A few things you need to know about the radio business

A lot of people think it's cool to work in radio. I'll admit it is. However, very few people realize all the restrictions and headaches associated with having to work at one. Here is a little primer before I get into the meat of my experience at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM.

1. Almost every radio station is financed with advertising.

This is the key. I know people hate hearing commercials while waiting for the next song, comedy bit or news to come on, but this how stations manage to stay on the air. In case you didn't figure out from my last post, running a radio station is expensive. During my time at KZZO, I saw two millionaires go broke trying to keep it afloat, and this was just in a small town, where they didn't have to pay the air staff a lot of money. We barely made above minimum wage. This brings me to my next point:

2. DJs and Air Personalities don't directly earn their income.

Can you imagine someone paying you just to sit around, play music and talk into a microphone from time to time? In order to pay people to keep a radio station on the air 24 hours a day, a sales staff has to sell enough advertising to cover everyone's paychecks AND they have to be able to collect on those bills. If you've ever heard about someone in a major market getting paid $150,000 a year, that means some poor salesperson has to bust their butt selling about $500,000 worth of advertising just to cover that salary and then some.

3. DJs don't really get to pick the songs they play.

Now, there was a time in the 1960s in which Free-Form formats existed on FM stations. Most radio stations were AM/FM combos and while a lot of advertising would be sold on the AM side, it helped to support the FM side. People were supposedly paid to put whatever they wanted on the air and this is how people like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa got their fan bases to grow through exposure on FM radio. When FM became the preferred frequency because of the capability to broadcast in stereo, a lot of that went away, but the legend remained that the DJs were in charge of the programming. At KZZO, we had a strict format that we had to adhere to. However, this didn't keep some people we hired from trying to entertain the town with "their kind of music," which usually consisted of playing the same 10 classic rock songs during their shifts. Nowadays, it is next to impossible to sneak your records onto the programming.

4. Radio stations don't really play requests.

Radio stations used to be known for playing songs requested by listeners. This was basically an illusion, so to speak. If you called up and wanted to hear one of the latest hits and you actually heard it played afterward, it was likely coming up in the rotation anyway. It was a coincidence. If you called and wanted to hear an older song, you might not hear it. If you called the radio station back, they would say, "I just played that five minutes ago. I guess you didn't hear it. I'm not going to play it again." I was surprised when I started working at a large market station in Denver that people called in and requested songs. I thought for certain they would have figured out that requests would not be played. Even recently when working at a newsradio station in San Jose, our FM sister station had a text service. People were texting in requests. That amazes me, because in this day in age, you can pull up just about any song on YouTube and listen to it for free. But I guess it has more to do with feeling like you're in control of the music that comes out over the airwaves.

5. Everybody thinks they know how to run a radio station.

One of the slogans for KZZO when we changed formats was "Finally, a really good radio station." My problem with that slogan was that EVERYONE has their own idea about what makes a "really good radio station." A lot of people were expecting us to go back to the AOR format we had before we were K108FM. The consensus seemed to be that we had a great presentation, but we weren't playing the type of music they wanted to listen to all the time. And to be honest, no single radio station is ever going to meet anyone's expectations. That's why it's nice to live in a large market where you can have a variety of choices. One of the biggest problems with the Clovis/Portales area is that the stations were all Top 40 or Country/Western.

6. Every person connected to the station wants to have some say in the music that gets played.

This includes myself. When I started working at the station, I dreamed of the day I would have influence over what went out over the airwaves. That actually somewhat came true when I was named the Music Director. However, almost everyone I worked with kept DEMANDING that I put certain songs on the playlist. When the silent partners took over, one of them had been in the music publishing business prior to holding the reins of the station. He swore that he was not there to control the music. But somehow, every recent song he held the rights to got played by the station, on Jid's orders. On top of that, the partner would open up all the new records when they came in, even though they were addressed to me. It was a relief when the partner went out of town for extended periods.

7. Some contests might be rigged.

I'll admit I've done this. If I had friends who wanted to win some minor prize, like a record, cassette or free food, I often was able to get away with making them winners without anybody else finding out. If I were to say the 10th caller would get a certain prize, I would keep my friend on the line until I figured time enough had passed for 10 people to call. I'm certain there are a lot of others who have done the same thing. Outside my influence, there was one raffle contest we had that was done in conjunction with a charity. People could donate money to the charity for a raffle ticket or, if they didn't want to donate, they could still enter the raffle. (There were laws governing this to keep it from being regulated as gambling.) We used two different kinds of tickets for the raffle. The major prizes went to the ones who donated and a few piddly prizes went to those who didn't. One of our most elaborate contests was rigged in such a way to keep the cash amount down to a minimum. That will be the topic of a separate article in the future.

8. Radical changes are common among radio stations.

A station may be high in the ratings for years, but eventually, they have to come down. When they sink to a certain level, they have to re-invent themselves in an effort to get more listeners back. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn't. I'd heard tale of a radio station with a new owner and Program Director hoping to ignite some excitement with a brand-new format and fancy jingle package. They saw their efforts fail because they didn't realize the previous owner had tried that exact same stunt just a few years earlier and it didn't work then.

Hopefully, this will give you a better understanding of the radio business and why some things that happened to me wouldn't make sense in any other business. I've got a lot of ground to cover in the weeks ahead.

Job #5: KZZO-FM Era: 1984 - 1988

This post will reflect somewhat of a change in course for this blog. First of all, I have to backtrack two years before I graduated from college. Second, I did some of my previous employers in two parts. My involvement in this radio station may span more than 10 parts, so there's almost no point in portioning it out. I'll just tell the stories as they happened. I've already mentioned a few things that happened at the station in previous posts, but there was so much that went on, it's going to be like the re-telling of my childhood, except that I didn't have to go to school.

With this post, I'll give a brief history of what happened at the station during the four years I was there. I've already written how I started working there when it had the call letters KCPK-FM and went by the name K108-FM. It was an Adult Contemporary station when I started. Two years before I started working there, it utilized an Album Oriented Rock format that had a lot of listeners there at ENMU, but couldn't produce enough revenue through advertising to keep going. Toward the end of the format, the station reportedly had only two regular advertisers: the two main record stores in Clovis. A friend of mine woke up one morning and heard a DJ say something like, "We're different now and we're better," and started playing softer music.

The station was still barely able to sustain itself, but was doing better than it was during the AOR format. When I came in, they played a lot of "oldies" mixed in with the current A/C hits. There was this huge shelf in the studio with hundreds of 45s that ranged from the 1950s to the 1980s. One of the nice things about having an A/C format is that the station played a lot of songs that didn't get played on KTQM-FM, which was our main competitor. I liked how we offered somewhat of an alternative with a wide range of styles of music. (Although, it was not "alternative" in the college sense.)

When I interviewed for the position in the summer of 1984, I was told that the station was undergoing a change in ownership. Crad, the Program Director who interviewed me, told me that there were going to be changes very soon and he didn't know what to expect. He warned that the new owner may bring in a new staff, so my employment there was not 100% secure.

The new owner was a man named Jid. He had a long and glorious history of working in radio. He was most noted for being the Music Director for KLIF-AM in Dallas, TX during its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s. After that station was sold, he left and became the Program Director for KROQ-FM in Los Angeles for a period of time. After that, he bought an FM station in El Paso, TX at a time when it was the only major metropolitan area where most of the residents were still listening to AM radio. He came in with a lot of the techniques learned from KLIF and his station dominated the market. He got a huge return on his investment and sold the station. He planned to use the proceeds to conquer small market radio. His plan was to buy some struggling little station, turn it around, dominate the market like he did in El Paso, and use the profits to buy several other small market stations throughout the Southwest. His decision to start with KCPK in Clovis would turn out the be the biggest mistake of his life.

