Where'd My Show Go??

It's Friday afternoon and I still have no show prepared for tomorrow morning.  We go live now for "The Doctor Roger Radio Hour" on 990WBOB.com, and frankly it's a lot simpler a target to hit now that I'm not spending 18 hours in front of my old Tascam mixer and computer audio work station.  I'd been producing a solid hour of radio theater and talk, complete with breaks for ads and station ID, with no prior experience or knowledge of what I was really doing.  I bailed after 5 shows, unable to uphold the impossible chore I'd created, for no pay.  But now, since Adam's gracious re-acceptance of my person as a regular contributor,  I just walk into the home-"radio station", hand over a playlist on CD and take a seat in front of a mic.  It's become fun instead of a source of anxiety, and the show has been doing great!  I'm progressively less nervous, I sound more confident and I'm getting control of what I want to do every time I sit down.

So yesterday, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and hopeful to offer something current and vital to my hopefully growing listener-ship, I went to the Occupy Providence site in downtown Providence, and got some nice interviews from a couple people- one guy named "Phil Esteen", who's in charge of Occupy Providence' media, and another guy across the street who was waiting for a bus.  Both were good interviews, real clear messages from two vantage points.  I was psyched, driving home with my potent, hot-topic loot!  I had good things to edit down and present in a way I felt was in fact "far and balanced"... it was almost like journalism... but I had apparently hit the Record button on my Zoom Handy Recorder one too many times, and for each interview I have now about 10 seconds of traffic noise to produce.  Nothing else, no earnest preaching, no calm dismissal of the vigor of youth and rancor over social cause.  I was, for about a good 20 minutes, devastated.  After a short period of mourning and cussing, I dropped my hands, cut my losses, and will now see what kind of creative conjuring I can work up from the mere experience.  And pull together a playlist. 

All this is really kind of disastrous, on a small scale.  Yet, I am finding that as I stay committed to this side-line, part-time, non-remunerative hobbyist venture, it's not so important what I bring to the table at all.  You can get away with a surprisingly miniscule amount of real substance in this business of radio... the heft of your presentation is really in how you present whatever it is you seem to have.  It's in your voice, your apparent demeanor, your enthusiasm for what you've got to offer; it's about the vibe you package your even potentially water-thin material in!  Radio is about engaging the listener, transporting them away from the immediacy of their manifest surroundings, even tricking them into believing in a reality they couldn't have created by themselves:  You're the one who has to believe in the quiet truth that all they have access to in the world is not just their seat in the workplace, their car steering wheel, or the $700-a-month living room they're sipping their now-room-temperature coffee in.  The even quieter truth is that if you can prove by experience that life is worth exploring and that inspiration is worth chasing, then your show has been a success.  If you are earnest, then what you're doing is disseminating information.  That, true or not, is substance.