Seizure
Final Eclectic Seizure
Script by Rick Burkhardt
R: Ah, memories.W: Memories!
R: Yes, memories. You know, I forget who it was that once said, William —
W: What?
R: Um, I’ll start over. Ah, memories. I forget who it was that once said, William —
W: That once said ‘William?’
R: I- uh... no.
W: Sounds like my dad.
R: It’ll make sense in a minute.
W: I can’t wait!
R: that once said, um, I forget who it was that once said, William —
W: It was me!
R: It was William?
W: That’s what you said.
R: I did?
W: Once.
R: Well, okay, then! Memories! I remember who it was who once said, William, William, who said, ‘Okay then, if the music’s in the background, and we’re in the background, then what IS in the foreground?’
W: That’s true! I did say that!
R: Roughly.
W: Well I had a cold.
R: As did we all!
W: Didn’t we though?
R: Those were the nineties!
W: The decade of the waltz!
R: All ninety of them, and thanks to Bill Clinton, we all had colds!
W: That was the first step in the Billary Clinton health care plan, a contract out for all of America.
R: The second step, we never took.
W: No, it fell by the wayside like so many steps.
R: The waltz again!
W: And like so many waltz steps, somebody took it!
R: There went the health plan, and there went the contract on America. But we still had our colds, and those mysterious stains on so many blue dresses, the third step to a healthier future.
W: And that future was:
R & W: An Eclectic Seizure.
R: Yes, if it seems so long ago, longer than the rain, longer than the pain, remember we now live in a Secured Homeland where anything Eclectic is bound to be seized sooner or later, but it wasn’t always like that.
W: Under the Bush health plan, if a foreign germ enters your body, you must report it immediately.
R: I’ve been code orange all week!
W: Haven’t we all? But it wasn’t always like that.
R: In the nineties, when the WEFT trade center still throbbed mawkishly against the night sky, pulsing valiantly against the call letters of the oldies station that rang through our ears, and both of our listener’s ears, like a cowbell mixed too high in a Mahler Symphony, we lived lives of unburdened simplicity and underemployment, the clever new term designed by the boys in term design for the new, moderately yuppified workless workforce of the nineties, too busy with getting life in gear for the long haul, too high-on-the-go for depression on a worldwide scale!
W: And as worldwide came to mean globalized, and we learned who it was that turned the glob into a globe, ‘
R: It was Silent E! The cabinet member we couldn’t remember.
W: ‘ Independent Media, Indy for short,
R: But not for long!
W: ‘ awoke, grumbling, from its endless slumber, rubbing its temples of doom.
R: Endless until then, William.
W: You betcha!
R: Because we, of course, had been doing Indy Media all along!
W: And this is where the story gets hazy.
R: At least, we think it does. There were so many scandals in those days, even if you were one of the lucky few who weren’t wearing a blue dress, scandals like the Roman cutoff jeans jacket tape,
W: That had scandal written all over it!
R: or the backward masked man on the flying trapeze.
W: Or Kenneth and Frito Lay!
R: Kenny Boy!
W: Kenny and the Laymen! A supergroup whose name was synonymous with scandal, whose stock-rending exploits rang out on everyone’s lips until finally, one day, they received that famously fishy phone call from on high....
R: Oh Kenny Boy, the old Savannah calling....
W: It was just a telemarketer.
R: Ah yes of course, the Saudi Duty telemarketing connection scandal!
W: Now that was a bad connection.
R: So bad in fact, that neither party could hear the other one at all!
W: And so the conspiracy trial was the only way to smoke them out, along with both the major parties!
R: But it was their party, William, and they’d cry,
R & W: If they wanted to.
R: And that, even in the most sensitive underbellies of the nineties, was scandalous.
W: But Rick, you’re forgetting all the good times.
R: You’re right! How could I?
W: Times like the Keith Johnson helio-simulcast from the 1993 Pride March on Washington.
