hold on to that feeling" in Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as "Hold onto that fetus," but I suppose anything is possible.
Dear Diary
Sometimes we do things we're so embarrassed by … like this past weekend when we were at the park. Everett was swinging and swinging and swinging. Every time I'd slow down he'd say, "MORE SWINGING!" I'm sure it was a good hour until he finally decided heading home was a good idea. So I pulled him out of the swing and we raced to the car.
When I put him in his car seat, I realized he was wet on his butt. Now it had crazy-rained the day before, so I didn't think twice about it at first, but then I checked his diaper. It. Was. POOP. Oh my gosh, poor Everett and his double ear infection are about halfway through the antibiotic …and if you've had a kid on an antibiotic … you know the runny, yucky, horrific stuff that comes out of their cute, little butts. So I first thought of grabbing a wipe, paper towel or anything I could get my hands on to go clean the swing, but then I saw that there was already a little girl in the swing and her daddy was smiling and pushing her up high in the sky. Who would I be to ruin that special moment for them? So I closed the door, started the car and raced home.
I can't stop thinking about that dad lifting his daughter out of the swing and being extremely stumped at first at how his daughter got poop on her butt without having a dirty diaper. Then slowly realizing that it had to be another kid's poop and getting extremely grossed out and angry. I'm SO ashamed and mortified. And I really wish I would've been wearing a less memorable color than orange. Dear Diary … please don't tell anyone.
Where Were You on June 8, 1984?
This weekend is a significant anniversary in Madison-area history: On June 8, 1984, shortly before 1:00 on that Friday morning, an F5 tornado, the strongest there is, struck Barneveld. Ninety percent of the village was destroyed and nine people died. Other communities in southern Wisconsin were also hit within a span of about two hours early that morning: DeForest, Arlington, Columbus, Beaver Dam, Markesan, and Belmont. Ann and I were living in Illinois at the time, but we vividly remember watching TV reports about the storm's aftermath. It was hard for us to get our brains around the idea that something so terrible could happen in a place so close to what we considered home.
(Local TV stations and newspapers will probably be carrying stories on the Barneveld tornado this weekend. You can read the story NBC15 did for the 25th anniversary in 2009 right here.)
Despite the terrible storm, regular daily life went on in the Madison area and elsewhere on that June weekend. If you felt like going to the movies, you could choose between two brand-new ones just out that Friday, Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Both were trying to dethrone the current box-office champs, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Just as the NBA Finals are going on now, they were going on 30 years ago this weekend. In a memorable game at the Boston Garden on the night of June 8, the Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers 121 to 103. Boston was suffering through a heatwave, and there was no air conditioning in the old Garden. As a result, the courtside temperature at gametime was 98 degrees.
And if you turned on the radio, the top songs on that weekend 30 years ago included Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams, Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," and "The Longest Time" by Billy Joel. On June 8, 1984, Billy performed the song at Wembley Stadium in London. His performance is right here.
Back there in 1984, we could barely imagine 2014, and now here we are. In some ways, it seems like a million years ago, but in many others, it's practically yesterday.
We're Officially Proud Mini Van Owners
I was just waiting … waiting for my husband to finally come around to a mini van rather than an SUV. He researched which SUV we were going to get. Figured out our possible monthly payments. Decided which dealership we'd buy from – and I supported his hard work.
I thought – I could do an SUV for a little while, that's fine. They sure are nice to look at, but then he read an article from a guy. One that was right around his age that had a little, growing family just like ours and he mocked the heel-dragging of parents everywhere when it came to the big evolution of mini van driving. He laughed at the egos of moms and dads everywhere who were either trying to be someone they were not or were finding it hard to admit where they were in life that would create a necessity for a mini van. Is it the word? Mini van? Is it what it represents? A family? Why is there such a fine line drawn between families with SUVs and families with mini vans? Why did I want a mini van?
It's very simple. I've been responsible for giving Everett way too many goose eggs on his sweet little forehead with the dang car door. WHOOPS! I didn't see you there, buddy! I'm so sorry!' I was done apologizing to my son for busting his face with a car door. It was time for those beautiful, thoughtful, sweet sliding doors to make their way into our garage. And so they have. And so I'm happy.
Broadcasting Live From the Festival
On Memorial Day weekend, Bratfest kicks off the festival season. If you keep your eyes open, you'll see lots of radio stations broadcasting from these summertime events (even Magic 98). Over the years, I have been to a few.
In small-town Iowa more than 20 years ago, the annual summer festival was supposed to have something to do with the city's heritage as an old Mississippi River town, although we suspected it existed mostly to create customers for the Kiwanis club beer tent. It was held in Riverview Park, a place from which the Mississippi could not actually be seen. I would do my radio show from an RV on the festival grounds all week, and part of the job involved introducing concerts. I got to hang out backstage with Paul Kantner and Jack Casady from Jefferson Starship, two actual survivors of San Francisco in the Summer of Love, and I once watched Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon go off on a roadie who brought him the wrong brand of bottled water, although it occurs to me now he may have been joking.
