A Van Full of Memories

RIFF Rocks...Baby!
Originally uploaded by CreativeExile.

Despite having a hungry, tired preschooler in the car on the way home from Meijers tonight, I had to do a U-turn and get a shot of this van. So many memories from my days as a WRIF intern in 1987...

...single-handedly dealing with the World Bar Tour every Friday night...unknown to my parents, who would have stopped me immediately from participating (they thought I had a partner, he flaked), despite the fact that it was my sole interesting intern duty...saving a spot for the guest DJ, only to have him sit somewhere else (the ladies, Ann and Karen, were always sooo much nicer)...

DJ Steve Kostan getting up to join the band, always playing the same three songs on a borrowed guitar...mercifully they have been erased from my memory (wait, one of them was "G-L-O-R-I-A," ugh, just remembered)...

...getting across the Canadian border to a bar in Windsor, thinking the van was going to be searched, when the young border patrol officer just wanted some of our famous oval bumper stickers...

...making my way out to the parking lot at 2:00 a.m., hoping I wouldn't be accosted...taking a shower the minute I got home, because I reeked of bar smoke...especially my hair (yuk)...

...smoking a cigarette at the bar to kill time...

...Playboy Channel going on the bar TVs around 1 a.m. (see: possibility of getting accosted, above)...

...having the way cool assistant programming director, Scott, buy me a flaming shot...The Mexican Revolution...green, white, and red liquor set on fire...spilling it across our table as I tried to blow it out...afraid I'd set the whole place aflame...

...Scott getting nicknamed "Cripp" after a debilitating accident...altering Def Leppard bumper stickers to read "Cripp" and putting them on his office door (he recovered, despite needing a walker for about 6 months...we put a "Cripp" sticker on his walker, too)...altering other stickers to read "Dead Wings" or "Piss-Ons" since our hometown hockey and basketball teams were such duds at the moment...

...stuffing envelopes with whatever bumper stickers we had on hand at the time...pathetic requests from listeners for the most popular (long gone) bumper stickers...my own collection of over 150 unique WRIF stickers...in a box somewhere, now...

...sitting for hours listing songs the other rock stations were playing (the most mind-numbing of my duties)...NEVER remembering the title of "Every Picture Tells A Story" by Rod Stewart...going into the programming director's office to ask him what the hell is this song? AGAIN...having him tune in his radio just as Stewart started to sing the title about 300 times at the VERY END OF THE SONG...

...attending premieres of the Talking Heads concert movie (where David Byrne comes out singing Psycho Killer, wearing the gigantic suit?...sorry, now you'll have that song in your head...)and a premiere of Princess Bride (still have the poster)...hanging out late night at the studio with David St. James...meeting Sam Kinison (the only "celebrity" I met during my entire internship)...interviewing DJ Ken Calvert (sweetie) for my feature writing class and getting an "A"...

Gotta get all that in my Book of Me someday...whenever I start one...