Radio Days: Year One With the Chuckanut Radio Hour

Alan Rhodes writes a monthly column for the Cascadia Weekly and delivers a slice-of-life essay on each episode of “The Chuckanut Radio Hour.” He can be reached at rhodesaj@msn.com.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, with music that will satisfy, poets and authors who will edify…”

Oh my god, we’re actually doing this, we’re on the radio.

“…coming to you from the studios of the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in beautiful downtown Bellingham, the city of subdued excitement…”

How did I get myself into this? What am I doing on this stage?

“…it’s time for The…”

Announcer Rich Donnelly leans back from his microphone, while the Honeybees lean into theirs and croon, “The Chuckanut Raaadiiiiooooo Houuuuurr.” The floor manager holds up the applause sign, the audience claps and cheers, emcee Chuck Robinson steps to the mic and the first taping of this new radio show is underway, January 9, 2007.

Bellingham had been hit by a snowstorm the night before and snow was still coming down as show time approached. We didn’t know if guest author Eric Larsen would be able to make it up from Seattle. It was too dangerous for me to drive my car down the hill I live on, so I’d pulled on some boots and tromped to a bus stop to get to the taping.

But Eric Larsen made it and enough people braved the weather to almost fill the Radio Museum’s studio. We charged into a night of poetry from James Bertolino, sketches from the Chuckanut Radio Players, an interview with Eric Larsen about his latest book “Thunderstruck,” 1940’s songs from the Honeybees, rock and roll from the Walrus, lots of humorous banter and a radio essay from me.

When I’d been approached by Phil Printz, the show’s co-producer, about reading an original essay on the pilot program, my first thought was, No way; I’m a writer, not a performer. I’m accustomed to sitting quietly at a corner table at the Black Drop or Tony’s, drinking too much espresso and filling up pages in my spiral notebook. Getting up on stage is a whole different thing. But Phil’s enthusiasm for the project was contagious, so I said I’d give it a try.

And now my moment was approaching. Floyd McKay was concluding his interview with Eric Larsen, and my microphone was being adjusted. I took a deep breath, began, found my rhythm and … wow, people were laughing and clapping and having a good time.

After the show I was asked if I wanted to be a regular. “Absolutely,” I said. “This was really fun!”

This zany enterprise had started just a few weeks earlier, when Village Books co-owner Chuck Robinson was talking with Phil Printz, a guy with production and media background. Chuck had wanted to do a radio program for years; Phil knew how to make something like this happen and had been thinking about ways to expand programming at KMRE, the low-power FM station broadcasting from the Radio Museum.

Phone calls were made, acts lined up, scripts written, tickets printed. Somehow it all came together … and it worked!

This month marks the completion of one year of the program. We’ve had golden moments, near misses and a couple of fabulous flubs. Although the show is performed before a live audience, it’s taped for later broadcast so the techno-wizards at the museum can fix our more egregious mishaps. Here are some of my post-program notes on a few of this year’s shows.

Show #2: February 4, 2007. Our second show clicked nicely. In addition to our house band, the Walrus, an acoustic trio called The Senate came up from Seattle and really cooked, stealing the show. Poet Nancy Pagh read from her book “No Sweeter Fat,” cracking everybody up with her poem “Ten Reasons Your Prayer Diet Won’t Work.” I especially liked stanza three:

All food miracles create more:
more loaves, more fishes, more wine, more manna…
When you ask god to do something about fat
expect multiplication.

I read a tongue-in-cheek essay contrasting liberal Bellingham with conservative Whatcom County, trying to make it an exercise in equal opportunity satire in which neither side got away.

What do people think about our neighbor Canada? A typical county response: Oh, it’s okay, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Reasons given: gun control, gay marriage, socialized medicine. A typical Bellingham response: Canada, I love it! I could live there. Reasons given: gun control, gay marriage, socialized medicine.

What was the greatest historical event of the 20th century? For county people it was the Reagan presidency. For Bellinghamsters it was the release of the Beatles “Sergeant Pepper” album.

Show #5: May 14, 2007. Susan Vreeland was the guest author, talking about her new novel “The Boating Party.” Since the book is about Renoir, the show had a French theme. The Walrus was away on another gig, so we had booked a French cabaret band, Rouge. This was a great idea; too bad the band didn’t show up. It turns out they had the right day written down, just the wrong month. Later the Radio Museum’s electro-boys spliced in music from Rouge’s CD, some introductory comments by our announcer, a little canned applause and nobody in the radio audience was any the wiser — until now.

