The first day I started at Queens College (City University of New
York), I made two stops between classes, down at the Student Union
Building: PHOENIX, the weekly student newspaper and WQMC Radio (visit
their website at http://www.wqmcradio.com/).
I was interested in both fields for a future career. But while I was
able to start writing articles for the paper immediately, WQMC did not
give me a show as a DJ for two years. In the meantime, I did a lot of
engineering work and newscasts. Plus I recorded a bunch of comedy bits
that could be played between sketches that I wrote with Jon Aubrey,
which were performed at LEVELS, a youth center on Long Island (visit
their Web site at http://www.greatnecklibrary.org/levels/home.html/).
The bits were very popular, which was flattering. But soon I realized
that many of the jocks were playing the bits so they could include them
on demo reels to send to radio stations across the country, when they
looked for jobs. Which meant I could be competing against myself, with
my own material. This theory was borne out when I erased the batch of
bits I had stashed in the production studio. One of the jocks confronted
the programming director and said, "Where are MY BITS?"
We had a great time writing and recording the bits, knowing that the
sky was pretty much the limit, as long as we kept our language in check -
as if the FCC was really listening to our carrier current signal that
didn't get out of the building.
I wrote an article in December 2011 for the blog talking about some of these experiences. Here it is: http://mrjeff2000.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-radio-days-perspective.html/.
In any case, this week's podcast tells the story of how we started
doing the bits, how he decided to keep most of them to ourselves, and
why I wound up in print media instead of radio - until entering the
podcasting arena.
We close with the Cohen/Aubrey commercial parody, "Roto-Sweet," perfect for these hot summer days.
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