Taylor

(A picture doubtless taken by Taylor himself; I took it from his Facebook page.)

As one gets older, if one survives, one will have to say goodbye to so many people one knew.  I say this because this past week I had to say goodbye to that gentleman up there.  His names was Taylor Cage & he's one of the many folks I've had the fortune to meet because of my radio obsession.  But I can safely say that none were quite like him.

When I decided to try my luck at KOOP radio in the fall of 2000, he most probably was part of the team that trained us.  I don't really recall - my main memory is that, with the station suffering from a recent schism, the training staff seemed shellshocked.  When I asked one of the other trainers what his name was, he told me that that wasn't important.

The reason I suspect Taylor trained me is that, once I joined the station & its Training Committee, I was teamed with him for the first night's training: he did the station's Orientation class, I taught FCC rules & regulations.  Taylor had a show on KOOP called Queer Waves & therefore it wasn't a surprise that he was openly, proudly gay.  He had a flair for the dramatic & was a marvelous teacher - & I always loved that he taught something called orientation.  Sweet & friendly, Taylor was there to show you how actually different your experience at KOOP would be.

His show was great, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of queer musicians that I have yet to see rivaled.  I saw him weekly as I was usually up at the station on Saturdays to do production work - & since he did his show then, he was often conscripted by me to voice spots.  I put one of them on my server, this was an indecency disclaimer for our webstream overnight, I think he enjoyed this a little too much.  Listen to it here.

He once asked me to sub his show & I just played show tunes - which he was fine with, but I felt like I wasn't really playing what he would play.  Last year, as I helped my mother move in with my sister, I found a bunch of old CDs of my Austin shows, which of course I tossed out, but I kept one to listen to on the drive back to Fort Worth.  It was that very show.  When I got home, I wrote Taylor a message on Facebook, which went like this:

"Hey, I was just in Dallas helping my 88-year-old mom pack up her place - she's moving in with my sister tomorrow - & she had a ton of burned CDs of my old KOOP shows.  I threw them all away (I have copies in digital form) but I saved one to listen to on the drive home, which was the Queer Waves show I subbed in 2006 on which I played show tunes.  I almost never listen to my old shows because I'm not a masochist, but I wanted to hear what I'd chosen & it was an all right show, but there was something I said that made me laugh out loud.  I had been saying something silly about you being gone & I said, 'Please don't tell Taylor I've been trash-talking him on the air.  He'd find it delicious.'"

His response was: "Yes! Or in Gay, YAAAAASSS!"

Two moments stick in my mind when I saw Taylor troubled or otherwise not as happy as he usually was.  One of them was after an anti-gay marriage amendment passed with a huge majority in Texas.  Now, Taylor was not someone I thought of as being for marriage of any kind, but he said it bothered him because, in the liberal bubble of Austin, he just forgot "how many people hate us."  The second time involved someone at KOOP who was of the Baha'i faith who arranged for us to use their temple for meetings after one of the fires we had, & it became known that the Baha'i had some issues with homosexuality.  When some members of the station either refused to discuss this, or thought it didn't really matter, it disturbed Taylor.  He confided in me, "This used to be one of the places I felt at home."

He left KOOP in 2007 I think.  I would leave a year later.  We didn't stay in touch, but we found each other on Facebook later on, where would occasionally talk.  We never had a social relationship - he did come to a party at my place once, but didn't seem too comfortable.  After meetings I would often take him home, which allowed us to talk about the station & our lives.  He invited me in to see his beloved dolls a couple of times, & I discovered he loved Jethro Tull more than I could have imagined.  Not much Jethro Tull on Queer Waves!  I should've got him to sub Self Help Radio once to just see how he'd do.

He did return many times to KOOP as a guest, on Dennis Campa's show, & I'm glad - he was made to be an on-air personality.  I hope I have some of his shows saved somewhere.  As my friend Ken said when we discussed his passing, he was "inimitable."

He died last week at the age of 63.  He had a twin sister I never met, & she shared his obituary on Facebook, & I share it now.  Now I'm thinking about how Taylor & I would sit in the station & make each other laugh, how he was perfectly happy to listen to me discuss how I thought the station should be run & all that nonsense, but how a simple phrase, subtly barbed, would deflate my self-important rants & make me laugh at myself.  He was a wonderful person that I'm sorry I didn't get to spend more time with.  I hope KOOP does something to celebrate him.  He really was one-of-a-kind.