Wednesday, May 02, 2007

A Hard Chair

I've been thinking about this melancholy poem over the past week. I kept it for a few years before letting it be published. A Hard Chair has a dedicatee, Lou "The Duck" D'Antonio, a WFMU godfather now doing a Sunday night jazz program in Vermont. The poem is a concentrated homage to Lou's masterful microphone style. He could build an entertaining, thoughtful monologue out of almost nothing. But the poem is also a personal joke.

For years, WFMU had a squeaky, uncomfortable office chair in the studio - it was a tradition, nobody ever tried to oil out the squeak, we were fond of it. At some point, back in the 1980s, the station acquired a few bulky, conference room type chairs, on casters, with arm rests, quite comfortable. They weren't intended for the studio & were impractical for that purpose, taking up a lot of space while limiting movement. Occasionally, a DJ would push one behind the control board, which took some effort. I preceded Lou's late afternoon show, & one day a big soft chair happened to be in the studio. I didn't care for it, but didn't bother making the switch back to the regular squeaky chair for my program. Lou arrived for his show, took a look at me tilted back & relaxing in the spacious seat, & literally kicked the chair, bouncing me about a foot in the air. "Get out of that chair," he commanded. "Poets don't sit in soft chairs when they're working. They sit in hard chairs!" On the spot, while some record was playing, he made me wrestle the big soft chair out of the studio & replace it with the hard, squeaky one. This saved him the trouble of doing it, because he wasn't using a soft chair for his show. In the 10 years we were both at WFMU, it was the only time Lou ever became really annoyed at me. Lou was teacher, I never heard him say an unkind word about his students, who could be a difficult bunch. But I pissed him off. I considered him a mentor, & he mentored me that day.

Eventually, we did away with the squeaky chair, the station manager even apologized for replacing it, but our circumstances had improved to where the chair no longer symbolically expressed WFMU's technical & financial frailties. Yet, there was a squeaky, hard chair in the studio last week, which made me think of this poem.

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