I will go into more detail about the rise and fall of KZZO-FM (also known as "The Zoo") during the following series of posts. In short, we were not able to generate the advertising revenue needed for Jid to realize his goals. A lot of it had to do with the timing of when he took over the station, which was something he had no control of. I had mentioned earlier about the first Arbitron report that came out after the switch. The ratings had been recorded before we changed format, but the new call letters were listed in the report. KTQM was able to use that report to show advertisers that, despite all the hype, more people were listening to them and there wasn't a thing we could do about it.

I was the only person on the staff from the moment that the station became "The Zoo" to the point that Jid washed his hands of the whole experience and handed control over to his silent partners.

The first time I met Jid was the night we were going to switch from K108FM to The Zoo. I had been told to attend this meeting or I wasn't going to get to work during the weekend. Jid was in his early 40s. He told us about how we were going to change formats at midnight that night and all the exciting things we were going to do. He said that we would sound like a large market station in a small market. He played these amazingly produced promos that sounded nothing like what had been heard in the Clovis/Portales area, or even Albuquerque, for that matter. He also played our first contest promo, which instructed listeners to write "The Zoo 108" 108 times on a piece of paper and carry it around with them at all times. At some point, someone may come up to them and ask, "What's your favorite radio station?" If they answered "The Zoo," they would get $20. If they had that piece of paper with them, they would get $1000! ONE-THOUSAND FREAKING DOLLARS!

Yeah, that did sound rather excessive, but it's the same thing Jid did in El Paso and that was what rocketed his station to #1 in the Arbitron ratings. All of us DJs looked at each other. We were all wondering how we were going to be able to do this. But Jid exhibited enough confidence that we just ran with it without actually questioning it.

Usually, I worked at midnight on Friday nights. I nervously asked Jid if I was going to be working that night. He said I wasn't. It was going to be Deed, who worked the overnight shift on weekdays. After the meeting, I went home and listened to the station beginning at 11:30pm. Right before midnight, Chid, a part-timer who worked Friday nights, announced that Deed was coming up next and that she had a little surprise. The new top of the hour ID announcing Deed came. Deed played the first song, opened her mic and started laughing. She wasn't able to get through the spiel that she was supposed to deliver and turned off her mic after a few seconds. I'm certain that Jid, Crad, Chid and any number of the other staff members were in the studio at the time this happened. I know that if I had done that, I would have been fired on the spot. I'm certain that the only reason Jid kept her on was because she was the only woman on the air staff and he had paid for these elaborately produced introductions by an extremely well-known announcer he used to work with in Dallas before he became big-time.

I have to admit I thought it was going to take a few months for our station to catch on and even longer for someone to win that $1000, but I was wrong. Even after that shaky start, everybody was buzzing about our station. Jid actually succeeded in creating excitement out of what he probably considered a hicktown staff. I have a feeling that he couldn't get any of the pros he knew to come to Clovis, so he had to make do with what he had.

One of the changes I noticed during my first shift was that Jid had gotten rid of that shelf with all the 45s. We were down to about 150 45s, with nothing from the 1950s or 1960s. There were very few songs from the 1970s. Jid said more would be added, but our library of older material would never be as massive as it was for K108FM. I really missed playing a lot of those older songs.

A couple of weeks later, Jid and the "J Team," our morning personalities, went to Towne Crier Records in Clovis. A few people said they listened to The Zoo, but didn't have it written down 108 times. Then, this one woman approached them and said they should ask someone older. They then asked her and she had the piece of paper. That woman and her family went on to win several more of our contests, but never got the $1000 again.

A couple of weeks later, they drove The Zoo van down to Portales. Everybody got excited when they saw the van and were holding up their pieces of paper. I had come up to Clovis that day for a meeting at the station and had to wait for Jid and everyone else to get back from Portales. I remember Jid coming out of the van and holding the cassette tape with the $1000 winner high in his hand. I didn't realize this until later, but I guess they found out after the meeting that they didn't record anything on that tape. This forced Jid to have to go out and find another $1000 winner the next day so they could have something to put in a promo.

For a few months after that, we put a bit of a freeze on the money contest. Then, we got our bumper stickers in and connected those to the $1000 prize. A few people won. This was all great and everyone was listening to us. But after the Arbitron ratings goofed everything up, we didn't give away any more money for a long time. People kept calling the station asking when we were going to give away more money. We had to keep saying, "Soon, keep listening," but all of the air staff lost confidence after that.

In order to keep the station afloat, Jid brought in a partner. This was Mr. W. He was a very large man and had a bullhorn voice. He was a very successful accountant from Los Angeles. He had a few celebrity clients. He left that business behind so that he could concentrate on helping run the station and became a morning air personality. Jid depended on Mr. W to provide new funding for the station so we could fix a few things. A short time after Mr. W came on board, our signal went out. It turned out we had our engineer remove the air filters at the transmitter and clean them. Somehow, he forgot to put them back. The transmitter had been receiving unfiltered air for more than a year and finally gave out. It cost $10,000 to fix. If it hadn't been for the injection of fresh money from Mr. W, we would have been off the air indefinitely.

Within one year, Mr. W was flat broke. As he had given up his accounting practice, he had no revenue. Mr. W was fired and bought out by the silent partner investors because he had given the station a bad name. Mr. W was gay, and while he never mentioned it on the air, he had no problem letting everybody he met know about it. He never encountered any problems while living in Los Angeles and vowed never to be ashamed of his sexual orientation. However, before he was fired, he admitted that if he'd known how much gay people were not really accepted in Clovis, he wouldn't have been so open about it with local businesses and advertisers.

Very soon after Mr. W left, Jid stopped all his involvement in the station and let the silent partners take over. A meeting was held in which they told us we could no longer refer to ourselves as "The Zoo." We also could not refer to ourselves as being 108 on the radio dial. We had to call ourselves KZZO 107.5 FM. The problem with this was that it killed our jingle package. Almost every single one used "The Zoo" or "108" in the lyrics. There were maybe two jingles that we were able to continue using. It was frustrating.

It's interesting, because Jid had left KLIF after the station was sold and he could see things going downhill. I did the same thing because I knew that things were never going to be like they were before. After Jid left, we no longer had any structure and too many people on staff who had no clear vision of what we were trying to accomplish.

After KZZO, Jid went to work for a jingle company in Dallas. This was the same company he purchased our jingle package from. He continued to work for them selling packages to radio stations across the country. He died of brain cancer in 1993. I found out about two years after it happened. It was Daz who told me.

I don't know what happened to Mr. W, but one day, I was working in the box office of the Mayan Theatre in Denver. During rush hour traffic, I could have sworn I saw someone who looked just like him in a car stopped at a light on the corner. I used the PA system to call out to him, but I guess it wasn't him. He never turned his head. Other than that, I have no idea what happened to him.

So, this is a preview of sorts of what's to come over the next few weeks. It was a rollercoaster ride working at the station, and for me, there were more downs than there were ups. Stay tuned.

Things I wished I knew about life after graduation

Even though I was finished with college, the School of Hard Knocks was just beginning. Sometimes, it felt like other people got an all-expenses paid scholarship to attend while I had to toil and sweat to earn my way. Here's a bunch of things that would have been nice to expect.

1. Real life is like a summer vacation that never ends.

It was such a relief to wake up every day and worry about only having to show up at one location at the same time. This was one of the areas in which college was proabably worse than high school. In high school, just about everything was confined to one small area of town. In college, it wasn't uncommon to have one class on one side of the campus and the next one on the other side. I didn't have to jot down notes to keep track of where I needed to be every minute of the day.

