As much as I had fantasized about working for a radio station, even I had to admit that local radio wasn’t glamorous—I remember bad wood paneling and a strip mall location that would have been the perfect setting for an axe murder. The interior looked like a barely finished attic (ah, just like home). The walls were covered in cork bulletin boards with random postings of events around Long Island. And it had the particular smell that all local radio stations have—a little musty, a little electrical. The equipment was set up on big rolling carts and looked like something out of a cheap science fiction movie, with massive knobs and toggle switches. The stylus for the turntable was as big as the leg of a couch. I remember being transfixed by the skill with which the DJ could turn down the volume so you couldn’t hear the scratching while he cued up the next record. It was like magic to me.
I had my own little cubicle, and I worked under the news director writing public service announcements. At least at the start, I kept my mouth shut. I was terrified of looking stupid. I pictured asking my boss a question, and him realizing: Oh my God, I hired a moron. So I kept my lips sealed, my eyes and ears wide open, and I soaked up as much knowledge as I could.
As scared as I was to make a mistake, the guys on staff—all of them with faces made for radio—were an incredibly nice bunch of misfits. They were either unkempt, or overweight, or gave new meaning to the word hairy. In some cases they were all of the above. And I fit right in by being just as much of a misfit in my own way. From them I learned that radio stations are ready-made families. But unlike in my own family, there was no odd man out, because everyone was odd. What an amazing feeling that was, to be instantly and thoroughly accepted. Radio was the perfect environment for an outcast like me (it still is).
I knew that being on the radio wasn’t the most typical aspiration for a high school girl, but I was always good at keeping up with all the activities that a high school girl was supposed to do—like cheerleading—so I never gave my parents or classmates a reason to think that I was such a freak of nature. I was really social and I played along with expectations, but while my girlfriends were all putting a lot of energy into their boyfriends and who they were dating, I couldn’t have cared less about getting a boyfriend. They were happily ensconced in high school and wondering who would be voted prom queen, but I was already set to fly the coop.
I was living two separate lives—my typical high school life, and my radio life. And this compartmentalizing of personal life and career aspirations would be a pattern that I would repeat for years. It was only much later in my life that I learned that it’s possible to integrate both sides of yourself into one healthy personality. Back then I thought I had to put 100 percent of myself into radio if I was going to succeed in achieving my dream.
Maintaining my two separate lives was exhausting. It’s impossible to be fully present in any part of your life when you’re split in two, so I was constantly jerking back and forth between my two worlds. I wore my popular high school girl costume when I was at school, and then I put on my career costume when I went to the radio station. And I danced as fast I could between both worlds, always a frenzy of activity and striving. I joke now that if they’d had that show So You Think You Can Dance back then, I might not have won for talent, but I definitely would have gotten a prize for sheer manic energy.
My first on-air assignment for WLIR was making a public service announcement geared at high schoolers. My bit wasn’t long, it wasn’t even interesting, but my voice was on the radio, and that meant that people were listening to me. The power! I still have the recording, so trust that I am not exaggerating when I say that I sounded like Long Island Lolita Amy Fisher (and that’s never a good thing). Here’s an excerpt, phonetically rendered so you can get the full humorous impact:
Woodjoo like something that is priceless, at no cawst ta you? Then register to vote during ya high school votah registration droive in Mahch. Thell be tables set up. Look fa dem.
Listening to it now, I especially love the way I overpronounced certain words, such as “register.” I was trying so hard to sound like a professional. Then the strain obviously became too much for me, and by the end of my spiel I was full on Long Island Lolita again.
Okay, so it wasn’t a great start, but it was a start. I’d lost my radio virginity. I wasn’t even legal to drink yet, and my high school yearbook ambition had already come true.
When I was a kid growing up in Long Island, the best food came in a wrapper. Why cook from scratch when you could have Yankee Doodles cold from the fridge, or Fritos from a bag? And how about the true nirvana of all convenience foods, slice-and-bake cookies from a tube? Truth be told, I still love them, but here’s my from-scratch version of the original. They give you a nice flashback to childhood, but they’re so much more delicious than the ones you remember.
P.S., when baking cookies, don’t let them brown too much. My cookie mantra is: when in doubt, pull out (after all, have you ever heard anyone complain about an underdone chocolate chip cookie?). Then, once the cookies are set (about a minute after you remove them from the oven), transfer them to a baking rack to finish cooling.
SLICE-AND-BAKE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1¼ cups packed light brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
Parchment paper for rolling up the dough
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Using an electric mixer, cream together softened butter and sugars. Scrape down sides of bowl. Mix in eggs and vanilla until incorporated. In a small bowl, stir together flour and baking soda, then blend into butter mixture. Fold in chocolate chips.
