Good news, Mikemates. As
part of the station’s rehabbing from classical music to news, Mike is
returning, on Saturdays, 2 to 4 p.m., beginning November 3.
He’s a delectably nutty mélange
of pseudo-quiz show, world-class live jazz, and the feistiest, freshest
audience participation extant in American radio. Where does his chemistry come
from? He’s a 41-year-old professional failure (English teaching, cab driving,
commercial radio-izing). As he hops into the seventh-floor studios of the
University of Wisconsin Communications Building, carrying a satchel
sufficiently old and bedraggled to have been an M.D.’s carry-all from back when
medicos still made house calls, you could mistake him for a custodian.
Thin-lipped, elfin-eared,
bespecked, Feldman in the flesh (if I may use that misleading figure in one so
bloodless-looking) resembles nothing other than the IRS auditor you have
nightmares over—until he picks up a live mike and goes mad right there on the
non-set.
Mic-less, Michael is the
failure of his family—his elder Milwaukee siblings did what their accountant
father wanted them all to do: become doctors (two) and lawyers (two minus
Michael). In a great ritual burning, he torched his law school test results in
a mixing bowl, burning those too-tight britches behind him.
He came out of the U. of W.
in 1970 with an English / education major, then taught high school English in
Kenosha and later in Madison, remembering with scarcely concealed disgust the
illiteracies of themes “written in eyebrow pencil.”
He volunteered one
depressing Christmas at a local public radio station. Voila. A window pane of
opportunity.
Congenital schmoozer that
he is, before you could say “Stan Freberg” sideways, he was disc jockeying,
then hosting—so well that he Chicago boom-boom boom clear-channel WGN tempted
him down to the Windy City to pair his motor mouth (“the fastest lip in the
Midwest”) with that of a recently-promoted female traffic reporter.
Michael muses that he was
acid and she was base—so they neutralized each other. Ha! Only an X-rated
English teacher can fashion a cheap shot out of what he dimly remembers of high
school chemistry.
By the 1985 he had
abandoned hacking for the glamour and glory of WHA, the oldest radio station in
America. A year later, he went National (as in Public Radio), and the rest is
fast becoming hysteria.
It’s a rare joy to see him
warm up his own audience, 15 minutes before air time. The ten-below February
Saturday I dropped in, the 30 “foreigners” with their chairs reserved by name
and place of origin—Milwaukee, Chicago, Brookfield, Port Edwards—were given
Michael’s little set-piece about drifting off-set whenever Nature calls,
because if everyone waited for the one-minute break between Hour One and Hour
Two of the two-hour run, the peeing brigade would be stacked up in front of the
toilets “like planes over O’Hare.”
He addresses the crowd ever
so sweetly. He’s a kind of Don Rickels who has who has earned a Merit Badge in
Good Manners. His listeners love to be mocked and milked for his unscripted
needles. The only scripted parts of the show are his two two-minute monologues,
the jazz pieces and sidekick announcer Jim Packard’s tasty jeux d’espritz researched
sallies on the town of the week—chosen at the last minute of the show by a
viewer who throws a dart at a jumbled map of the U.S.
Packard picks up neat
trivia like the fact that an English teacher named Hoge coined a famous city
name by connecting “Minne” (Indian for water) “ha” (a Norsky expletive) and “polis”
(Greek for city). The “h” dropped out silently because Minnesotans are just as
slurvish as the rest of the country when it comes to enunciation.
Michael is in his (final)
element when he’s poking around in the town’s telephone directory for some
unwitting local to expatiate authentically about his locale. The FCC hath just
decreed that you can’t broadcast a caller until he specifically agrees, and
this first day of the ukase didn’t twit Michael a bit. The first call got no
answer, the second a curt non-compliance, and the third, a car customizer who
didn’t know the local hangouts because he didn’t hang out—he just stayed in his
garage with buddies beering it up while they upfiddled their cars.
The quiz is harder to
describe. You have to volunteer from the studio audience. Today’s choices were
a yuppie lawyer and a winsome 20ish woman with a beguiling giggle who did “brain
research.” Then Michael picks a long-distance partner from a list of those who’ve
written in.
There are six categories
(people, places, science, current events, what you should have learned in
school, and odds ‘n’ ends.) You have to win in three categories to get a mock
prize—which run to things like pink lawn flamingos. The brainy lady was in a
state of delectable (to Michael) panic, fearing she’d make a mess of everything
but science.
She actually distinguished
herself on a question about the adrenalin glands: “rena” means kidney; “ad,” on
top of. The phone-in helper gave her a gold star, and everybody turned euphoric
as jazz pianist John Thulin and augmented bassist Jeff Eckels swing into three
minutes of Benny Golson’s evergreen “Stablemates.”
The second pairing was the
amiable yuppie lawyer from Watertown who said he was in the Good Guys law firm
of Ken, Fred, Ray and Bob—a bit of Midwest status deflating that all hands
relished. His serendipitous Bell-mate was a sign painter from Cumberland,
Kentucky, who was so outrageously idiosyncratic that Mike had a nanosecond when
it looked like Bruce was running away with Mike’s wit.
In a 20-minute live
interview with Feldman hero / mentor Stan Freberg, shamelessly flogging his
memoirs, Michael offered to read the book’s bar code over the air. You almost
had the feeling Stan was bestowing his mantle on the young freak.
Perhaps the richest four
minutes of the two hours are Feldman’s two two-minute monologues that he sweats
over all week long. His second take was a superb lark about George Bush’s
clubs, the Bohemian (where they oil themselves and wrestle Greco-Roman—think of
Caspar Weinberger “oiled”), the Alfalfa (which Feldman impishly twisted into an
“Our Gang” tangent), and the Alibi (“which needs no explanation”).
The mad man returns to
Philly’s air. It’s nice to be plugged in again, Saturday afternoons, to
Madison, the madcap capital of the Midwest.
From Welcomat: After Dark,
Hazard-at-Large, October 31, 1990
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