2. You don't need to close the bathroom door and lock it when you're relieving yourself or taking a shower.

This took me a month to figure out. All of my life, I had shared facilities with other people. I definitely felt weird the first time I peed with the door open. I was so afraid that someone was going to suddenly walk through the front door in stealth mode and come straight to the bathroom. This is probably the one thing I miss most about living single.

3. Intelligence is no longer a requirement for the women you want to date.

I had high standards for women to be able to keep up with me mentally in high school and college. Once I got out in the real world, that didn't matter so much any more. At this point, I was just looking for someone I was mildly attracted to who didn't have a problem with my rather obvious quirks.

4. Your cooking is really going to suck for the first few months.

I can't tell you how many times I overcooked food, undercooked food and set things on fire on the stove. And the thing was, I had to eat it or it would all go down as a massive waste of money. This isn't to say I didn't know how to make food for myself, but I'd certainly never gotten to fry raw meat. This leads us to:

5. There is no store-brand substitute for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Even though my parents were poor during the first part of my childhood, they didn't just buy generic food. They went with the brand names. Even our powdered milk was a brand name, which was Carnation. (Although I did think Shasta was a brand name.) On my own, I didn't always have the luxury of paying for brand-name items, but I soon found out that Kraft Mac and Cheese was one of those things I could not cheap out on.

6. If you buy a pound of hamburger meat, make sure you cook it all right away.

When I was growing up, a pound of hamburger meat was enough for one meal for the entire family. Anytime we took a package out of the freezer, it would all get eaten during the same meal. I made the mistake of frying up a couple of hamburgers from the pound that I purchased, put it back into the refrigerator and tried to cook the rest the next week. When it stank up the whole kitchen, I knew there was no way I could eat it and live. It was wasted food and money, but a lesson well-learned.

7. As expensive as it may seem, you absolutely need a phone.

I didn't have a phone for the first six months I lived on my own. This was back in the landline days. Now, I can't even imagine not having a phone, let alone one that you carry with you everywhere. The only bad thing was that it cost a lot more money than I anticipated, as I was frequently making long distance calls.

8. Friends are going to be so hard to find.

Because of my Asperger Syndrome, it was hard to me to make friends outside of work. It was easier to make friends in school because everybody just kind of gets thrown together. When you find that you don't have anything in common with anybody else in the real world, you can't make those connections like you used to do. This would also hinder me in my ability to get girlfriends.

9. Your parents and other relatives may drop in unannounced from time to time.

I lived three hours away from my parents. They didn't always tell me when they would be up in my area, so they would stop by the house. It would always be in a mess, and since I didn't have a phone for the first six months, I never knew when they (or anyone else) was going to drop in. Of course, I had to remember back when I was a kid, we would drop in on family members unannounced all the time, too.

10. No matter how bad things get, it's still better than living with your parents.

I am so thankful that I got my life in order before graduating from college with a job and an apartment. As it turned out, an increase in the number of college graduates moving back home was starting to take place around the time that I finished school. It would just keep going up after that. I don't necessarily think that my parents gave me proper tools to survive on my own, but they certain made my home life so miserable while I was growing up that I would have done just about anything to keep from living with them again. My brother Loyd, on the other hand, had to move back in with them several times over the next couple of decades. I know they wanted him to be as independent as me at that age, but it just didn't happen.

But I guess everybody has it rough when they're on their own for the first time. I just felt like I was at more of a disadvantage.

The Road to Real Life

On May 10th, 1986, I woke up in my own apartment with my life starting anew. I had graduated from college. I never had to worry about classes again. It was a huge burden off my mind.

I remembered it was very cold that morning. Loyd and his girlfriend left my house early to get back to College Station near Amarillo. Mom and Dad would be coming up later so that Dad could get my car fixed. I also had to work at the station. Mom and Dad came up just in time to drive me over.

A couple of weeks before I had moved into the apartment, I showed it to my parents. While they liked it, my Mom said, "We need to paint this apartment." I told her it was fine and that it didn't need to be painted. While I'll admit that it looked a little drab, I really didn't want to start my new life surrounded by paint fumes. A few days later, Mom called me and told me they were going to buy some paint. I told her that I was going to be the one living there, not her and she didn't need to do anything.

An odd thing happened while I was at work. It started snowing. Never in my life up to this point had I ever seen it snow in May in New Mexico. The really bad thing was that my Dad had to fix my car outside in the snow. None of the snow stuck to the ground, but it was still very bizarre.

When I got back home from work, I found that Mom had COMPLETELY REARRANGED EVERYTHING! On top of this, they hung a plant from the ceiling. Because they didn't paint the apartment, I didn't get mad at them. However, I made it pretty clear that I was disappointed. Mom said the plant only needed to be watered once a week. I was really not liking the idea that I was being forced to care for a living thing. Eventually, Loyd took that plant to his dorm room at ENMU.

After they left, I was finally alone in the apartment. I didn't do anything special that night. I probably went out to get something to eat.

The next day, Loyd came back from College Station. I wasn't expecting this, but he wound up staying with me for a few days. Loyd and I went to Wal-Mart, which was located at the mall across the street. We bought some dishes, a frying pan and a spatula. (Grandma Bend gave me a lot of leftover silverware, a coffee pot and a broken toaster. It still toasted the bread, but you had to manually pop it up after about a minute. I never drank coffee.)

Then, we went out to the grocery store to buy some food, since I obviously couldn't afford to eat out every night. Mom had made a list of the foods she thought I should buy. Loyd looked at the list and saw that it was all food that she wanted to eat. He said that I didn't need to buy bacon because it was rather expensive. We just bought the things we thought I needed. We bought some pork chops and made those for dinner that night.

After we were done eating, we started cleaning up the kitchen. We washed the dishes and I started cleaning the stove. I lifted up the burner pad with my thumb and index finger. SSSSSSSSSSS! I JUST COOKED MY FINGERS! I didn't feel any pain at first, but knew right away I needed to get my fingers under cold running water. After a few seconds, I started feeling the hurt and it would just not go away. I sent Loyd down to Allsup's to buy me a cup of ice with no soda. He came back and while the ice helped to ease the pain, it all melted after about an hour. I still needed to go to work the overnight shift at the station that night, so I sent him down to buy a whole bag of ice. I had a metal bowl to put the ice in. I wasn't able to get any sleep before the shift, so I took the bag of ice and the bowl to work.

I had to run my show using my one good hand while the bad hand rested in the ice. Around 3am, I noticed I couldn't feel any more pain. The pain never bothered me again the rest of the night. I was able to go home after my shift and go to sleep. I felt bad about what happened, because it kind of meant I wasn't capable of taking care of myself now that I was "grown up."

I had a funny coincidence with those dishes I bought that first weekend. After a few weeks of living on my own, I broke one of the four large plates. (I REALLY couldn't take care of myself.) About eight years later, I was moving out of an apartment I shared with a roommate. (His name is Jakd.) I was clearing my stuff out of the kitchen shelves and putting them in a box. I packed the dishes I had first purchased at Wal-Mart. Jakd reached in the shelf and pulled out a couple of plates. He asked, "Aren't these yours?" The design was the same. I said, "Yeah, they are. Why would I have only grabbed one and put it in the box?" I realized I had already put my three plates in the box. These were different plates that used to belong to his old roommate! I didn't see the point of tracking her down to give them back, so I just kept them. I now had one plate more than I started with.

It's too bad I wasn't lucky enough to have that happen with the glasses from the same set that I broke.

The Road to College Graduation

I had no classes during the final week of college leading up to graduation. It was nice because I only had one final to take and I was done. The rest of the week was spent working and moving my stuff into my new apartment.