R: Ah yes of course! Before it was bought out by AT&T!
W: Or the microscopic two-step performed on ultrasensitive scientific instruments by Wally and Andre, the deceptively self-referential squirrel lice!
R: William, if I’m not mistaken, you’re forgetting the show where we plunged headlong into the mysteries of rubber cement, snorkels bared, barely surviving to tell the lurid tale of corruption, murder, and gawking knavery which we learned from Thusnelda, snail queen of the underworld!
W: Gracious! You are mistaken!
R: Well, then, you certainly might remember Walter Shaboygan leading his raft of mutinous sea lions up the Huckamuck river in search of the source of Rubber Cement, only to find that we’d replaced the provisions in his makeshift canteen with longer-lasting, breath-freshening, super funny gummy boing boings!
W: I certainly might. How about the time we dressed up as country DJs and performed an entire square dance festival in the studio on a subatomic level?
R: That sure blew the dust off of MY chicken!
W: Or the time we found an eight-track tape which accurately predicted all our deaths?
R: That certainly takes me back. I only wish Drake’s parents hadn’t been listening to that show. Which of course reminds me of the short-lived supergroup Funk and Wagnalls, and the stunningly popular double A-side hit single ‘Workin’ in the Salt Mine’ and ‘Goin’ to My Tonsilectomy’ which rocketed them to the top of the charts in every genre before extinguishing them in a fiery ball of fame.
W: I’m reminded of course of the Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment, an absurdist romp through a surreal landscape evoked by the wildly implausible conceit that there were a bunch of guys building a hovercraft in our basement, which turned out to be absolutely true.
R: As so many things did. Because those were the nineties!
W: Well, true, but the nineties really started in the eighties.
R: Naturally. King George the Second was crowned in a nationwide coronary attack in 1989 despite Michael Dukakis having won the popular vote, if I remember correctly, in the controversial Supreme Court decision Bush vs. Everybody, which pointed out that you don’t actually vote for kings!
W: And none of our mail was delivered that day, because they had buried it along with Richard Nixon!
R: And not on the old prairie.
W: But did they bury us lying down?
R: They did not! I promptly fired up the WEFT transmitter, as I did every Tuesday morning at roughly six AM,
W: Very roughly!
R: ‘ I had a cold ‘and I put my power as WEFT airshifter into play, threatening to play ABBA all morning unless these wrongs were redressed by the end of my morning show ‘You Need a Thneed.’
W: An abuse of power if ever there was one, Rick.
R: I sure feel pretty bad about it now. But I got more calls from listeners that day than I ever did before or since, and the hundreds of watts of rabble-rousing energy surging through the WEFT antenna and into the airwaves of Central Illinois just went straight to my head.
W: Where they belong. I was living just a few blocks away, as were you, in the same house, and when I heard the commotion down at the station trickling through the rusty gears of my old clock radio, I threw some clothes onto the bed and rushed immediately past the Grande Donutte Emporium on first and Green, which at that time was called the ‘Rime of the Donutte Mariner’...
R: A sort of runic rhyme, really....
W: and down to the station proper, where I found an intimidating number of very proper people amassing outside the ornately fashioned wrought-iron WEFT gates, who, armed only with painted signs, an almost religious zeal, and pitchforks, had formed a threatening mob ‘ with their bare hands!
R: Those were no bare hands, William. That was Tipper Gore and her still-fledging multimillion dollar grassroots lobbying organization Mothers Worried About ABBA, or ‘mwa’.
W: Ah, the old M.W.A.A.B.B.A.!
R: Her grass had some of the strongest roots in the city, and there were a lot of high horses that morning, William, swarming the hallways of the WEFT complex, pounding on doors, reading our personal mail, and upending jam pots in an attempt to halt the ballot recount that was going on in this very studio!
W: And halt it they did.
R: And history is still bearing that out.
W: But what about the memories, Rick?