Show #6: June 13, 2007. Dee Robinson came on board tonight as the show’s co-host. The mock-combative banter between her and Chuck was fun.

I think this was my favorite show so far — because of a monumental screw-up. (The adolescent anarchist in me often loves those times when things go wrong, because the results can be so entertaining.) Instead of a guest author, we showed the first in a series of short films produced by Powell’s Books, each focusing on a famous writer.

In this film Ian McEwan talked about his new novel “On Chesil Beach.” It seemed like a great plan: the studio audience would enjoy the film’s visuals, but the scenery wasn’t essential to the radio audience who would just hear the interview. Everything was going along swimmingly until McEwan began reading selections from the novel, choosing, it seemed, only the most graphic, sexually explicit passages.

I’m not sure if anybody had remembered to preview the film, because for our guest musicians we had booked the Bellingham Youth Jazz Band. As McEwan’s prose grew increasingly libidinous, I looked over at the large assembly of apple-cheeked middle school kids. Probably none of their teachers had ever seen them paying the close attention they were now giving to this somewhat dry and erudite middle-aged British novelist.

Show #7: July 21, 2007. This was our first experience taking the show on the road — not far, though, just over to Fairhaven’s Village Green to precede the Saturday night outdoor movie. Or so we thought. That afternoon the sky, which had been bright blue for several days running, became increasingly dark, the wind turned cold and icy rain began pouring down.

We had to move everything inside Village Books, setting up in the little speaker’s nook downstairs. That space is cramped enough if you just have a single author giving a reading. We had a band, guests, several actors, a bank of microphones, a lot of recording equipment and wires strung everywhere. As I sat waiting to go on I quickly revised parts of my monologue, a local color piece on Fairhaven that had several references to all of us being outside on a warm summer night.

It turned out to be, I think, one of our better shows. Guest band The Senate was back by popular demand, and their acoustic trio music was perfect for that intimate setting; author Kate Trueblood couldn’t have been more charming; and this month’s “Bellingham Bean” episode was one of its funniest.

The “Bellingham Bean” was the brainchild of the show’s co-producers Phil Printz and Leslie Clark, who write the segment for each show. It’s an ongoing soap opera revolving around the lives of three siblings who run an espresso bar called the Bellingham Bean. Every month the Bean segment gets a little better as the characters develop. The Chuckanut Radio Players seem to really be having fun with it, and the jokes, sound effects and old-time radio music make it an audience favorite.

Show #10: October 1, 2007. This was definitely our most upscale endeavor, taped at Northwood Hall on the Monday that kicked off Banned Books Week. Our usual $5 ticket price jumped to $50, but the ticket included the show, a buffet dinner, a contribution to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and a copy of guest author Chris Finan’s book “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: a History of the Fight for Free Speech in America.”

Free speech and the right to read were the topics of the evening, so I wrote a piece encouraging people to exercise their free speech rights in every area of life.

Now that freedom of speech is out of favor with so many in the current administration, we should do more things than ever to promote free expression. For one, make sure your kids get their hands on lots of banned books. Cranky pressure groups have always tried to keep certain kids books out of schools and libraries. They’ve been after poor Judy Blume for decades, and are now convinced that Harry Potter is an agent of Satan.

Lately they’re objecting to the Newberry Award winning book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” because of a single sentence in which a rattlesnake bites a dog on the scrotum. Kids, if you’re listening at home, “scrotum” is not a bad word. Many of you have scrotums. This is not to say that there are no bad words. Kids, here are the three nastiest words I know: war, racism and genocide. Don’t go to war, kids, you could get your scrotum shot off.

That night we had a room full of liberal lawyers, librarians and Bellingham lefties, so this stuff could hardly miss.

Last January, on that snowy evening when we assembled on stage for the first broadcast of “The Chuckanut Radio Hour,” no one really knew what to expect or how it was going to go. Conceivably the premier program could also have been the last. Well, it’s a year later, and next month we’ll do a special show for our first anniversary. If you’ve never watched a radio program being taped, it’s a lot of fun, so come on downtown and join us at Radio Museum. With a little luck there won’t be a blizzard this time. §