Even though I wasn't supposed to move in until Friday, May 9th, I would finish my shift at the radio station at 6am, drive the 1.25 mile distance from work to the apartment and sleep on the bed. It was so nice to so longer have to sleep on the floor in the back offices. It was Wednesday night, the 7th, that I started moving stuff from my dorm room into the apartment. Since I had to carry everything upstairs, I was certainly glad I didn't have to move any furniture.

That night, I went to a pizza place across the street called Ken's Pizza. They had a special deal on Wednesday nights in which you could get half off a regular pizza. I walked over and back. That began my tradition of always having pizza my first night in a new apartment. As I mentioned in the last post, I couldn't figure out how to turn the dining room light up. The only light I had was this ceramic owl that Grandma Ogolon had made me for Christmas one year. That's what I had to use for illumination.

On Thursday, I returned to my dorm room one last time and spent all day cleaning it up and getting the last of my stuff out so I could take it to Clovis. The nice thing about those 10' x 10' rooms is that they didn't take very long to clean. When I went back to the apartment that night, I walked over to the mall and ran into a couple of people I knew from college. I invited them over to see the apartment, but they didn't want to come. I was rather disappointed that they didn't want to check it out.

Friday afternoon, I woke up and went out to get something to eat. I drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken. When I came back out and started my car, my "ALT" indicator light came on. I didn't know exactly what was wrong, but I knew it meant I wasn't going to be able to drive home. I was able to get the car back to the apartment. I went to a pay phone and called Grandma Ogolon. I told her I had trouble with the car and asked her to come from Portales to pick me up so I could make it to graduation that night. That would have been really bad if this situation had kept me out of the commencement.

She showed up about an hour later and drove me back to Portales. After awhile, the entire family showed up. Mom, Dad and Loyd were there. Loyd's girlfriend from West Texas State University was with him. My cousin Rud was also graduating, so Aunt Berd and Uncle Wind had showed up. Also, Aunt Pand and Uncle Rid came with my cousin Mad. Mad was the only cousin who was at both my high school and college graduations. A few years later, I got to return the favor by going to his high school graduation.

I've written about some of the stuff that took place immediately before the ceremony. In all the years I had gone to Eastern, I had never attended commencement. I always just wanted to go straight home after finishing my finals. This left me unprepared for what I would see the monent I entered the main floor of the Greyhound Arena. IT WAS COMPLETELY PACKED WITH PEOPLE! I'd been there for concerts and never saw this many people there. It looked like there was no room to sit down.

Some 14 years earlier, I had attended an Artesia High School graduation. At that ceremony, the students threw their caps in the air at the end. I then went to Uncle Ord's graduation at ENMU. Not one student threw a cap. I was shocked. I asked my Dad why they didn't throw their caps. He replied, "It's because they're grown up." At that point, I thought I would be officially grown up once I graduated from college.

There was a lot of craziness that took place while we were marching in. (This was probably caused by the fact that we didn't rehearse like we did in high school. But there were way too many students to try to organize a rehearsal. I guess they figured we'd all done high school and knew what to do.) A lot of students had put words in masking tape on their caps. Some wore novelty sunglasses. There was a lot of revelry taking place while we were marching in. I knew that caps were going to be flying all over the place at the end. I was kind of saddened by that. I felt like we hadn't really grown up like we were supposed to.

College graduation is different from high school graduation in that you don't march side by side with a partner. It's basically one long line. (Really, it was two. Two groups entered from opposite sides of the arena.) At ENMU, everybody from each department got called up on stage alphabetically. My mother had asked if I had a marching partner. (I guess she was hoping again that I had found someone to date.) I told her no, there were no marching partners. She said that she and Dad got to march together at their graduation. I told her that was because they were married and had the same last name so they would have been positioned alphabetically, but they really weren't partners. That wasn't the way she remembered it.

I was fortunate in that I had a woman go right before me. I was followed by a guy whom I knew from the Radio/TV Department. It turned out the woman was the University President's daughter. I had never met her or even knew she existed the whole four years I was there, but I guess she was known for rollerskating all over campus. Her father became President the summer after my freshman year. During the ceremony, she talked to me like we had always known each other. Even though she was very attractive, I figured she already had a boyfriend and decided that all I could do was enjoy that time for what it was worth and not try to take it any further.

I wasn't aware of any graduation parties, so I didn't go to any. I just went to Grandma Ogolon's house with my family. My cousin Rud also went there for the whole evening. We had a good time.

Afterward, Loyd, his girlfriend and I drove up to my apartment in Clovis in his car. I don't remember why, but I had to drive. Loyd's car had a problem in that you couldn't get it to shift into first gear, but the other gears were okay. We got there and spent the night. Mom and Dad would come up the next day and I had to work at the radio station. Some interesting stuff happened that day. I'll get into that tomorrow.

As for that woman ahead of me at commencement, she became a pediatrician in Cincinnati, OH. From what I was able to tell on her Facebook page, she got married to another pediatrician in 1990 and had one daughter who is grown now. The guy she married is on my level of attractiveness, so maybe I would have had a shot at her if I had decided to go to medical school. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen.

Apartment #1: 2800 N. Prince St., Clovis, NM

In April of 1986, about a month before I graduated from college, I knew that I was going to have to find a place to live. This would be my second step toward adulthood following my graduation from college. (The first was finding a full-time job, which I got four months before I graduated.)

After years of helping my Dad take care of his apartments, I had a really high standard for the type of place I wanted to live. I got the Clovis paper and looked at the classified ads for the apartments. I carefully vetted the locations, fairly aware of the "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. I found an interesting location I was not familiar with. The address was 1000 Thomas Road. There were furnished units for about $100 a month. I thought that was a pretty good deal. However, the ad mentioned something about taking vouchers. I drove by the address and saw several apartment buildings on the site, but because it was a little bit out of the way, I had questions about it. I asked a co-worker if he knew whether those apartment were where the people who get welfare lived. He said, "Yeah, that's not a very good place to live unless you want to get stabbed." I never asked to see the apartments.

I got my classified search narrowed to a couple of apartments. One was an unfurnished studio for about $175 a month. The other was a furnished one-bedroom for $225 a month, but the electricity and water were paid. The second apartment was part of a complex called the "Muse Apartments." It was run by a property management company. I went over to the office and a woman drove me over to the apartment. It was in a really good location. It was about a little more than a mile from my work at the radio station. It was also across the street from the South Plains Mall and the Steed-Todd Funeral home. It would be easy access to work, shopping and death.

It was an upstairs unit and had a balcony. The living room was a nice size and had some decent furniture. There were a couple of sectional pieces, a coffee table and what I would wind up using as a TV stand. There was a double-sized bed and two dressers in the bedroom. There was a table and chairs in this small dining room and and stove and refrigerator in the kitchen. I was pretty much sold and decided I didn't need to see the other apartment. I went back to the office, paid the deposit and signed a six month lease. The woman gave me the keys and said I could move in the middle of next month.

I visited the apartment a couple of times before I moved in. I was able to explore a little more. One of the odd things I found was that there was this door in the kitchen and a door in the bedroom. I hadn't noticed them the first time I was in there. I opened the kitchen door and saw that it led to a stairway. The other bedroom door also connected to this stairway. At the bottom of the stairs was a door that went outside. It was like a secret passageway.

I figured out what was going on. The door at the bottom of the stairway was the original front door to the apartment. What was now the bedroom used to be the living room and the living room used to be the bedroom. This would explain why there was a walk-in closet in the living room, but no closet in the bedroom. But this would have made the original bedroom larger than the original living room. At some point, they built the balcony outside and made that the front door entrance. I thought that this might come in handy: If the cops came banging on the balcony door, I could slip out through the downstairs door and not get caught.