My wife and I once got invited to be celebrity judges at Taste of Something-or-Other. (It, too, was in Iowa many years ago, and can't remember what the festival was actually called.) The judging process wasn't exactly systematic – they gave us a handful of food tickets and told us to go and eat, which we were happy to do since we were newly married and broke. I don't remember which establishment won. I know the celebrity judges definitely did.
A more recent experience came a few years ago at Taste of Madison, when I worked for a different radio station, and discovered that the most dangerous place on Earth is onstage with six DJs and only one microphone that they have to share. It would have been easy to break up the melee, though – just wave a few free food tickets.
Have fun around Madison this summer, and come up to say hello to radio DJs whenever you see us. We like that.
Hamsters in the Smoke
This past weekend's Saturday morning edition of American Top 40 is a show I can remember hearing when it was on the first time, back in the spring of 1974. I was a 14-year-old music and radio geek, and I used to sit by the radio with a pencil and paper and write down the title and artist of each song as Casey played them. I remember being pretty happy when my favorite songs of the moment, "T. S. O. P." by MFSB was the #1 song on the show.
Somethign else I remember very well happened sometime that spring, probably in the month of May. We came home from church one Sunday to find our house full of smoke. We didn’t see any fire, but we couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from, either. As it turned out, the culprit was the radio in my brother’s bedroom upstairs. It was an old plastic box with tubes inside that had belonged to my father (and had been my first radio a few years before), something inside had shorted out and burned. It was hard for us to imagine that it could have produced the volume of smoke we saw, but it did, and the smoke and soot damage, particularly to the upstairs, was significant.
The afternoon of the fire, my brother was inconsolable, sure that his hamsters, which lived in his room, were dead. At mid-afternoon my father finally went up to retrieve the cage. The little creatures were covered with black soot—but they were still alive. It fell to my grandmother, for reasons I can’t recall, to clean them up. I can see her even now, standing at the kitchen sink, washcloth in one hand and hamster in the other, with a look on her face that said, “You know, at my house we set traps for things like this.”
Oh Baby!
Good news from the Hansen household! There's going to be a new addition. Roman Frederick will be Everett's little brother and his ETA is August 28th. Now that I'm of 'Advanced Maternal Age' things are a little more achey and I'm a little slower, but I'm so happy and feel very blessed to be able to be welcoming a healthy baby boy into our family.
I do want to say this though, if you're working on starting or expanding your family and haven't had success, my heart hurts with you. I'm not going to say anything like, "You'll get there someday," or "keep trying, it'll happen," because I know those phrases well and although they're said with love, you still want to flick the nose of the person saying it. I didn't go into either pregnancy with fairy wings and rainbows. Both had to be planned out with the help of doctors. We've experienced loss and the disappointment that came along with every month somehow managing to get your hopes up just to have them crash down in front of you. So I don't share my news lightly. We are very well aware of our fortune and don't take that for granted one second.
So, I stood in line and willingly got on this ride. I'm ready for it and hopefully in four months, the world will stand still for a moment as I get to meet my sweet baby, Roman, and kiss his wrinkly forehead.
Now Taking the Stage . . . Practically Everybody
If you are a 70s music fanatic (and odds are good that you are), these are good times in Madison. Chicago plays Overture Hall on April 28th, and two more high-profile shows have been booked for the summer. On July 16th, Jackson Browne is scheduled to play Overture Hall. It's an acoustic show–an article in Billboard says he's likely to accompany himself from a rack of guitars and a keyboard, playing songs and telling stories from his 40-year career. One month to the day after that, on August 16th, Steely Dan is set for Overture Hall.
(Steely Dan was in Milwaukee just last summer, and it's interesting to me how a band that so badly hated touring back in the 70s seems to be on the road all the time now. What's different today, Donald Fagen has said, is that the band can pick its spots and create a livable schedule, although the 2014 tour schedule is pretty rigorous for guys in their 60s, as Fagen and his partner Walter Becker are.)
Want to road-trip to Milwaukee? Summerfest has put together its usual eclectic lineup around the Fourth of July, and it's been rolling out the stars for quite a while now. A few new ones were announced just this week, including Rick Springfield and Ingrid Michaelson. Others booked for the grounds stages on Milwaukee's lakefront include Michael McDonald, REO Speedwagon, Bonnie Raitt, Kool & the Gang, Melissa Etheridge, and Cheap Trick, along with some newer acts you've been hearing on Magic lately: A Great Big World and Neon Trees. The Wisconsin State Fair may have landed the biggest star of all, though: Aretha Franklin, who'll play the main stage on August 5. Lady Antebellum and Alabama will headline Fair shows too.
Don't forget Bratfest over Memorial Day weekend in Madison, which welcomes Bret Michaels, formerly of Poison, for a bit of late-80s flash, as well as a ton of favorite local bands including Lube, Kings of Radio, the Love Monkeys, Madison County, and the Madison Jazz Orchestra.
And it's since only April, the odds are good that more great shows are yet to be booked for the summer of 2014. Stay tuned.