It's been two weekends and one workweek since I began my New York Arts Program internship. I’m living in a partitioned townhouse smack in the middle of Chelsea with 30 other art interns from the Midwest and Texas. My roommate from K, Emily Townsend, and I are rooming together again. We managed to squeeze our belongings from our old, spacious room at K into a closet with barely enough space for our single bunk bed. With the tapestries on the wall, familiar books on the shelves and goofy conversations, it feels like a hornet hive tucked into the heart of the world’s busiest city. Our front stoop view of Times Square makes Trowbridge’s vista of the library or downtown Kalamazoo seem like doll houses. The drag racing, drunken fighting and sirens never sleep, but with our curtains drawn and guitar plucking, we do.
I have come to appreciate the tameness of the city of Kalamazoo since my arrival, as I realized how little class work I could justify completing in this electric environment. Last weekend, some housemates and I bought tickets to a “surprise guest” comedy show two blocks away. After squeezing into the standing room area, Aziz Ansari from Parks And Recreation strolled onstage and explained he would be playing Carnegie Hall the next night and wanted to fine tune his act. While walking home and recovering from an hour of snorting laughter, we ran into Ben Stiller’s film crew shooting a movie one block from our front door.
I started work on Wednesday at a station that broadcasts throughout the tri-state area. The office overlooks the East River. The location in the heart of corporate America is ironic for the self-described hippies at the station, but walking into the studio is walking into a world apart. Although I’m only just getting to know my colleagues, they all seem engaging and diverse. My official boss, the station’s program director, is a former stand-up comedian with a long ponytail who swears at his emails.
February is fund drive month at the station. For now, my daily responsibilities include tracking down materials to offer donors as “premiums.” It’s the simple things, like contacting publishers at the behest of my boss that inform me about what a future in public radio journalism might hold.
Each day, my workload builds as I attempt to reverse my Midwestern reputation (not that I’m actually sure how that characterizes me; all I know is the inflection people use while they say, Oh, so you’re from Mi-chi-gan…)
On Thursday, I wrote two promotional spots (one in Spanish) to be read on air. Although my dyslexia and air-fright prevent me from desiring a career as a live host, I have to admit it’s exhilarating to imagine my voice enveloping New York from the station’s signal atop the Empire State Building.
My boss is a cool-headed director and I enjoy compiling information onto spreadsheets in his office while watching the radio world rotate through his door. So far, I can tell that each day, there are fires to put out, and each day something interesting falls into your lap. In only three workdays, two hosts couldn’t come into the station for their shifts, they squeezed a ten-person funk band into the tiny studio for a live performance, and while I was on my way to the Democracy Now! studio, I found out the entire crew had shipped off to Sundance with only a moment’s notice, all of which led to raucous moments of improvisation.
Above the clamor in the office, I can always hear the station’s output, which gives me this meta experience of watching the future product assembling while enjoying the manufactured good, as though from the future. Tune in online and listen with me.
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