There were other oddities about the apartment. One was that I couldn't find the light switch to the dining room. There was a fixture in the ceiling, but I had no way of turning it on. I had to turn on the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom lights to get any kind of illumination in there. A few months after moving in, I found the light switch. It was right next to the refrigerator inside the kitchen. When I found the light switch, I also found a box of "little treasures," like in the movie "Amelie." It mostly consisted of stuff from the beach. I didn't even try to find out who it belonged to.

When I moved out two years later, I experienced "mover's remorse" for the first time. I had worked hard to clean the apartment to get my deposit back. When I was finished, I thought, "Oh, the apartment looks nice and clean now. I don't want to move." This thought has occurred to me every single time I'm about to leave a dwelling for the last time. This even happened with my most recent move in July of 2014. After Ms. Ogolon and I had cleaned up the apartment we lived in for more than ten years, I said, "Oh, the apartment looks so nice and large now. Let's move back in!" Ms. Ogolon laughed.

To this day, I still have dreams in which I am put in a position to move back into that apartment. I don't have dreams about any of my other old apartments. Sometimes, I will dream about being somewhere with a secret passageway. I know those are connected to the time I spent living there.

All and all, it was a very good first apartment and set the standard for my taste in residences for the next 20 years.

Did I ever get sick!/Getting yelled out on stage

One thing that has remained constant all throughout my life is that I almost never get sick. I may develop a few sniffles here and there, but I've usually been able to go to school and work without any problem. When I was in the fourth grade, I came down with Scarletina and had to stay home from school for two days. When I was a junior in high school, I was really worn out from all the extracurricular activities I was involved in and simply needed a day off to rest. These were the only three full days of grade school I missed due to not feeling well.

I was working my regular overnight shift at the station. The first couple of hours went really well. I had given away concert tickets and had recorded the conversation with the winner. I sounded just fine. Then all of a sudden, I felt something just come over me and I was very cold and tired. I struggled to keep warm and didn't feel like talking on the air. I was doing everything I could to stay awake and keep the station on the air. I'm guessing I had the flu.

It didn't help that the morning guys decided to come in a half hour late. I was completely miserable. On top of that, I had to sleep on the floor. After I got home, I spent the rest of the day in bed. A few hours before, I felt like I was going to have another rough night, so I scrambled to see if anyone could fill in for me. We had just hired this new girl who was a student at ENMU. I asked her, but she said she didn't have a ride up to the station. I told her I would drive her up there and drive her back. I would sleep at the station and she just had to work the shift. Fortunately, I only had to do that once. I'd gotten the worst part out of my system and could work after that. However, I didn't have a voice.

So for the next week, I just played music on the station and never talked. I had actually lost my voice for that time. This also caused a problem at rehearsals for "Anything Goes." When I got sick and it affects my voice, I can't project on the stage. Attempts to speak louder make the pitch in my voice go up so that I'm just barely squeaking. One nice thing was that I got to lip-sync the production numbers, but it was noticeable anytime I had lines.

I shortly regained my voice, but it never felt quite the same after that. However, that was not the end of my troubles in the production. During the "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" number, I was supposed to bring in a platform that the actress playing Reno Sweeney would perform on. Every night, I rolled in the platform from off-stage and put it in place at the beginning of the number.

During one rehearsal, Dr. R stopped the number and said, "Fayd, that platform is in the wrong place."

"Well, that's where I always put it."

"That's not where it's supposed to go."

"I've been putting it in the same place every night."

"There are supposed to be spike marks on the stage."

"Well, there are spike marks."

"Then put it in the spike marks!"

"It IS in the spike marks."

"THEN WE HAVE TO CHANGE THE SPIKE MARKS BECAUSE THAT PLATFORM IS NOT WHERE I WANT IT!!!!!!!"

Backstage crew members IMMEDIATELY ran out on stage with masking tape. Dr. R told them where to put the platform and they spiked the new marks. I was rather taken aback by Dr. R yelling at me. I always thought he'd get on my case about my acting, not semantics. I put the platform in the right location after that.

The next night before rehearsal started, Dr. R talked about being on edge the closer that we got to performance. He said, "...and yesterday, I yelled at an actor for something that clearly was not his fault." It wasn't really an apology, but after four years, I knew what to expect from Dr. R.

But it felt a lot better than being sick.

The last college trip home for Thanksgiving

I had managed to go home for Thanksgiving every year I was in college. The strange thing in 1985 was that I would go home to Artesia on Wednesday night, but come back up to Portales Thanksgiving Day and remain there for the weekend.

The plan was for my brother Loyd (who had started his freshman year at West Texas State University near Amarillo, TX) to come by Portales with some friends he had attended high school with. They would pick me up and we would go to Grandma Ogolon's for lunch and then drive to Artesia. It should have been pretty simple.

For some reason, Loyd started acting like a crank that day. Right before they left WTSU in the morning, Loyd called me and told me to get Grandma to make fried chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy and corn for lunch. I told him that we were going to have a turkey dinner the next day and there was no way I was going to ask her to do that. We were just going to have sandwiches and that was it. He got mad that I wouldn't ask Grandma to make us some real food because he knew that she would do it if we asked.

It was supposed to take about an hour and a half for them to get to my dorm. Three hours later, I was still waiting for them. Finally, they came and knocked on my door. They said they had to stop and help a girl from Artesia because her car had broken down. (This was back in the day when we didn't all have cell phones.) We all went over to Grandma's house and ate lunch. Then we headed home.

An hour and a half later, we were a few miles outside Roswell. The sun was starting to set. At this point, Loyd said, "Hey! I want to stop and go down into the missle silo." There was an old abandoned missle silo just off the main highway. Loyd had gone down several times before. Getting there basically involved trespassing. I never wanted to go because I knew I would get into major trouble. I also knew that going would delay our getting to Artesia by at least two hours. I said, "No, Loyd. It's getting late. We need to get home." "I WANT TO GO INTO THE SILO! THAT'S THE WHOLE REASON I WANTED TO COME DOWN THIS WAY!" Loyd's friend re-iterated, "Loyd! It's getting dark! If we hadn't been delayed getting out of College Station, we probably could have done that. But it's too late now!"

The whole rest of the way home, Loyd griped about not getting to go to the silo. I'm glad we won that argument. I could have just seen us getting trapped in the dark and no way to get out. I also could have seen this as the one time the cops would have come out to do a security check and found us there. I never would have forgiven Loyd if that had happened.

The rest of the weekend was fairly uneventful. I really don't remember much of what happened, except that I had to work while everyone else was eating at Grandma's. I still got to eat leftovers after my shift was done.

There's been an interesting development in the last few months. That missle silo was put on the market in December and had a buyer in the closing stages in January. The guy who originally owned it died. They were asking $295,000 for it. But I'll bet whoever buys it is still going to have a problem with trespassers.

A non-spectacular senior year in college

My senior year in college was not as terrible as my senior year in high school. But there really wasn't anything special that happened that year. At least, nothing worth writing about (that I haven't already done). I guess I was so busy concentrating on finishing all my requirements for graduation and working that I wound up spending a lot of time by myself. I didn't have any roommates, so it was almost like self-imposed solitary confinement for nine months.

At the beginning of the school year, I had a lot of doubts about what I was going to be able to do once I finished. There was one thing I knew: I was NOT going to go to graduate school. I figured that 16 straight years of education were more than enough for me. I'd had it with assignments and deadlines and worrying about whether or not I did something to wreck my GPA. Of course, I would go out into the real world finding out that there is no end to the assignments and deadlines, and if you fail, you could lose your job.

At the time, I couldn't see myself working full-time at the station. It seemed like anytime a slot became available, I was the last person to find out about it and they had already filled the position by the time I knew. So it came as a relief when I got a full-time position early in the Spring 1986 semester. That meant I didn't need to worry about what was going to happen after graduation. But it did mean that I had to worry about working overnights and attending school. If I hadn't dropped most of my classes, I never would have survived that semester.