Divide dough into two batches. Tear off a long sheet (about 18 inches or so) of parchment paper and place sideways on the counter. Now scoop one half of the dough onto the paper about one-third from the bottom of the sheet and use your hands to form the dough into a rough log. Using the top (long side) of the paper, fold the paper over the dough and gently push while squeezing (with your palm) to form a smooth log. Keep squeezing until the dough is 3 inches in diameter and 12 inches long (feel free to let your imagination run wild while doing this—it keeps things interesting). Square off the edges by pushing in the ends with your palms. Now do the same with the other half of the dough.
Chill both logs in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes, or until the dough is firm and sliceable.
When firm, take sharp knife and cut ¼-inch slices. Because these don’t have all the lovely artificial ingredients that help to hold together the store-bought slice-and-bake cookies, you might find that these crumble a bit around the edges as you slice them. If they do, don’t sweat it. Just smush them back together again. Once they’re baked, I promise you: no one will care. As you slice, space the rounds 2 inches apart on the parchment-lined cookie sheets.
Bake 12 to 15 minutes or until cookies are golden at the edges.
Makes around 48 cookies.
Note: If you don’t want to make both logs at once, you can always freeze one for using later. There’s nothing like a warm chocolate chip cookie, so it’s great to have a log of these handy when the craving hits. Just slice off as much as you want and store the rest.
CHAPTER 2
CONFESSIONS OF A TYPE A VIRGIN
Once I started my internship at WLIR, I became as single-minded as that female GPS voice that won’t let you even think about taking a different route. I had a few months of high school left, but I was just biding my time until graduation. Nothing could distract me from my goal of a career in radio. You could try to turn me in a different direction, but I’d always find my way back again.
I was so career obsessed that I wasn’t even all that excited about my high school prom, as perhaps you can tell from the hap
hazard outfit I chose for the occasion. I don’t recall putting even the slightest thought into what I’d be wearing, and, yeah, it shows.
The guy I went with was perfectly nice, but this was not a love match, and that was exactly the way I wanted it. In fact, I asked him out because we were friends—just friends. Here I was, seventeen years old, my last year of high school, and I should have been all gooey-eyed and excited about the prom, the BIG NIGHT (a.k.a. the occasion upon which you lose your virginity to your high school boyfriend). But that wasn’t on my agenda. I just wanted to go to the damn prom, get it over with, graduate, and then move on.
I was ready to move past the whole world that I’d been living in but that felt so disconnected from me as a person. I wasn’t cut out for spending weekends at the mall or the country club. I couldn’t really relate to the kids who got a Mercedes-Benz for a birthday gift, and whose parents bragged about which Ivy League school they were going to. I had never aspired to any of that.
I definitely wasn’t like the spoiled beautiful girls at school who seemed to sail through life on their good looks. I’d gotten the message from both my parents that my looks were not going to get me far in life. My father had even suggested that I consider getting a nose job. I was a teenager and I think we were sitting at the dinner table at the time. And my mother would take one look at me and just roll her eyes. Recalling it now, I can’t blame her, because it must be incredibly frustrating to look at your daughter and know she’d be better off if she only took your advice. It was your typical mother-daughter adolescent battle, and I decided that if I couldn’t please her—and I couldn’t be her—then why even try? So I gave up and decided to focus on other things. I had below-sea-level self-esteem, but I didn’t know any different. I just plodded along, and I figured that my appearance wasn’t my strong suit. I certainly didn’t let it get me down or hold me back. I always did a good job of fitting in at school, and I had tons of friends that I still have today.
Still, all the while that I was smiling and nodding to the outside world, on the inside my career clock was ticking, and my bags were figuratively packed. I chose Hofstra for college not because it was close to home (no way), but because I already had a foot in the door in local radio. It was also close to the city, where all the best radio stations were—New York radio was the Emerald City at the end of my own personal yellow brick road. Another mark in Hofstra’s favor was that it had a campus radio station where I started working within minutes of arriving on campus.
While I was there, I was never really there. I never gave myself a chance to be goofy and aimless, to shop around for a major—or a boyfriend. I never just kicked back with friends and philosophized and expressed inane opinions that would embarrass me later or took crazy road trips (or acid trips). I was so focused on my goals that I treated everything I did like an item on my mental to-do list. And while some of the items were way more important than others, I was equally methodical about crossing each one off. This is what my typical list looked like:
1. Practice violin
2. Study for statistics midterm
3. Lose Amy Fisher accent
4. Return library books
5. Buy more Cup-a-Soup
6. Lose virginity
By far, the last item on the list was my biggest issue. I’d spent my last year of high school without the slightest concern for crossing that milestone. But now that I was in college, my intact hymen was getting just a little embarrassing. This was the free love ’70s after all, but if my actionless dorm room was any indication, it might as well have been the ’50s … the 1850s.