R: Ah, the memories! What about them?
W: What about the memories!
R: Ah! You mean like the time we spilled an entire box of donut holes into the mixing console next to the satellite dish, rendering the spinach tongs unusable but also shorting out the main transmitter board, so that Adam Cain had to build another fully functioning FCC-approved microradio broadcasting station out of the computer chips he had left in his pocket and twine?
W: No, not that one. I mean like the time we were all pirates and you were a parrot.
R: AWK!
W: And we went in search of a map which would show us the secret route to a map which would show us the secret route to a map which would show us ‘
R: The recursion show! AWK!
W: I think it was a show. It might have been a rerun.
R: What about the time you were assassinated on the air, and Mark Enslin interrogated the bassoonist for the WEFT orchestra, forcing him to take apart his bassoon and prove he had nothing to hide, at least nothing smaller than a bassoon, years before the Patriot Act?
W: That show was way ahead of its time, and I’m surprised we didn’t see the political implications of that assassination when they were staring us right in the face, like that large orange bird in the desert who would have eaten us if we hadn’t been rescued by Lee, the long-suffering religious airshifter whose Mormon heavy metal show came on right before ours.
R: Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum!
W: A crown of thorns!
R: And a can of bees!
W: And was that a bassoon?
R: Or was he just happy to see us?
W: I think that was the only time that Mae West ever appeared on Eclectic Seizure.
R: Not only was that the only time that Mae West ever appeared on Eclectic Seizure, but Mae West in fact never appeared on Eclectic Seizure.
W: Well, that explains that! Rick, I’m remembering the time we all dressed up as Astronauts and flew to the farthest corners of the galaxy, past the outer reaches of WEFT’s own airwaves, to battle the vice-admirals of the Oldies Empire armed only with little electric party favors and kazoos!
R: Small wonder they crumbled.
W: The wonders may have been small from their point of view, but not from ours! In those days, we could bust out a Phil Ochs song as if we’d written it ouselves, because we had!
R: And remember the saga of Schnickel Fritz?
W: Which one?
R: Well, exactly! Schnickel Fritz the children’s show as penned by Mel Groan in the original Welsh, Schnickel Fritz the bozon, smallest relative of the Z-nought quark, Schnickel Fritz the suffering temp worker in the statue factory, living through the winter in a cardboard box with cardboard plumbing and cardboard heat, Schnickel Fritz the medieval village graced with the soul food restaurant of the same name, Schnickel Fritz the obscure Heideggerian neologism, Schnickel Fritz the young boy seeking his fortune, warding off the insidious advances of the evil Newt by means of a ball-peen hammer and thesaurus, Schnickel Fritz the third world leader once beloved by his constituents but driven into a spiral of debt and increasingly ugly dictatorial measures by the International Monetary Fund until a people’s revolution deposed him, and don’t cry for me, Argentina.
W: Whew!
R: Whew is right!
W: And the list goes on.
R: It’s still going on!
W: I remember the time when there was a giant oil spill outside the studio, but it was an extremely rare collection of expensive massage oils, and yet Rishi was so intent on whipping us into shape for our new ten PM slot that he wouldn’t let us go outside and roll around in it!
R: What a control freak!
W: And remember when Adam made us all heart-shaped toast for Valentine’s day?
R: Heart-shaped salami and American cheese, too, if I remember correctly.
W: If I remember at all, it went exquisitely with Mark’s fortune chocolates!
R: I still have that fortune stuck in my teeth!
W: Well, you were supposed to crack the chocolate open first along the dotted line.
R: But we never saw the line in those days, did we William?
W: We were too busy connecting the dots!
R: Like the time WEFT Champaign was actually arrested for aggressive panhandling, released on a pledge of bail money but nonetheless unavoidably entering into a downward spiral of unemployment and life on the street, culminating with a series of phantasmagorical historic visions in which Mr. WEFT actually foresaw the downfall of the Roman Empire!