I was lucky I got to stay in my room in the honors dorm at Curry Hall. The rooms were only supposed to be for full-time students, but they let me slide since it was my final semester. I don't think I could have put up having to live in a regular dorm with a roommate. (I did not need a college roommate #9.)

I will go into detail here about how I dodged a bullet by deciding to move into the honors dorm. I had lived at Lincoln Hall the previous three years. If there was one problem that characterized living there, it was that the building would run out of hot water by 7am. If you tried to take a shower between then and 10am, you would have to hop around in the ice cold water. It took that long for the water to stick around in the heater's reservoir to get warmed up. This was also a problem at Bernalillo Hall, which was the girls' dorm that consisted of the same design as Lincoln.

At Eddy Hall, which was across the street from Lincoln, there was no problem with hot water. They never ran out. Of course, this had to do with the fact that there were fewer residents there. However, the powers that be decided it would be a good idea to connect Lincoln and Bernalillo to Eddy's hot water tank. This was a construction project that continued through the Fall 1984 and Spring 1985 semesters.

When the Fall 1985 semester began, the project appeared to be a success and everyone had hot water anytime they wanted to take a shower. A few weeks later, those living on the 7th floor realized they weren't getting any hot water. Someone discovered that the 6th floor still had hot water coming to them. Everyone from the 7th floor went down to the 6th to take showers. Not long after that, the 6th floor stopped getting hot water, so everyone started going down to the 5th floor. This continued to the point in which there was almost no hot water ever for either Lincoln, Bernalillo or Eddy. But I always had hot water at Curry. That was probably the best choice I ever made in all four years of attending ENMU.

One of the interesting things about that final semester was Spring Break. It was the first time I stayed at college for just about the entire week. I remember going home the weekend before it started. I found out what my life was going to be like once I was on my own outside of college. Basically, all I did was sleep ALL DAY LONG! I would wake up a couple of times to eat and then go to work the overnight shift. I'd come back home and start the whole process over again. I do remember getting out of the dorm and seeing "The Color Purple" and renting "Prizzi's Honor" on VHS. I hoped that one day soon, I would be able to get out of the overnight shift because I found just that one week tough to handle.

So I really just have a few decent stories that I'll write about in the following posts. After that, I'll get into my adult life following college and my experience working at KZZO-FM. The rest of my life should go pretty rapidly after that. At least, that's the way it felt.

Another of life's quiet moments

Sometimes, you can be just walking around and notice something that almost hits you right in the face.



Ms. Ogolon would not let me bring this home and keep it as a pet.

Mistop #6: Biz

(What's a Mistop? Click here!)

Biz is very unique for a Mistop as she is the only woman I retroactively believe that I could have started something with. I didn't want to be with her at the time that I could have dated her, but I now realize what a mistake that might have been. But first, I want to make perfectly clear that this is not about "the one who got away." This is about "lowering my standards so I could've had at least one girlfriend during college."

I first met Biz when I was a senior in high school. I would eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken on a frequent basis. I enjoyed going there because there was this really cute girl who worked behind the counter. She appeared to be about my age, but I never saw her at school before. She always smiled at me when I came in. However, she wasn't always the one waiting on me and I would typically get Biz instead, a situation I didn't like very much. She was not the reason I went there to eat.

I honestly did not find Biz attractive. She kind of looked like Shelley Duvall with freckles.* But of course, she was working with a REALLY CUTE girl, so trying to find something to like about her would have been a chore. She also didn't appear to have much of a personality and clearly didn't enjoy working at KFC.

During the summer of 1982, I was eating at Pizza Hut in the middle of the afternoon. I saw Biz there eating lunch with someone else. I recognized the other person as the really cute girl from KFC, but she looked very different. This was the first time I'd seen her with her hair down (not wearing a KFC cap). She had a child with her. OH! THAT'S WHY I NEVER SAW HER AT SCHOOL! (A side note: It's too bad they didn't wait 15 years to eat out. Otherwise, their meal at Pizza Hut would have been free.)

At the beginning of the Fall 1984 semester at Eastern New Mexico University, I saw Biz in the lobby of the Campus Union Building. I remembered her from KFC and assumed (correctly) that she was starting her freshman year there.

During the summer of 1985, she got involved in the Theatre Department, working on the backstage crew for "Carnival." This was when we really got to know each other. She found out I was from Artesia. She told me she was from Lake Arthur, a small town about ten miles north of Artesia. She had finished high school before I did. (At the time, I assumed she had graduated the year before me, but I just found out she's almost three years older than me.) I told her I remembered she used to work at KFC, but she didn't recall me at all. I never mentioned the really cute girl she used to work with.

One evening, I had arrived at the Theatre to get ready for one of the final dress rehearsals. I was sitting on the inside stairs next to the make-up rooms and talking with someone. Biz came in with one of the other actors. The person I was talking to started talking to the other actor. I was not looking directly at them, but I could feel Biz place her hand on the top of my head. In that instant, I realized that she had a crush on me.

I tried not to think too much about it. I had to get ready for the rehearsal. On opening night, she gave me a big "Hi!" when she saw me. Because I was doing so much for the show, changing costumes and running the sound board, I didn't really see much of Biz during the performance.

After opening night was over, I got out of my costume and went back to the dorm. Biz was sitting on top of the front desk, talking to two other students (who were not in the Theatre Department). She saw me and excitedly said, "Hi, Fayd! Congratulations!" She stuck out her hand so I could shake it. I knew she really just wanted physical contact with me, so I went ahead and shook her hand. She said, "Oh, we're going to go to the Sands Motel Restaurant! Do you want to come?" I said, "Sure." She slid off the desk, and motioned for the other two students to follow us. She then took me by the hand and we started walking out the door.

At this point, I didn't know what was happening. Was this something I wanted to do? Did I need to put a stop to it or to should I see how far it I would let it go? Should I yank my hand away so as to not give her the wrong impression? Would that be rude? I actually never had to get answers to these questions. She stopped holding my hand when she went to push the front door open.

We walked across the street to the restaurant. There were several other cast members there. We all hung out for awhile. Biz didn't try to hold my hand again. She never made any more overtures after that night. I guess she either stopped having a crush or she figured I wasn't going to ask her out and stopped putting any more effort into it.

We didn't see much of each other after the Fall 1985 semester started. I would see her at the Theatre from time to time, but that was it. We never talked and she never took part in another production.

So when I look back at my experience with Biz, there's a part of me that wouldn't have minded a relationship with her. Growing up as a teenager, I couldn't stand it when my Mom would say about a girl, "There's nothing wrong with her!" I have to say that describes Biz. There really was nothing wrong with her that should have prevented me from trying to find out if we were meant for each other.

But I did have a few issues. While the current version of me would describe her as "quirky cute," she was not "smart quirky cute." This was me being really stubborn about my standards. I never saw Biz as someone who would sweep me off my feet with her intellect. I had a hard time imagining me with the girl I knew from KFC and I didn't like that I might get involved with someone who grew up just ten miles away from me. It also freaked me out that she was older than me, but was two years behind me in college. That was just weird. However, seeing as how no one else came along, it shouldn't have been a big deal to explore the possibility of a relationship at that time.

And even though I now would have liked for us to become romantically involved, I'm actually glad we didn't. I probably would have figured that this was going to be the best that I could do and latch onto her. We would have gotten married and had at least one child (even though my Mom probably wouldn't have liked her). As we all know, I simply was not mature enough in my early 20s to be a husband and father. Bad things would have happened and we likely would have been hurt in the process.

