Country Matters. The Evening Tickler is Rural Radio
There’s a sinkhole in the time-space continuum where the HMS Impulse leaves Port Axon for the short passage across the Synaptic Strait to Port Dendrite, but inadvertently strays into the Bermuda Triangle of Early Onset Dementia, never to be seen again. We’re tootling down Bridge Street in the Subaru to join Steve Burnett on his Sunday evening public radio show, The Evening Tickler. Everything’s going swimmingly, the engine’s purring like a Siamese as we pass our host, parked on the other side of the street in his new truck. We smile, exchange finger-above-the-steering-wheel greetings. It’s a wonderful, rural life. A gentle u-turn and we’re easing up to his bumper when the shit hits the fan.
The Little Crosstrek Who Shouldn’t is suddenly humping Steve’s tailgate at 40 miles-per-hour, furiously grinding a beast twice its size up the kerb and onto the sidewalk. Its nose is in the air, its engine roaring with lust, it will not stop. There are no reasons and nothing can be done. Steve tumbles from the cockpit like a man harpooned. He’s standing in the middle of the street, arms flailing like Ahab, eyes like tennis balls on stalks.
Pandemonium quiets by degrees to bucolic silence. Puffy clouds of radiator steam embroider an indigo sky streaked with pink. The skitter of birdsong. Wind chimes. There’s hot maple syrup on the breeze, a tributary of viscous fluid snakes towards the gutter as the Subaru, spent, cries green tears. It’s Norman Rockwell’s The Demolition Derby.
‘Why did you do that?’ whimpers Steve.
The Evening Tickler is the kind of radio that should be mandatory in any rural community worth shaking a stick at. Part soap opera, part community bugle, part road-map for strangers; it’s a keen-eyed Osprey soaring over the Catskills once a week, spearing a fish to bring home and eviscerate. Or a bald eagle, plucking a kitten from a village garden. Only occasionally is it a nappy buzzard tearing strips off a rotten raccoon that got hit by Chevy Silverado with a bumper sticker that says There’s No Feeling Like Lipstick On Your Dipstick. Every week, an epiphany. Kevin sounds like your local mailman but sees UFO’s nightly and believes in the impending Zombie Apocalypse. Z raises livestock, but her dad coached the Morocco and Zaire football teams to consecutive World Cups in the 1970’s. Peter is the art critic at The New Yorker and a legendary pyromaniac. Gary convinced Aretha Franklin to sing Nessun Dorma when Pavarotti pulled out of the Grammys. All residents of Delaware County, all coaxed by Steve into the studio at WIOX to spin their yarn. Even the shows where the guest doesn’t turn up and the hosts are left to chew the cud alone, like two old muppets barking in the gallery. Wonderful. Often, actually, the best.
A few choice cuts.
Siobhan Barrett – almost gave birth at 3 in the morning in a Ford F150 going through the mountains during a blizzard. She describes dangling from the ‘oh shit’ bar with one hand whilst deploying the other to keep her child inside her vagina. A shotgun blast of Catskills Realism, glorious counterpoint to Instagram Nature Mama posts that make you want to prolapse your rectum. Siobhan tears the covers off Spiritual Midwifery, stuffs them in the blender with a pint of cheap tequila and a couple of strips of Sudafed Pain and Mucus and whizzes up a backwoods Placenta Colada. Suck it through a straw, snort it, make a poultice for your meatloaf nipples.
Amy Sokol – purrs slippery tales of a misspent Woodstock youth, featuring Bonnie Tyler, Richie Havens, Bob Dylan and Cher as a man. Remember Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow? Amy does. Mother of six, Delhi’s own painted lady offers a peek through the keyhole of small-town swinger culture, in which a man conspires with his wife to hide in the closet and bear witness to her feverish extra-curricular gyrations with local undergraduates. Fresh insight into the unholy conjugation of Church, State and upstate Constabulary. Throw in Jonestown, Tostoy, snorting Percocet through a straw, buttworms, nightcrawlers and Pocono Couples’ Weekends, for a Catskills scramble of wry wit and home-fries.
The one from above, after the Subaru went postal. Statler and Waldorf are shadowed by The Grim Reaper, fresh from a sold-out gig on the seventh ring of Satan’s rectum. They sip Lambrusco and mull over the issues of the day; the inevitability of death, suffering, pain, automobile accidents, Auschwitz, genocide in Rwanda, boils, the smell of the crease where thigh meets torso, the absence of God in an indifferent universe, the Candiru fish of the Amazon that lodges itself in bodily orifices with expandable spines, aseptic necrosis, the music of Celine Dion, the loa loa nematode which burrows through children’s skin en route to the eyeball. If you’re looking for a reason to throw yourself off a bridge, this Bud’s for you.
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