W: A bit too late, one might say.
R: And one did.
W: Or the Great WEFT fire of 1783, in which an errant coffee cup related incident, its author unknown to all but those in the know, led to the destruction of WEFT as a frontier telegraph outpost, but as we all pulled together for a last-ditch bucket brigade, something new and magical rose from the ashes.
R: And we don’t mean Phoenix Arizona.
W: Thank God!
R: Or the time we were all Pizza Delivery Men!
W: Goodness!
R: Traversing the mean streets of middle America with walkies and talkies ‘
W: especially the latter!
R: ‘ taking it on the chin for that sausagey goodness in the gut. It was no mean feat being a Pizza Man in those days.
W: And we really don’t mean Phoenix this time.
R: River Phoenix! Another celebrity who never appeared on Eclectic Seizure, unlike:
W: Patch Adams!
R: Warren Burt!
W: Hunter Adams!
R: Herbert Brun!
W: Dr. Adams, MDC!
R: Millions of Dead Cops?
W: No, Medical Doctor and Clown.
R: Ah yes.
W: Some guy played by Robin Williams!
R: Well, who could forget the Eclectic Seizure movie?
W: A blockbuster tearjerker for Seersucker gear-wearers!
R: And a fumbling feelgood film for the post-Xmas generation.
W: I was played by Judge Reinhold in his final role.
R: And I was played by Judge Reinhold right after that.
W: As were we all.
R: Karl Marx!
W: Patch Adams!
R: Claudio Abbado!
W: Remember how we analyzed Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in minutest detail when we were supposed to be grinding out product from the machines at Masterworks, the Folk Art Factory, under the watchful but easily distracted eye of Rocky Nelson?
R: When we discovered that the piece appeared longer than its nine minutes due to its careful retardation of motives, creating a psychological time stretching effect, there wasn’t a dry eye in the factory OR in the studio audience.
W: How about Ronald and Edna?
R: Ohhhh....!!!
W: Don’t get me started!
R: Some say it was Ronald and Edna who ultimately broke up the band. And even for those of us who were there and should know better, it’s hard not to see what they mean.
W: Previously known on the folk-grunge circuit as Richard and Linda Thompson, Ronald and Edna were added to the Eclectic Seizure team at the emphatic urging of the rapacious, powermongering strip programmers on the more-and-more bellicose WEFT board, who dreamed of an uptick in ratings among the alt-rock-crazed youth of the decisively mid-nineties.
R: A foolish move, William, which ultimately led to their downfall.
W: And not a moment too soon.
R: We loved Ronald and Edna. Of course we did.
W: It was written into our contracts!
R: But as soon as the honeymoon was over, and all the chickens had come home to roost, the fur began to fly, literally. And we were left holding the bootstraps.
W: Ronald and Edna wouldn’t stop arguing. They argued over dinner, they argued over lunch,
R: They argued over raisin bran
R & W: And over Captain Crunch.
W: And it wasn’t long before their arguing began to affect the mood of everyone around them.
R: It was contagious! I remember the extreme bouts of jealousy which surrounded the Valentine’s Day present I gave Adam!
W: I remember the midnight power struggles, the lurking accusations, David Fruchter looking daggers over the control board at Jim Zimmerman....
R: I remember how George got into a huge argument with Paul over his amplifier, and the cameras just kept on filming them.
W: You could tell something had to crack.
R: And in the end, what cracked was:
R &W: Little Timmy.
W: Oh, little Timmy! How inexcusably cruel, how achingly heartless, was the world you were plunged unprotected into!
R: Little Timmy, the presumably adopted son of Ronald and Edna, watched his parents grow apart just as if they had ever been together, and as their marriage collapsed outside his thin bedroom door almost nightly, the burning rubble tumbling down around him with the hysterical regularity of Valhalla in a run of Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth, Timmy turned to Eclectic Seizure for help.