So, what has happened to her? I'd actually been trying to locate her the last few years on the Internet. Right before I started writing this post, I located her. From what I've gathered, she lives in Albuquerque now and has a different last name. Her Facebook profile features a photo of a girl (not Biz) holding a dog, but there doesn't appear to have been any activity since January of 2010. I know she never graduated from ENMU. That's all the actual information I could find about her.

In my investigation, I found her possibly connected to some guy with the same unusual last name as the one I found. This guy lives in Albuquerque and works at Sandia Labs. He graduated from ENMU in 1989, three years after me. This means that we were in college together, but I don't remember ever having met him. It also means that he and Biz would have been at ENMU at the same time. He got his degree in Business. I really didn't hang out with the Business students much. Judging from his Facebook profile, he appears kind of geeky and has been involved with the Society of Creative Anachronism. The latest ENMU Alumni Directory came out about a month ago. Alumni are able to list their spouses and children. He has two children listed, but no spouse.

I did come across the the Facebook profiles of her daughters. One of them had a photo of her with Biz from a few years ago. She looked the same, but was obviously older. She was still thin. I do get this feeling I will run into her again some day. I'll likely never mention this post, but it would be interesting if she accidentally came across it.

* (I would like to point out that during that period of time in high school, I DID find Shelley Duvall attractive. I didn't figure out the similarity in the features until I started writing this article. If I had made that connection at the time, my reaction to Biz' appearance would have been less adverse. However, as I point out in the very next sentence, I was blinded by the cuteness of the other girl and kind of turned off by Biz' attitude. If the cute girl wasn't there and Biz was the one to light up when she saw me, I probably would have liked her much earlier.)

College Roommate #8: Chid/Animals on Stage

Chid was my final college roommate at Eastern New Mexico University. We shared the residence at De Baca Hall during the Summer 1985 school session. I was first aware of him during my freshman year when he did work-study in the Theatre office. Even though he worked in the department, he was not a Theatre student.

We actually got along pretty well, but we were not friends outside the room. I actually had friends come to the room now and again and he got along well with them, too. We had more conversations together than I did with Skad.

He was about my size. He had black hair and wore glasses. He also had a thin mustache. Sadly, I don't remember his last name or where he was from. Some of the unusual things about him were that he would buy those music magazines that public pop song lyrics. Then he would write the name of the album they came from in the magazine. He also listened to the rival radio station instead of the one I worked at. He didn't do this to make me mad. He just preferred listening to it.

That's really all I recall about him. I don't want this article to end after four paragraphs, so I'm going to write about a completely different subject related to the summer session:

A lot of actors will tell stories about their experiences working with live animals. I'm not that much different. The only thing that I can guarantee about my stories is that none of the animals pooped on stage.

The first was during my sophomore year. I portrayed one of the mechanicals who perform the play within a play at the end. One of the other actors brings his dog with him. We had this little terrier mutt named McHeaver. It was Scod's dog. (Admittedly, McHeaver pooped in the Theatre, but it was in the seating area and before a rehearsal.)

The first three perfomances went off without a hitch. MacHeaver simply stood on stage and kept quiet. But on the final performance, he apparently decided he wanted a bigger part in the show. He started barking sporadically at first. A little bit later, he started punctuating the end of every spoken line with a bark. So, when Nick Bottom (played by Toilethead) says his last line, "Die! (pause) Die! (pause) Die," MacHeaver barked during each pause.

Fortunately, I was behind the set when this was going on. One of the other mechanicals was with me. (He was one of my Broadcasting professors.) We started snickering when MacHeaver began barking. As it continued, we were doing everything we could to stifle our laughter. We were both doubled up and had tears coming out of our eyes. When the play within the play was finished, someone brought MacHeaver back to us. The other guy quickly rushed the dog off stage left.

If it was hard for us to contain our laughter, it was even more difficult for everyone on stage to keep a straight face while this was going on. Some of the members of the entourage simply smiled through the scene. And I think everybody enjoyed seeing Toilethead get upstaged by a dog.

But really, while this was all going on and I was laughing, I was wondering if the audience could tell something was wrong or if they thought we had trained the dog to bark at those intervals. Certainly, anyone who had seen the prior performances knew right away that wasn't part of the show. Anyone who came in for the first time got more than they bargained for.

All six of us mechanicals performed the play at the Renaissance Festival during the Spring of 1984. We had a different dog that appeared to be a greyhound mix. He didn't act up. It almost wasn't as much fun.

In the Summer of 1985, I played a character named Dr. Glass in our production of "Carnival." The role was that of a veterinarian who carried a couple of animals around with him. One was a hen and the other was a rabbit. The script called for me to pull them out of my pockets. However, we couldn't get the pockets big enough in my jacket to fit the animals inside without suffocating them. I had to carry them on stage in my arms. That really wrecked the joke, but people still got a kick out of it.

We had the same rabbit throughout all the performances. He never game me much trouble. He was very cute and fluffy and everybody liked to pet him. However, we had to use different hens every week. The first hen was very easy to handle. She didn't put up any fight when I had to pick her up. The next week, we got this huge black chicken that looked like a rooster. We were assured it was a female, but we all had our doubts. She was tough to keep under control and kept trying to eat the rabbit when we were on stage.

The third hen was exactly like the first hen, on the outside. However, it would squawk for about a minute after I picked her up. The solution was to keep her cage in the Theatre basement. A few minutes before I went on stage, I had to go down and put my hands on her. I then had to let her get all the squawking out of her system before going back upstairs. She didn't cause any problems while on stage. I was able to get the animals back in their cages and continue with the show.

Since my stage experience outside of college was very limited, I never got to work with animals again.

I develop a neurosis

I previously wrote about the Eastern New Mexico University Theatre Department's Technical Director Mr. H. I started out my freshman year with a good rapport with him, but that slowly disintegrated over the course of my entire four years in college. This actually damaged me in one respect.

As I mentioned before, Mr. H started his position at ENMU the same year I was a freshman. He came on the heels of the previous Technical Director, who was very popular with the students. I'd often hear stories about how the students considered him one of them and reacted to him more as a friend than as a professor. If Dr. R was the department's father figure and Dr. W was the mother figure, the old technical director was like the cool older brother that everyone wanted to be friends with. Mr. H came across like the cranky uncle who didn't like spending much time at family gatherings.

The old tech director didn't have much of a life outside his job. He spent a lot of time working on the productions. Supposedly, minor details didn't get completed until right before the first performance. However, the older students claimed that everything got done when they needed to be done. Mr. H had a wife and two children. His objective was the get the set and props completed as soon as possible, so he would have more time to spend with his family.

The first thing Mr. H did was get rid of all the hardwood flats for the sets. To replace them, he built canvas flats. And this was where the complaints from the upperclassmen started. They claimed that the hardwood flats made for sturdy sets. If you pounded the wall, it would stay right in place. They also said that while the old tech director was a true artist, Mr. H was in such a hurry to get things done, nothing looked good on stage.

But the things that they didn't talk about was that while the old tech director strived for perfection, that meant that students in the Rehearsal and Production class were working two hours a day on sets leading up to the performances. With Mr. H in charge, it took three weeks to get everything done and students didn't have to come in any more after that. If there was work to be done, it was provided by those on work study.

I stood up for Mr. H on a number of occasions. Mainly, I did it because what he did was light years of what we did in high school. On the hardwood flat issue, I countered that we almost never needed to pound our fists up against the sets. It wasn't like we were ever going to do "Fool for Love." And if we did need to go to extremes like that, I'm certain Mr. H would have come up with a re-inforced section of the flat to knock around. However, no one ever listened to me.