It was a lot easier to focus on the other items on my list, so I decided that I really needed to deal with my voice. No one on the radio sounded like me. The DJs I listened to—the ones I wanted to be—definitely didn’t mutilate their vowels the way I did. If I were starting out today, my thick Lon Gisland accent might have been an asset, but back then the ideal was to sound neutral. Since my career was the most important thing in the world to me, I decided that this self-improvement goal was much higher priority than losing my virginity. I could keep my sex life (or lack thereof) to myself, but there was no way I was going to get more airtime if I couldn’t tawk bettah. At the first opportunity I took a speech class, and I became the Henry Higgins to my own Eliza Doolittle. I spent hours and hours in the college listening lab. Instead of studying my French tapes like I should have for my intermediate French class, I snuck in my own on-air reels to listen to how I sounded, where my vowels and consonants went wrong, and how I could correct them.
The funny thing is that all the while I was trying to sound neutral, the person I really emulated was Barbara Walters. And who sounds more distinctive than her? I was really struck by her career. Number one, she was a famous woman in broadcast, which was still very much a man’s world. And number two, she was an interviewer who was just as famous as her subjects. That was my dream.
About a year after I started at Hofstra, I got my first paying job at a radio station, working for WBAB in Babylon, New York. I was eighteen years old, and I already felt like an adult. I’d never been your typical coed, but this was really the start of my life being all about work. I went to classes in the morning, then I worked at the radio station in the afternoon and evening. I had no social life to distract me. It never even occurred to me that I was missing out on campus parties and events. None of my high school friends had ended up at Hofstra with me, and with the exception of my roommate I had no other college friends who might have tried to lure me away from work for a few hours. I was always such a moving target—I’d never sit still long enough for anyone to be friendly with me. My closest friends (and they weren’t that close) were the people I worked with at the station and the musicians I met along the way. A pattern had officially been set in place: my work and my social life were one and the same.
If WLIR looked like the setting for an axe murder, then WBAB’s studio looked like the undiscovered location of a serial killing. It was really just a ranch house out on Route 109, with thick shag carpeting of an unidentifiable color. I shudder to think what one of those UV lights that they use at crime scenes would have turned up on those surfaces. If Dexter were the overnight DJ, he would have gone unnoticed.
WBAB consisted of two separate stations while I was there—the FM music station, and the AM Christian gospel station. In those days, the FCC required all stations to broadcast a certain amount of news at regular intervals throughout the day. It didn’t matter what your main programming was, you also had to have someone doing newscasts. And that someone was me—even for the Christian gospel station. But my job for the Christian station was a little different, because after I did my on-air newscast, I also had to read a Bible verse. There I was, a nice Jewish girl from Long Island (my pronunciation had already improved!) and I had my own “Jesus File.” At least that’s what I called it. Every broadcast, after I’d read the news, I’d pull a little card from the front of the file, and on it was my Bible reading for the day. I’ll never forget this choice passage from the New Testament:
He who believes in Jesus is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
I was such a hard worker, and such a believer in doing what your employer told you to do, that it never would have occurred to me to object. And that which does not kill you gives you a story to tell later.
That radio station specialized in some strange programming. My direct boss, Joel Martin, hosted a UFO show on Sunday nights. Listeners would call in from all over and they’d describe the Frisbee or whatever it was that had just sailed through their backyard and that they swore was an alien visitor. It was pretty odd, but it didn’t bother me at all. And I wasn’t even slightly perturbed that Joel was the news director and yet he engaged in serious conversations about paranormal activity. Joel was just one in a series of peculiar, awesome characters I worked with in radio. I’m pretty convinced that all the sort-of normal
people in broadcast—the ones with a little more caution about how they looked and sounded—went over to TV. The rest of us less-photogenic types stuck with radio. And as ever, that was fine by me.
NOW WE MUST GET back to the whole virginity thing. It was time to lose it—even I had to admit that. With the clock ticking, and determined not to enter my twenties a virgin, I went about the task of giving it up in my usual methodical way: step by step. The first issue was to identify who I should have sex with. I immediately decided on Barry, a guy I’d worked with at the college radio station. He was nice, and he liked me more than I liked him so I wasn’t worried about getting emotionally involved. I also had a feeling he would respect my privacy. He wasn’t a big talker, so he wouldn’t be looking for me to open up and tell him my life story. He was perfect on all counts.
The next issue was where to do it. My prison cell of a dorm room was the safest bet, since I wanted to be on home turf.
Finally, I needed to pick the background music: I settled on my favorite album at the time—Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale.
A different sort of girl might also have planned out what she was going to wear to the seduction of the century, but I was the same old Lisa I ever was, and changing my clothes really didn’t occur to me. God only knows what underwear I had on. I’m sure Eve’s fig leaf was silkier than whatever bloomers I was wearing. Not that it would have mattered to Barry—I really don’t think he was expecting expensive lingerie.
After planning out all the particulars, I didn’t waste any more time. After all, I had a to-do list to get back to. So the next time that Barry and I were in the campus pub, I turned to him and said, “Hey, wanna come up to my room?”
I’m sure his chin dropped a bit, but he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He dutifully followed me back to my eight-foot-by-eight-foot cell, and the seduction began in earnest.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 2