![]() As college students, when hunger calls, we call for pizza. Not too long ago, a few of my friends and I were hanging out in my dorm room, watching TV. This recording is for the Pizza Pipeline in Moscow, Idaho. And every one of them reacted the same way to the message, like this guy Ben Feldman, now an entertainment lawyer. I called other Columbia students from that period. No matter how long it took, he said, it would be worth it if I could track down some recording of the message and allow him to hear it again. Goodbye." The guy then became so excited at the thought of someone doing serious research about the message that he offered to use the Columbia database to look up every Fred that might have graduated around that time. I'm not going to wait up all night for you. "You and The Little Mermaid can both go yourselves. I ended up speaking to someone who not only attended Columbia in the early '90s and remembered the message, but just like Josh had, he actually quoted it to me, the whole message. But just for the hell of it, I phoned the Columbia alumni magazine to see if there was anyone there who might remember anything about the Little Mermaid message. Now how is a person supposed to believe something like that? He swore to me that it was the defining moment in his class' campus life that year. Just the other day, Josh was telling me about this really funny phone message that he heard back in his college days, and how I should definitely do a radio show about that. Josh tried to convince me that this semantically innovative young woman was most definitely worthy of a 40 minute interview on national radio. One time Josh talked to a French-Canadian waitress who used the words diggy do as a conjunctive phrase, as in, my mother, she gave birth to me in Lac Saint-Louis, and diggy do, I'm in Montreal. The thing was, most of them involved hot dog eating contests and all-nude car washes. So a few years ago, when I first started doing stories on the radio, I would call him up and ask him if he had any story ideas. And he always refers to his ideas as pure gold. The other thing to know about Josh is that he thinks of himself as an idea man. Just the same, quit your bitch squealing is what Josh says to me when I ask him to please change the station on the car radio or to stop crowding the armrest in the movie theater. And while my scream may have been louder that evening, Josh's scream was definitely higher pitched, which to my mind means Josh should rightfully be called the bitch squealer, while perhaps I should be called something like bitch bellower or bitch loud crier. And that's because it's referring to an actual dog, a fenced in security dog that barked at me and Josh while we were out walking one night. Now bitch isn't the bad word you're going to be hearing in this story. The first thing you should know about my friend Josh is that he calls me a bitch squealer. In that act we return to the guy who you just heard from a minute ago, a man trying to sustain a relationship that spans oceans, all with a little cassette tape. In fact, the story of a soldier in the first Persian Gulf War who made tapes for his wife during battles, until he accidentally recorded this incident, this violent incident that haunted him for years. ![]() In that act, we use the power of audio technology to turn someone who stutters into someone who no longer stutters, so he can deliver a message to one man in Idaho. Act Two, we have a special effects story. I have to say, it's kind of an amazing show because of that.Īct One, we hear the greatest phone message in the world, the absolute greatest. ![]() Someone somewhere made somebody else a tape. ![]() ![]() Every story is made from tapes that were intended for an audience of one. Every story on the show is made out of tapes like this one. And so today we're going to try something completely different on our radio show. That's what I like about these recordings. When you're really love and other people overhear you, I think it's hard not to sound a little over the top. ![]()
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