W: But Eclectic Seizure was having troubles of its own.
R: The bitterness Ronald and Edna had brought into the studio had spread like hotcakes, and in the ensuing acrimony and recriminations, the Eclectic Guy could no longer conceal his numerous embarrassing financial ties to Coke and AT&T.
W: Plus, the WEFT theme and amusement park, featuring the FLY-WEFT, if not the tallest, certainly the lankiest rollercoaster in the world, was a financial disaster, and WEFT’s programming directors had chosen to deny the obvious and to ignore the equally obvious and headed straight for Venezuela with their Swiss bank accounts frozen in a twisted ice-sculpture of corruption.
R: Mick Woolf called a press conference to declare the recession over, but it was too late.
W: Airshifters were amassing outside the WEFT mansions to demand the resignation of the entire Pacifica board, now headquarted in Houston in the catacombs of the empty Enron Stadium, proving once again that history repeats its repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a miniseries.
R: More than one impoverished airshifter pointed out that the fifty-foot statue of the Eclectic Guy, looming aristocratically over the slums in which we now all lived as if to mock us with its faux dreams of opulence, could easily be pulled down amidst ecstatic street dancing in a staged photo-op organized by the U.S. Army and broadcast all over the world by sniveling media toadies.
W: Who we like to call ‘the Dependent Media,’and who, by the way, work in the Dependent Media Center and are always making rude phone calls to the Independent Media Center down the street.
R: Fortunately, nothing like the statue scenario ever took place anywhere.
W: But in the midst of this mayhem, Little Timmy ‘
R: Remember Little Timmy?
W: ‘ Little Timmy found in the world of Eclectic Seizure only a cold, icy reflection of what his tormented home life had become ‘ or indeed, had always been.
R: Oh, Little Timmy! How cruelly we neglected you in your time of need! How our garishly colorized fantasies of pretty-greatness and relative fame blinded us to the realities you saw so starkly and clearly, and would later write about so persuasively vividly in your best-selling self-help memoir which I haven’t actually read yet!
W: Little Timmy, we know we owe you an apology. It haunts us every day.
R: And if only I could go back and do it again, William, I’d go back, and I’d do it again, with more emphasis, on different words.
W: Little Timmy, age five, checked out of the spiral of self-destruction which community radio theater had become,
R: and into the Betty Ford Coppola Clinic for people under Four Feet Tall who have had it up to here.
W: And when we saw what had happened to Little Timmy,
R: it was then we knew, that something had to change.
W: We began to get our lives in order.
R: I became a major league interspecies basketball goalie!
W: And I became a Hound for a Baskerville startup team!
R: And as for the rest,
W: Where are they now?
R: Adam Cain is once again in charge of encrypting Opera Seasons at the Met!
W: Rishi Zutshi is a cheese taster for the International Criminal Court!
R: Sam Markewich won the lottery and became the only surviving member of ‘YES’!
W: Ben Blanchard designs custom leashes for dogs on the go!
R: The list goes dangerously on.
W: Ronald and Edna formed a startup company and a shutdown company for all the business needs of Silicon Valley!
R: And Little Timmy wowed the talkshow circuit in a whirlwind tour following the publication of his billion-selling self-help auto-page-turning memoir, which topped the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, perhaps as a result of the fact that it was the ONLY book published last year, but also certainly because of its endearing and very timely title which all America can say along with me: ‘Surviving Childhood as the Son of One Workaholic Parent and One Parent who Doesn’t Seem to Ever Do Anything.’
W: And the rest,
R: as they say,
R & W: Is History.
W: Folks, this is the last Eclectic Seizure.
R: The last ever!
W: We hope you’ve enjoyed the show, as we have,
R: to the exclusion of everything else.
W: You won’t have the Eclectic Guy to kick around any more!
R: But we still have the memories!
W: Memories!
R: To kick around!
W: Ah, memories.
R: Yes, memories.