Driving Erotically

Have you ever have one of those moments when you're driving along and you think of something funny from the past, and you laugh out loud (that's "LOL" for you kids), despite the fact that your windows are down and there are other people around and your radio isn't even on? Sure you have. It was a rhetorical question.

I had one of those moments in the car yesterday. Something triggered my brain into thinking about my early years as a radio DJ while I was in high school. I can usually control most of those memories with the proper medication.

Back in 1985 I worked part-time as a DJ for our town's little radio station. And from time to time I had to read the news, which wasn't exactly my strong point. Let's just come out and say it: I sucked at it.

It's not like I couldn't read, it's just that I would get really nervous about reading news and I'd wind up reading things at a lightning pace, and oftentimes my brain would come up with radically different words than the ones written in front of me.

One day I was reading a story about a traffic accident where someone had crashed their car into a 10-point buck. For some bizarre reason, each time I read "10-point buck" in the story, my brain twisted it into "10-point duck," which would be an entirely different animal.

People in town would never admit that they listened to the local radio station. If you did a survey, most residents would probably deny that they even knew the town had a radio station. But strangely enough, the day of the 10-point duck episode, every single radio in town was apparently tuned in. I'm guessing that the station was being piped in through speakers around the town just to be sure that everyone was able to hear me say that one.

I walked into one of my classes the following day, and the teacher literally started laughing so hard she was crying. She couldn't even speak for several minutes as the rest of the class sat there, wondering what was going on. Eventually she gathered enough composure to say, "10-POINT DUCK!!" and the rest of the class erupted with laughter since they were all apparently listening at that moment, too.

On another occasion, I was reading a story about someone who had been arrested for driving erratically. But my mind must have been somewhere entirely different as I said that the person had been "driving erotically." I'm sure that put some interesting mental pictures into the minds of the listeners.

Things could have been much worse, though. I had a good friend who used to read our school's morning announcements from time to time. One day she repeatedly mispronounced the name of a local baseball venue over the school's PA system. Let's just say that she gave Kuntz Field a whole new meaning…