Brunch And A Hunch

Sunday February 1st, 2009 - Milwaukee, WI/Kenosha, WI

My phone rang this morning way too early for me to know it was too early for it to ring. I’ve been hitting it hard lately and not sleeping as much as I probably should be and I was deep in a coma when it rang. Usually I have it near my bed but today it was in my pants.

I was so tired from yesterday I never took it out of my pocket when I took my pants off so I crawled out of bed and answered it just to see who it was. It was my cousin Brett and we had made plans to get together today and he wanted to know if I was still up for that.

I always love to see Brett and we hadn’t done it for a while so I told him I’d dust off my carcass and head up to Milwaukee for a brunch at Pandl’s in Bayside. That’s a place both of us love so it wasn’t difficult to get motivated to get out of bed to have top shelf chow.

The whole atmosphere is great about that place. The food is world class but the people are nice too. That’s a very well to do part of town and somewhere my family never even considered going when we were kids so that makes Brett and I enjoy it even more. We’re both trying to move past our childhood and salvage a good life and this helps us do that.

There are people of all colors and backgrounds eating there for one reason - the food is REALLY good. They are usually well dressed and no matter what color they are they are laid back and polite and have class and manners and don’t cause trouble. It’s refreshing.

Everyone is in a good mood and those who are there know it’s going to be an out of the park home run dining experience. I was waiting for my omelet next to a black woman and a man from India and we were all commenting on how lucky we were to be having such a wonderful meal on such a beautiful day and we were right. Pandl’s does it the right way.

After the meal I dropped Brett off and headed back home to take a nap. I slept so long it almost made me miss my Mothership Connection radio show on WLIP in Kenosha. I had my Toyota up to about 90 through the back roads trying to make it to the radio station on time and right when I turned on Highway C in Kenosha I got stuck behind a pig trailer.

What are the chances of that? It’s Super Bowl Sunday and roads are empty like a scene from the movie Omega Man where Charlton Heston is the last man on earth. I thought I’d have no problem making it to the station but that idiot in front of me kept slowing down.

I ended up making it to the station at 8:04 but my co-hosts were ready and started it off without me which made me feel great. This is a group that really works together well and I hope we can both stay together as a group and stay on the air too. We all enjoy this a lot.

My hunch is we’ll either find a way to syndicate the show and take it much higher or we will go through more personnel changes before long. It’s tough to ask anyone to do a long running show without offering any pay but right now I can’t pay anyone including myself. It’s a fun thing and getting more fun by the week. I can feel our chemistry really growing.

That’s great in a way but in another way it scares me. Every other radio show I’ve had that has had chemistry growth in a positive way like this has ended ugly with a bad firing. The last one was the Loop in Chicago. We were getting a really strong chemistry in place and that’s when the station was sold and we got blown out the door by the new snakes.

WLS was very similar. Jerry Agar was getting good and borderline great ratings on his show and then lost his job to a situation which still makes no sense to any logical person in or around radio. Just because a show is sounding good doesn’t mean it won’t be axed.

Every week I come to the station in Kenosha and hope we’re still on the air. I know my friend John Perry is the operations manager of the station and wants us on the air but I’m still a little gun shy from all my other radio situations where I’ve been yanked off the air.

Anything and everything could bring this one to an end too and I know I need to keep a positive attitude but after all that’s happened I can’t help thinking of what could go on in this whole scenario. John Perry could get another job or be gone for whatever reason and then I’d be left dangling in the trees. The new person may or may not like the show at all.

Also, the station could be sold or they could sell my time to a brokered show who buys the time every week and run their own psychotic ramblings about the wonders of all their penis enlargement formulas or machines to remove unwanted stains from your mattress.

I’m coming up on a year in early March and those kinds of thoughts keep creeping up at this time because that’s when all my other shows blew up. What really concerns me is the loss of the current panel though. Lara Shaffer has been a fantastic replacement for the loss of Scott Markus who moved to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. He was a whiz.

Lara is turning out to be even whizzier in many ways and she just fits in perfectly. She’s also an aspiring model and actress and has some ins on jobs and TV shows and any week I expect her to tell me she’s leaving to pursue those things. Just like with Scott I wouldn’t be angry or upset but it would put the show in another rut until we found someone else.

Another new part of the show is ‘Dr. Destruction’ who has a growing role. He’s a really interesting guy and a total character and he very much adds to the mix of everything. He’s a Kenosha resident and has a TV horror movie show which apparently has a big audience and a cult following. He’s settling in nicely with us and hopefully we can cross over fans.

My comedian friend Gary Pansch is also fitting in very well to the mix. He does a funny weekly bit called ‘The Mothership Hall Of Fame’ with weirdos and nut bags from across all time and time zones. Living or dead he picks out a unique character every week for his segment and little by little all of this is falling together and becoming a busy fun show.

Lara or Gary or Dr. Destruction could easily come to me at any time and tell me they’re not able to hang around anymore and there could be a lot of legitimate reasons for that so who am I to tell them no? All I can do is enjoy it while they’re here and I am. It’s a blast.