A. Joni

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was an invulnerable seventeen-year-old. What could possibly go wrong? The plan was solid: Joni Mitchell was playing at Yale, an easy 45-minute drive. Court and Spark had just been released and I really wanted to see this stuff live. (Footnote: her best album, by my reckoning).

The flaw in the plan was one that has brought down everyone from Nazis (Stalingrad) to first graders (rain on field day): the weather; specifically, sleet. In Connecticut, in 1974, there was plenty, and it was in especially abundant supply in New Haven, during the evening of February 2, 1974. I was wearing only jeans, a shirt, and a corduroy sport jacket, because, um, fashion would not yield to trivia like 34-degree darkness and what the weather guys like to call

“mixed precipitation.”

I also had not anticipated that we would be standing in line for over 2 hours. I remember talking to people in line that night. “If Joni knew that we were standing out here in the sleet, she’d let us in.” Right. Like Joni Mitchell gave a shit. Result: transcendent show on the one hand; strep throat on the other. And that began my time in the Red Room.

The Red Room was a bizarre anomaly. Our house had been decorated to within an inch of its life by my mom. Every room had scrupulously chosen wallpaper, furniture, and carpeting, except the Red Room. The Red Room was the smallest bedroom in the 5-bedroom house. It was also called, in the parlance of the day, the “maid’s room,” because we had a never-ending succession of live-in housekeepers (in the parlance of our day).

We called it the Red Room because it had a deep scarlet, fuzzy carpet, that was the color of new blood mixed with old blood and matched absolutely nothing else in the house. It’s as if my mom had spent weeks with decorators, painters and designers, and when the time came to do that room, she ran out of steam and just said, “fuck it”; closed her eyes, and pointed to a carpet sample held in front of her by an unscrupulous carpet salesman looking to dump a remnant. The result: a room with disturbing carpet, stark old furniture (you know, for the maids) and one thing that my bedroom across the hall sorely lacked: the sun.

My own bedroom faced north. It was cold and sorta dark. So, when I scored my strep throat, and was out of school for almost 3 weeks, I decided to move across the hall into the Red Room. It was warm during the day. It was bright. Weirdly, nobody in the family seemed to notice that suddenly, I had taken up residence there. We no longer had live-in help, so the room was vacant. And some of the best nights in my life were spent there.

Here’s what sometimes happens to me: when I’m sick, or on vacation, my internal clock gets all screwed up. I’ll wind up staying up until all hours. The strep made it difficult to swallow, and so I had a tough time sleeping. For late-night entertainment, I took to the airwaves. Of course, this was pre-internet, and everything ever written, recorded, painted or created was not available on instantaneous demand. Instead, at 12:30 a.m., all that TV had to offer were test patterns (remember those?). So, I tried the radio, and that was when it all began.

B. Jean

There is a romance and a mystery to the radio that is, I am afraid, something that our kids will never experience, because the Internet has rendered distance and geography irrelevant to what you can know and experience. A YouTube/Tik-Tok video might as well be posted from next door; from Terre Haute; or from Mumbai, for all it matters. No longer is the availability of information a function of where you live.

We have traded the thrill of the hunt for the certainty and breadth of result. In 1974 New England, though, the world was a much narrower place. AM radio, at night, would snare faraway places. How exotic to hear local advertisements for stores in Cleveland that I would never see, or to learn about people in Buffalo that I would never meet! But what made my time in the Red Room memorable to me was what I found on FM radio: stories. On WGBH, in Boston.

WGBH is a public radio station. I was able, by constant tweaking of my analog dial (sigh), to listen, very late at night, at a time when they would broadcast stories. I felt a bit late to the party. Late at night, they were broadcasting Jean Shepherd. He’s best known for the movie “A Christmas Story.” (“You’ll shoot your eye out”). There was no introduction; no context. Instead, here was this gruff but loquacious guy telling stories of growing up in the 20’s

in the Midwest, talking about his friends as though I were expected to know who they were. Soon enough, though, I caught on. The stories were hilarious, first person and told like we were having a beer together. I was hooked. One of my enduring memories is falling asleep to Jean Shepherd stories.

As if that weren’t great enough, WGBH started to broadcast chapters of “The Hobbit”, read aloud as a sort of break between chapters of Jean Shepherd. The whole house was asleep, hushed and unaware of the pictures being painted just down the hall. It was the most silent of rebellions.

In the film “Inception”, we learn that one of the characteristics of a dream is that you aren’t aware of the dream beginning. My 3 weeks in the Red Room are like that in reverse: I don’t exactly remember it ending. When did I move back into my room? When did I stop listening to stories in the dark? I’m not sure. Life went on. I got better, went back to school, and resumed my normal life in my own room, in the front of the house. Because my sleep patterns righted themselves, no longer was I awake at the wee small hours to hear this stuff. And, to be honest, it felt that my auditory late-night adventures were of a piece of the Red Room, and needed to be left behind once normalcy re-emerged and I rejoined the land of the living.

But I never got over listening to stories in the dark, broadcast by guys from far away. Now, it’s podcasts that have filled the breach. And though, sure, we all love to Google stuff, I cannot help but feel that something has been lost. Back then, there was the thrill of finding something I wasn’t exactly meant to find, but which is all too easily found today.

There was the slightest twist of a dial. There was the dim green glow of my receiver. And there was the world, that, for 3 weeks, inhabited the Red Room every night.

Peter Rustin and his wife Leslie recently moved from Los Angeles to Peter’s native Connecticut, with their three rather intelligent cats. Peter is an attorney practicing remotely with his firm in Los Angeles. He plays guitar badly and drums decently. His work has been published in the Arboreal Literary Journal.