Friday, January 14, 2005

The Chronicles Caper

A movement is afoot to put Michiana Chronicles on the national map. Last week a listener pleaded with the station to forward April Lidinsky’s latest commentary to NPR. “It would be something of which Michiana could be proud,” he wrote. Everyone here agrees! But sadly, breaking through to the national airwaves isn’t easy. I should know.

After an array of other promotional efforts had failed, I was chosen to execute what I called Mission Desperado. My lawyer has another name for it that I can’t repeat on the air. Anyway, I truly thought I had been chosen. That was the sense I got during a strategy session at the Midway Tavern. The jazz was loud, but it seemed to me that everyone was urging me to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., and badger Bob Boilen, the producer/director of “All Things Considered,” to listen to our demo CD. But I really hadn’t understood. Now I’m told everyone was insisting that, above all, I should not be sent to Washington, D.C., to mercilessly badger Bob Boilen. Well, I’m a fanatic.

I’m also pathetic. My first week in Washington I haunted the Starbucks closest to 635 Massachusetts Avenue, hoping that Bob Boilen might stop in for a latte. I had a photo of him. But this guy, I tell you, must be allergic to caffeine or something. I finally had to drag myself out onto the blinding sidewalks and physically stalk the man. Once I had figured out his subway line, I was able to do my PR thing with him all the way from the Chinatown Metro stop to the NPR lobby every morning. But try as I might, I could never force one of the demo CDs into his hand. Bob’s a nice man, but I was a bit put off when he said, “Michiana? Is that even a real place?” And I have to say that he walks probably too fast for his own good. He was physically hard to slow down and would aggressively wave his arm at me to brush me away.

One day, not long after what I call the “body guard incident,” I figured out which office Bob was in, and I cheered aloud when I saw his window cracked open. If I aimed properly I could frisbee the disk through the narrow opening, and there was some chance of my placing it right on top of that pile of CDs on the corner of his desk. My research told me Bob Boilen’s a sucker for experimental electronic music, so I quickly scribbled on the back of the disk, “Bob, you’ve gotta hear the synthetic zither on this one!” and signed it, “Love, Terry Gross.” I’m wicked talented at flipping a coin onto a saucer at a carnival, and I can prove it, because I’ve collected quite a menagerie of oversized stuffed animals, including a life-sized Gumby doll and an enormous chicken that only barely fits in our garage. But each copy of the CD I tossed ticked against Bob’s window pane and sliced down into one of those damned reflecting pools that are all over D.C. like water hazards.

In desperation, I signed up for a tour of the NPR headquarters. I had to disguise myself as a tourist in order to get past the guards in the lobby who seemed to have multiplied ten-fold since the early days of my mission. Half-way through the tour, I slipped away toward Bob Boilen’s office. I could see him in there, at his desk, but one look at the angle of his tense back and I knew I had no chance with him, not without a clever device. I made a close study of his shoes before darting off in search of the nearest men’s room. Fortunately, I had remembered an old trick from “The Partridge Family”—from the first episode, about how the family won the services of a prominent band manager named Reuben Kinkaid. Danny Partridge kept hounding Reuben, but the guy was too important to listen to a music tape some pushy ten year old was touting. Then Danny hit upon the scheme of catching Reuben in a restroom stall and placing the tape player on the floor in front of his stall, just out of reach. I think you were supposed to figure out that Reuben Kinkaid suffered from constipation (he was that kind of character), so he couldn’t really do anything but listen to the whole tape. Of course, he loved the music, and the rest was TV history. I installed myself on one of the johns and waited. As luck would have it, Bob showed up. I knew the shoes. Once he had settled in, I switched on the CD player. What happened next is kind of a whirl in my memory. Suffice it to say that the guards were easily able to break through the metal door, and it hurt a lot to be thrown against the back of the stall.

At the Washington jail they let me keep my CD player, and I consoled myself by listening to our old Chronicles pieces. I was heading back to good ole Michiana in my mind until it dawned on me: the demo contained none of my own recordings. It was all Louise, Ken, April, Jonathan, then Louise again. On this supposed demo, I didn’t get the recognition of Tracy Partridge—you know, the cutesy girl with the tambourine you couldn’t even hear. That’s when I heard, from a neaby cell, like an omen, or a happy dream. 

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on January 14, 2005
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