December 26, 2021
The eagle has...
Not really landed just yet, but touched down, found a home, is ready to nest for a minute. Just a minute. No longer than that. She doesn't have time to rest just yet. But she has an absolutely killer view of the Manhattan Bridge. Even if the floor in her tiny studio is made of tile, not wood. Even if the building has made her think of doing a performance piece called "Project Girl," despite all this, she has found a great slice of lower Manhattan.
For now. The eagle has set foot on ground. It will not land just yet.
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Chinatown. Christmas Day. Maybe the most unoriginal place for a Jew, but that's where I found myself last night. The irony of it all is that New York City is a small town for Jews on a large religious holiday like Christmas. I ran into one friend from my eYada days, a college buddy and two girls from my Babeland years.
eYada. There was and is something about working on talk radio for the Internet, years before anyone believes it can really happen, that keeps you feeling slightly ahead of your time. I don't mention eYada often (anymore) because it took me a while to stop mentioning that "long, strange trip" everyday. It was by far the best two years of my "corporate" life. We were one of the first, and definitely the largest of our kind, a talk radio station broadcast exclusively over the world wide web. The concept and shows changed more often then the name ever did, and we always knew we were an experiment waiting to explode. We had two options: the company would blow up, as in disappear, or blow up, as in by wildly successful beyond anything we could have ever imagined. We hoped for the latter. However, it was the former that found us first, and in July of 2001, two days after our CEO declared, "the fat lady hasn't sung, but she is warming up in the corridor," it was over.
September 11th would have destroyed us anyway, at least that's what we all believed. Still, some of my closest friends and dearest radio contacts were from those days. I even ran in to Lionel, a still successful radio host, one night a few weeks back. The first thing he said to me, over three years later, was "Do you remember eYada? (It's still hard to forget). I was trying to think about my best job, and that might have been it. I loved those days." Okay, I may have quoted him off a bit, but when you're writing from memory weeks after the fact, it's hard to get too detailed. The point is...if we worked there, we remember.
I'm chuckling now. I haven't rambled on about eYada for quite some time. I haven't thought about it much, except on the occasion of chatting with Chaunce, Lionel or Bob (whose website doesn't seem to be working now), or the even more obscure times when someone else reminds me. We had fans. A lot more fans than we should have had before DSL and cable were in everybody's homes. We were still popular in the age of the 56K modem. We would have been more popular now.
Those were the best radio days of my life. And now, the people who meet me, who get to know me in my 30s, they have no idea about this part of my life. To them I am a writer, a sex educator, maybe even a freak. But I was once a radio and TV producer (and maybe even a freak). I guess I'd produce again, occasionally, if the money was right. Otherwise, it feels like a lifetime ago.
The eagle has scraped earth. The festering continues.
Posted by jamye at December 26, 2021 10:46 AM