The song on the radio winds down and finishes. Silence. Where’s the deejay? Where’s the next song? Nothing. Just silence.
We called it “dead air,” back in the broadcasting days. They probably don’t have it anymore, since most programming is accomplished by human-assisted computers. For some reason, even after all these years, I still have nightmares about the silence.
Last night, the scene was pretty chaotic (like most nightmares, I suppose) and the song was running out and I grabbed a pair of headphones and put them on, ready to talk my way out of the disaster.
“It’s partly cloudy and 78 degrees,” I said to my nightmare audience. “We’re looking for a high today of 85.” It was all a lie. In my dream, I was just making it all up. You say anything to avoid dead air.
“Where are all the records?” I remember asking whoever it was in the control room with me. The truth is, all the records are in flea markets and collectible malls. Records – those round vinyl things that look like CDs but are usually black and groovy in the old-fashioned groove sort of way – well…records only make appearances these days (or nights) in bad dreams.
A fellow radio-employee told me once he had similiar nightmares. He was a newsman and in his dream he’d be in the booth awaiting the start of the newscast and looked down to see that there was nothing in his hands, no copy to read. No news.
It turns out, he was a fortune teller and those dreams were just forecasting the state of the business some years down the road.
No news is good news, these days. Except for sleeping former broadcasters.
For your own night movies:
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