Radio is therapeutic. Not so much for the listeners (who can't be helped) but for the people on it. I suffered postdivorce trauma, postadolescent miasma, and turning forty on the air, all at the expense of my listeners, a cherished radio tradition. Many called and said they hoped I'd never get well. I strongly recommend radio therapy, particularly if you can get yourself a call-in show. It makes you feel better just knowing how many people out ther are as bad off or worse.

I never had legitimate training for the career, not that there is any. In high school I won a guest DJ contest and was told by the real jock the secret was to not talk so much -- good advice for him. I had actually forgotten about radio entirely until I stumbled onto it by volunteering at a local radio station (listener-sponsored WORT, home of the Wortniks), during my annual Christmas depression. (Years later I would meet my second wife on Christmas and finally have a basis for the feeling, actually a premonition.) My big break was a couple of years' broadcasting from Dolly's Fine Food in Madison (it was food; how fine depended on a lot on what you, the eater, brought to it), annoying people while they ate. It was like being home again.

Although I brought those skills and more acquired while teaching (speaking to an imaginary audience) and driving a cab (using a mike while groping for something) to public radio, I was not immediately taken to the bosom and nursed by the highbrows in it, although I'll hold my expanse of forehead to any in the business. (You can't talk to people who have classical music as their mission, though, especially if you've only had one semester of music appreciate and a Night on Bald Mountain is not playing). My only commercial experience was two weekend overnights on a local rock station (where a young woman, at two in the morning, requested "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC for her newborn neice), and a career that ran for the worst part of a year at WGN in Chicago, where, as an experiement, I was paired with a woman who was the incarnation of a mental block.

I enjoy what I do while I'm doing it, although afterward I have my doubts, along with everybody else, as well as the guilt generated from continually having to explain what I do the rest of the week, the same question people wouldn't dream of asking their priest, rabbi, or pastor. (I know, because I play pinochle with them.) Radio brought me out of myself, and I'll be damned if I can stuff it back in. Having a live audience is a great way to meet people, since you generally never see them again, the exception being the unfortunate woman in the audience I married, a true violation of the Broadcasting Code of Ethics. People are generally quite receptive and absolutely forthcoming in letting me know that I'm all wrong -- I'm too short, I'm too tall, I'm not that ugly, or I've got "a face made for radio" (everyone seems to think they made that one up), I'm really not all that bald, etc., etc. Just what someone who obviously craves reassurance or he wouldn't be in the business wants to hear. The medium is an inexact science; if I tell people I'm six four and blond, that may not be literally true, but maybe it is in a more important sense. Maybe there's a Schwartzenegger buried deep inside of me, and a Maria Shriver waiting at home. You don't know. So turn me in the Accuracy in Media.

Of course, people do think they know you, and I'm starting ot think maybe they're right. When you're spewing out the cartridges of your life, you don't really expect people to pocket the shell casings, but they do. It seems as if I must have revealed everything on air except my wife's hair color, which she forbids me to do. Otherwise, she doesn't mind what I say about her on radio nearly as much as the very same things said in the friendly confines. So, if I'm feeling witty at her expense, I try to do it through a door. (But no longer the front one. She can lock that.) Generally, that's not the problem people think it must be; she likes being mythological, and I'd prefer her to be. Besides, Conseuela is not merely my wife, she is every woman I have never known, as I tried to explain to the storm door the other day.

Well, I'll have to wait until Saturday.