Performance

I have been a performer most of my life. As a six year old I walked around the house with a bulky tape recorder half my size playing characters, interviewing my sisters, and clowning around. I have been in front of a camera, behind a microphone, on stage, or backstage for much of my life. I never really thought of entertainment as a career, per say, but more of a compulsion. Making people laugh was my drug of choice.

Radio Oklahoma

Inspired by my oldest sister Kim, who entered into radio professionally while in college at 17, I took my first radio job at 16, at KMYZ in Pryor Oklahoma in 1985. The station had moved to a newer building outside of town, but the transmitter was still located in the derelict remains of the old building. The relay that sent transmitter readings to the new building failed, so I was hired to sit in the old building and log the readings every three hours, per FCC law. I threaded a paper towel roll into an old manual typewriter and spent my time between transmitter readings writing poetry, then setting it on fire in the parking lot.

While a senior in High School, I had the opportunity to work with my sister Kim on the top 40 radio station KAYI (Kay 107) in Tulsa. She was the Info-tainment straight character in the Morning Show Zoo of Andy Barber. I called in from home to play voice characters on the show before running off to school.

After High School I spent the summer as an intern on the morning show as a voice actor, writing the morning show mail when the mailbag was empty, editing the promos for the show, and working as a board operator.

I landed my first real air shift on KSPI in Stillwater, Oklahoma during my brief college career. I was bored senseless and my attraction to radio was tarnished by my growing understanding that the freeform wild days of the FM radio of my childhood was becoming an automated Borg-like corporate nightmare.

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