Our teacher-student relationship flourished to the point that he cast me in the production of "Deathtrap" that he directed during my sophomore year. But the year after that, things started changing. Mr H became a lot more volatile. When I was the Assistant Director, Stage Manager and Sound Designer for "The Importance of Being Earnest" my junior year, we got into a couple of large public arguments. Once, he yelled at me for allowing a crew member to leave early during rehearsal. However, he later apologized when the student who left reminded him that she had asked his permission first. Another time, when the director was going through notes following rehearsal, we yelled at each other over the sound cues. We were basically arguing whether the person running the audio had the ability to do her job. I defended her, but Mr. H kept yelling at me that he wanted someone else in the sound booth. I didn't get an apology on that, but the crew member stayed.

But the worst came the night we were going to strike the set after the final performance. I had to work at the radio station at midnight. Since the performance would be over at 10pm, I asked if I could leave at 11pm so I could get about 30 minutes of sleep before I went on the air. Mr. H replied, "That's b***s***!" Since I had a grade riding on this, I had no choice but to stay until the very last moment in which I could make it to my job on time. For the next hour and a half, Mr. H kept calling for me every five minutes to make sure I hadn't left yet. He finally let me go at 11:30pm. I was exhausted.

To keep myself awake, I would walk around the radio station while songs were playing. I took my shoes and socks off so the cold floor on my bare feet would help keep me alert. However, at one point, I went into the Program Director's office and sat down on the couch. The next thing I knew, I heard the phone ring. It was a listener, who told me the song had ended. I had fallen asleep! I ran back into the control room. The record that was playing had the needle in the infinte groove at the end. I had my next song ready to go on cart, so I was able to get back on the air. If I had fallen asleep in the control room chair, I never would have heard the phone ring.

It wasn't a big deal. I was probably asleep for only a minute and a half. The Program Director never found out about it. I never got yelled at. However, that incident affected me in a pretty severe way. As the title of this article suggests, I had a full-blown neurosis. After that night, any time I slept on the couch at the station after a shift or between shifts, I would wake up every single time and think that I had fallen asleep on the air. I would always experience a moment of panic, thinking that would be the time the Program Director heard it and would fire me for it. It usually took about ten seconds for me to come to my senses. This even happened after we moved the station to a new location. Once, I woke up and ran out of the office to the control room. The weekday morning crew was there and they were on the air. One of them said, "Uh oh! Fayd's awake!" The other said, "Go back to bed, Fayd!" I was really shook up by that.

The neurosis stayed with me through the end of college. I never sought help for it. I couldn't afford it. All I could do was deal with the anxiety I experienced for a few seconds after waking up. I usually figured out what was going on pretty soon enough. Once I had my apartment and could sleep in my own bed, I never had that happen again.

As for Mr. H, he wasn't around for the summer of 1985. A Technical Director from another college came and worked for us during the summer. While he was not as good an artist as Mr. H (who was not as good as his predecessor), he was a lot easier to get along with and help to create a stress-free environment. I was able to use that summer to finish up my R&P requirements for my degree so I wouldn't have to do that any more during my senior year.

When Mr. H came back, things just got worse. He supposedly became a bit of an alcoholic by this time, which had probably been building up over the course of the previous year. While I never saw this myself, I guess the other students had seen him acting out and he was frequently being made fun of because of it. I was called upon by the Theatre fraternity to ask him a favor. They chose me because I was "closest" to him. (Chud was not a member of the fraternity at the time.) He said he would do the favor. I thanked him and turned around to leave. While I was walking away, he said, "Oh, yeah! Make sure you get a picture of me drinking alcohol so I'll get into trouble!" I stopped, but I did not turn around. That moment, I felt the last of my admiration for him flow away.

After that, I never took part in any more set strikes. I acted like a total diva my senior year and left as soon as I got out of my costume and make up. Even though I was required as a Theatre major to help out after the final performance, there wasn't a darn thing Mr. H, Dr. R or Dr. W could do about it. The funny thing is that I would see other actors rushing out the back door. That was the kind of atmosphere that Mr. H had created.

Mr. H did not come back to ENMU the next year. He still kept in contact with Chud. Once Chud told him I was coming over and Mr. H asked him to tell me hi. Chud says that sometimes, the phone calls can get a little intense, like one time when Mr. H said that Chud owed him. Chud didn't really feel like he owed him anything.

He and his wife live in Bloomington, IN. I guess he was working at the University of Indiana for awhile. I think he's retired now. There was something on the Internet about him working on a documentary about the military forces in Vietnam putting on theatrical productions featuring soldiers to entertain the troops, which he was a part.

When I turned 36, I reminded Chud and Elad that we were the same age that Mr H was when we first met him. However, so much time has passed since then that his children are now older than that. Time is something you completely lose track of if you're not thinking about it, but it can't heal all the wounds.

The only time(s) I've ever hit a woman

I want to be clear about this: I've only ever hit a woman in a theatrical setting, but there was more to it than that, as I will explain.

I have to backtrack my life in the blog a few months to the beginning of the Fall 1984 semester. One of my fellow Theatre students who came in with me during freshman year asked me to be in her Beginning Directing project. She was supposed to have done it during the Spring semester, but she had been going through a lot of drama at the time and somehow managed to get Dr. R to give her a grade and she would present the final project the next year. She was one of the few people who asked me to be in her directing projects.

She had asked this freshman girl named Ald to be the other person in the scene with me. I was first aware of Ald because she had gotten cast in the Theatre Department's production of "Charley's Aunt." Pretty soon, Kird (who was also in the cast) started dating her, even though he was living with another girl at the time.

The first time I actually met Ald was when we had our first rehearsal for the scene. I cannot remember what play the scene was from, but it required me to slap the other character. Every time we rehearsed it, I would do a "stage slap," in which I would pretend to hit her, but actually make no contact. When done correctly, it looks like a slap to the audience and is pretty dramatic, even without the actual sound of a hand smacking someone's cheek. As we continued to rehearse, this was the way I performed the slap.

One day, Kird told me about how Ald was complaining about my acting ability. He said the crux of it was that I wasn't really slapping her. I got ticked off about this. I was a junior and I didn't need a freshman getting on my case about my acting. (The truth of the matter was that she was actually a good actress and I was delusional about my own talents.) I did not want to become one of those kinds of actors who physicalize everything on stage. I preferred the tried and true methods of proper stage combat in which no one really gets injured, but it looks like it hurts.

I knew that I would actually connect on the slap during the next rehearsal. A funny thing happened, though. The director asked us to mouth the lines without actually saying anything. I was actually impressed by that suggestion. We mimed through the scene and then we come up to the slap. I connected and after we had been all silent, it was the loudest noise that had been made in five minutes. It shocked the heck out of her! I immediately broke character and asked her if she was okay. She was and there was no bruising.

Every time we rehearsed the scene after that and during the performance for Dr. R, Ald always did something to deflect the slap. She would put her hand up or move her head to reduce the force of the blow. It really deflated the intensity of the performance. I wonder if she ever complained about another actor after that.

Ald did not return to ENMU the next semester. I did find out what happened to her after that. She finished up her education at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She got married to this guy who went to her high school. He had graduated the year before her. After that, she performed as a Uzbek/Persian/Eastern Classical and Folk dancer and also worked as an archaeologist for a few years. She later became a high school history teacher in Anthony, NM and eventually moved to Ruidoso, NM. Her husband is also a teacher. They never had any children.

As for the director, I think I found her, but the photos on Facebook only sorta kinda look like her. However, I'm pretty certain it's her. She never graduated from ENMU, but went on to Wayland Baptist University. She majored in Education and now lives in Clovis, NM. It doesn't say, but I assume she's teaching. She got married, but I can't tell if she had any kids.

I have never struck another woman since, in either the theatrical or the real world.