Pardon Me While I Monotask
My interest in audio began was about 8 growing up in suburban New Jersey. I had a crystal radio that was popular among kids in those days. It was a red plastic box a bit thicker than a deck of cards that contained a coil of wires and not much else. There was no battery or on/off switch, and the radio's unseen power worked only at night. The aerial was a wire attached to the screw on a telephone jack. A big tuning knob served only to vary the volume on the one station that the radio received: WABC-AM from New York City, the first Top-40 station in the country, whose clear-channel 50,000 watts could be heard in 48 states.
At night, with my brother asleep in the next bed, I listened to my radio through a small white headphone that I kept in my ear with my head on the pillow. It was my own impenetrable world. I listened to the Beatles, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas; all introduced by DJs who spoke in a thick echo that evoked a happy world of never-ending energy and high spirits.
When I was in high school I discovered Jean Shepherd and Bob and Ray, both on the venerable WOR-AM. Bob and Ray came in the afternoon with a repertory of characters all played by these two middle-aged radio veterans. With their clean brand of New England humor, they skewered pomposity with dry, sweet sarcasm.
Jean Shepherd, on the other hand, had a rougher edge. His show was on each school night from 10:15 to 11:00. As I listened to him on my little Sony cube radio, a world opened up for me, as it did—I was to learn decades later—for many other East Coast boys who were less than stellar in the social, academic, and athletic arenas.
Using his hypnotically rich voice, Shepherd presented a picture of the world that I didn't get in my three or four hours of network television. Shepherd, who died recently, was one of the century's great humorists and prose stylists, whose short story collections belong on the shelf next to Benchley and Thurber. In his monologues, rants, and stories, he created a comic world depicting his childhood in an Indiana industrial town, and described what it was to be like as an adult writer living in New York who followed his own unique path. Some broadcasts were better than others, but they were all shot through with a deep sense of both the wonder and absurdity. He helped me to see the tragic comedy of being human.
On Saturday nights I listened to the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a predecessor to TV's Saturday Night Live, that was more original, caustic, and hilarious than that network program could ever dare to be. It helped me form a sense of humor that gets me through life's rough spots.
In the culturally sterile suburb I lived in, these shows kept my mind alive. The airwaves that were transmitted from the top of the Empire State Building and across the Hudson River showed me that there was something beyond shopping malls, backyard cookouts, and bowling; and that I wasn't getting the full story about life on prime time TV.
Years later, when I was living on my own, I got to sample life without TV with the help of burglars who stole my expensive Sony from my New York apartment. I began to spend my leisure time in reading and listening to music. They turned out to be much more satisfying than TV ever was, which—I grew to realize—usually didn't satisfy me anyway. Reading, attending concerts, going to museums, taking walks: These brought me home to myself and brought a serenity to my life that I never knew when TV was king. I eventually came to understand that living without TV was a political act, an act of thinking independently from the mob. It removed me from the monoculture that tells us how to think, feel, and behave. If you allude to a Seinfeld episode around me, I won't know what you're talking about, and in celebrity knowledge I'm deficient.
Around this time I began to listen regularly to old-time radio shows. They were played over (I think it was) Fordham University's WFUV-FM. I'd light a candle and turn off the lights and listen to Inner Sanctum or Lights Out. What a rich experience this was compared to TV. Listening to radio drama had the depth of a novel and the liveliness of a film. It was like being inside a dream. The sound of the story expanded small rooms of my Lower East Side apartment. It didn't matter that the scripts and the music were dated; the medium was asking me to do something I had never done before: To use only my sense of hearing to create a landscape in my mind. It was up to me to cast the actors, dress them in costumes, and provide props and lighting. My imagination, flabby and unused, leapt at the chance to get out and play.
These days, audio theater continues to keep me out of the therapist's office. In a society that values "multi-tasking"; that is hell-bent on distracting us with tidal waves of information and with blaring TVs in waiting rooms and (coming soon) elevators, audio theater gives us a chance to dwell in the inner landscape of our souls. It seems like an anachronism to sit down and just listen, without doing anything else. But so does going to the opera, looking at paintings, or playing chess, activities that keep our souls intact. Perhaps we should call these "mono-tasking": doing one thing at a time with one's mind and emotions engaged.
It's been many years since I saw one of those red crystal radios. They've probably stopped making them. Sometimes, when it's late at night and I can't sleep, I take out my digital Walkman, put the turbo earphones in my ears, and switch the band to AM. I then indulge in some "DXing"—looking for those distant stations that can be heard only after dark, when their signals travel great distances by bouncing off the ionosphere. No matter that it's talk radio or farm reports. The mystery of distant voices traveling through the night still excites me.