Whither Lions Revisited?

(Image from here.)

Self Help Radio began, more or less officially, on Wednesday, October 9, 2002, on 91.7 fm KOOP Austin.  I've probably told this story before but I'm too lazy to look it up, so I'll tell it again.  Initially I was given a show at 9am on Friday mornings.  I kinda preferred the time.  It let me get into work a little late but I could also stay late.  I did a few shows on Friday morning - maybe two? - & in fact they did have themes - one of them was weekends, which I later also did as a theme on Self Help Radio - but then one afternoon I got a call from someone at KOOP named Danny who told me his story of woe.

Danny had recently gotten a show on Wednesdays at 2pm.  The thing is, he was taking vacation time from work to do the show, & it would eventually run out.  He only worked half days on Friday (he told me), so Friday mornings would be better for him.  I knew I could easily skip out of work in the middle of the day (I already cleared it with my boss) so it was no big deal, & far be it for me to be selfish about something as silly as a timeslot.  We switched times - though we had to go to a Programming Committee meeting to sell it.  To sweeten the deal, I also volunteered to oversee the show before mine, from 1-2pm, which would be an hour for new deejays to demonstrate what kind of show they wanted to do.  (In the early days, when we were just starting, there would often not be a new deejay, so I would do two hours.  In fact, my first show that Wednesday was a sub show - it was songs which said hello.  I don't count that as Self Help Radio's first episode, however.)

It seems like I was on Wednesdays forever, but I think I had moved to Fridays by 2006, so for less than four years.  I kind of wish I had been moved to Wednesday afternoons instead of Fridays, but I thought I would enjoy an end-of-the-week show.  Eventually Danny moved to Sunday nights.  Both of us left Austin, maybe even around the same time, & I think he's still doing radio where he ended up.  As am I.  I'll bet he wouldn't recognize me if he saw me again, though.  I'm pretty forgettable.

Always a sentimental sort, I started doing these anniversary shows in 2008.  The show was barely four years old!  It seemed a nice way to commemorate the project.  By then I suppose I figured I'd be doing the show for a while, but in the first two years, I wasn't sure I'd be doing Self Help Radio for any great length of time.  It was like a new relationship - who the hell knows how long it'll last?  Two dates?  A year?  But it seems I'm stuck with this show.  Which is fine.  We sometimes don't like each other, but we know each other tolerably well.

For some reason I felt like I had more to say about this anniversary stuff.  I don't, actually.  I am revisiting a theme that I first explored in March of 2005.  As usual, I won't play any of the stuff from the first show - although there'll be covers of songs previously played.  I actually have a recording of the original show, & I listened to some of it, & it didn't make me sad.  Maybe because there's a part of me that doesn't think the show sounds like me.  If that makes any sense.

Tomorrow - Monday morning - 8 to 10am - Freeform Portland - freeformportland.org - listen & celebrate eighteen years of this foolish pastime of mine.  I really never thought it would last as long as it has.