Tropic Magazine, The Miami Herald
September 25, 1994

Radio Sex

by Laura McCarthy

I was new to radio then, a romantic, enchanted by the possibilities.

Community radio, "people's radio" they called it: some 100 volunteers making radio for the love of it. Our guru was a reclusive iconoclast named Lorenzo Milam, who had written a book called Sex and Broadcasting. (He claimed to have thrown ''sex'' into the title merely to sell more copies, but we weren't so sure. Radio excited us.)

The station gave me Friday afternoons, and I gave them jazz. Hot bebop, '50s cool, the word jazz of Ken Nordine. Outside the control room our little northwestern community bustled by on the business of radio, every few minutes a head poking in with a question or comment, an anonymous "thumbs up" flashing around the doorjamb. It was an atmosphere of benign chaos into which I jumped with enthusiasm Friday morning and from which I exited with relief at the end of my shift.

I became a listener as well: Javanese gamelan music, Serbo-Croatian folk dances, Muslim sermons. Tex-Mex and Tlingit. Nights and early mornings were reserved for traditional classics, and often I would sleep to Stravinsky-colored dreams, or awaken briefly in the dark to measured Mozart as reassuring as a ticking grandfather clock.

One night in late winter I awoke to a dead furnace and the heat of a DeFalla opera. The clock said 3:50, and the guitar notes seemed to be the only source of warmth in my bedroom. Wrapped in a woolly robe, I shuffled to my desk and opened the station program guide. The Sunday night host's name was unfamiliar to me: Daniel. I reached for the phone.

"What wonderful music," I said to him when he answered. "I thought you'd like to know someone's out here." I introduced myself, and described the supportive midday chaos that surrounded my own show. He chuckled, then was silent. "I woke up because my furnace died and my house is freezing," I told him. "Come down to the station," he said finally. "It's my last show. I'm leaving in the morning for medical school in Massachusetts. Come down and help me celebrate."

Warmed by a sense of adventure and my down-filled jacket, I drove to the historic building that housed the radio station. Daniel opened the door to my buzz. Inside the bulky black sweater he seemed so much smaller than his voice. His dark hair was pulled back in an untidy ponytail, and thick eyeglasses rode the high bridge of his nose. He turned and left me to find my way to the studio.

How quiet it was, alone in that old building. We sat in the tiny control room, and he said so little I wondered why he'd bothered to invite me down. I watched him carefully clean a new disc and lay it on the turntable, cueing it up with a steadiness that belied the hour. "Sibelius," he said. "If I timed this right it should end just at seven when the sun rises, and we'll feel like Orpheus."

The music began gently to fill the room. Finally warm, I unwrapped the scarf from my neck. Slowly Daniel reached down and pulled off his heavy hiking boots, and leaned back to rest his feet on the edge of the console.

His socks! The darkened room was suddenly luminous--I felt like Dorothy dropped abruptly into the kingdom of Oz. On Daniel's small feet were wondrous, knit rainbows, pinks and spring greens and lavender, with borders of yellow against his pale shins. I thought of his trip east the next day: Perhaps like Dorothy he could merely turn round and click his heels three times.

I found my hands drawn to those beacons of warmth and humor. Daniel accepted my touch without comment, and we sat just so, the rough wool warm under my palms, as the music built around us in the slowly changing light.

As Finlandia's last notes faded, the host of the morning news show let herself in and plugged in the coffee pot. Framed in the frosted window, a pale sun slowly pulled itself out of the river. In the building's doorway I shook Daniel's hand, and wished him luck in medical school.

Fifteen years later I still can't hear Sibelius without feeling under my fingers the rough yarn of Daniel's magical socks. Lorenzo Milam says to look at the eyes. "People who will be right for your station," he tells us on page 44 of Sex and Broadcasting, "will have nice eyes." But since that night I always look down first. I always look at the socks.

Laura Pelner McCarthy, PhD
Silk Purse Editorial Services
laura@silkpurse.net