Conclusion

Well, I guess I’m still pretty new to this whole radio thing. But I gotta say, two old farts, reluctantly resigning themselves to the changing times, while still harboring the faint flames of rebellion deep within their hearts—that pathos… mmm. That’s the stuff.

—Koda Minare, Nami yo Kiitekure (Wave, Listen to Me!) chapter 44, “Nothing Lasts Forever,” 2020

“We Have to Give Them the Chance”

On November 17, 2024, an audience of over one hundred seated spectators and unknowably more radio listeners gathered at the John and Linda Whikehart Auditorium or around their radios and internet-capable devices for Keep Bloomington Weird!,[1] the latest installment of the Firehouse Follies. A variety show featuring skits, music, and narration, the Follies’ first show was written and performed in 2007, a simultaneous live broadcast on WFHB and in-person theater production. Independent from WFHB, the Follies as an organization has nonetheless always been aired on, sponsored by, and named for the station, as well as housed in the John Waldron Arts Center, where WFHB’s facilities are located. Its productions showcase the talents of a handful of mostly local writers, actors, and musicians of varying experience. After the death of its founder and executive producer, “Colonel” Mike Kelsey, in 2019 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shortly thereafter, the Follies went on hiatus until the fall of 2023. Keep Bloomington Weird! marked a full year since the Follies’ return. Since the show preempted one of my usual on-air shifts, producer Richard Fish, a WFHB volunteer since before the station was on the air, graciously compensated me with a ticket to the in-person show.

Though Bloomington was finally experiencing the beginnings of a long-delayed autumn chill, it was stifling in the Waldron’s upper-level auditorium that Sunday afternoon. Walking to find a seat, I could feel every individual light beaming down, and as more showgoers filled in the bleacher seats, it only grew stuffier. I took a seat in the front row, where most seats had been blocked off with blue tape, not because they were reserved but because, as Rich explained, the acoustics were better in the back (where, I noticed, the heat was the most oppressive). This was not a large room. When lead engineer and “semi-retired” WFHB volunteer Jim Lang called Jar and me backstage, it only took a few steps to get from seats to and through the “stage,” which was level with the front row of seats. Once we were backstage in what looked to be a barely-tucked-away dressing room, Jim showed us his setup: a monitor with video feed, a set of speakers, a codec device for streaming the show over the internet to the station for broadcasting, and a Midas-brand mixing board through which he could control the levels of various microphones and make a multi-track recording of the whole show. It was a compact setup, but even so, the environs were too spartan to contain it all: Jim had the mixer extending from the built-in wall ledge onto an ironing board at almost the same height, an especially homemade touch (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1: Jim Lang shows Jar and me his engineering setup backstage at Keep Bloomington Weird!

Figure 5.2: Promotional flyer for Firehouse Follies production Keep Bloomington Weird!

For about half an hour before the show began, Rich spoke to the in-person audience about the history of radio theater, positioning the Follies as a continuation of traditions that have been baked into radio since its introduction as a domestic technology, providing entertainment and relatively timely social commentary. He mentioned such foundational figures as Norman Corwin and Orson Welles as well as the decades-later surreal humorists of the Firesign Theatre. As he recounted these histories and associated anecdotes, he checked his watch to stay on track for a 2:00 PM start. In the early days of radio theater, he reminded us, performers were always beholden to the second hand of the clock, and time was just as essential to the Follies. Rich tuned in to the radio with a large pair of headphones as the top of the hour grew closer, and as he heard the board operator on the air at WFHB introduce the Follies, he cued the live foley artists and local musician Kid Kazooey’s Four-Alarm Orchestra. A brief musical fanfare and the sound of tires screeching cued the Mighty Firehouse Art Players to begin a chant of “Keep Bloomington weird!”

The premise of this introductory sketch was straightforward enough; a news reporter character, Bora Ingrown, was covering a demonstration in downtown Bloomington’s People’s Park made up of locals committed to an idea of Bloomington as weird and afraid it was losing this quality. After some interrogation on Bora’s part and rapid-fire pun exchanges between the entire crew, the demonstrators explained further their ideas of weirdness (demonstrator numbers designated by me):

Demonstrator 1: Look, Bloomington is changing. Kirkwood Avenue isn’t what it used to be. It’s been invaded by a bunch of cookie cutter chain restaurants!

Demonstrator 2: Right; in the old days, the city would have made Starbucks swap locations with Needmore Coffee Roasters.

Demonstrator 1: I saw a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt at one of these upscale shops and it was scaled up, all right! They wanted 57 dollars! I got my Jimi Hendrix t-shirt in 1969 for two bong hits and a strand of love beads!

[Audience laughs]

Demonstrator 3: Bloomington’s known for being a little... scruffy, but people here are smart, talented, and sophisticated. It’s a super cool place to live!

Demonstrator 1: Yes, and in the Midwest... that’s weird!³ [Audience laughs] Come on, everybody, what do we want?

Demonstrator 4: More weirdness!

Demonstrator 5: Organized anarchy!

Demonstrator 6: Hemp-flavored ice cream!

Demonstrator 3: Ethical treatment for molecules!

Demonstrator 2: One organism, one vote!

Demonstrator 7: Make Shalooby’s real!

Demonstrator 8: Subscribe to my YouTube channel! [pause, audience laughs] What?

The demonstrators and Bora were then joined by a new character promising change:

I’ve just come from the mayor’s office. She’s been listening on the radio and she hears what you’re saying! [Demonstrators cheer] She’s hired me to make sure that Bloomington stays weird! [Demonstrators cheer] That’s right, folks, I’m with Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. We’re consultants! We solve—we’ll help you solve a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you can’t understand! How weird is that? We’ve already got $90,000 in billable hours scheduling more roadwork on big weekends! [Audience laughs] And now the mayor’s on board with giving everyone in government a raise! [Demonstrators start to cheer, then groan] And... trying to annex more land into the city! [Audience murmurs] All right... well, that’s just back of the envelope stuff.

The sketch ended with a ‘plan’:

Consultant: Here’s my elevator pitch for how to keep Bloomington weird.

Demonstrator 3: What are you going to do that’s worth 90,000 dollars?

Consultant: I’m going to say... live from the Whikehart Kelsey Cassandra Kazooey auditorium high atop beautiful downtown Bloomington, Indiana, it’s the Firehouse Follies!

[Music begins, audience cheers]

I interpret some of these points in their broader local contexts below, along with descriptions of how I experienced audience reactions while sitting in the auditorium. Audiences mostly indicated agreement (through laughter, applause, and sometimes even directly affirmative shouts) with the following points:

Not all lines received as clear of a response:

In less than five minutes, the Mighty Firehouse Art Players drew audiences near and far into their struggle for a unique local identity. Though their jokes lampooned multiple perspectives (“hemp-flavored ice cream” and “ethical treatment for molecules,” for example, served as especially exaggerated caricatures of an imagined socially and politically progressive Bloomington archetype), the final lines of the skit not only introduced the Follies but presented them as a bulwark of Bloomington weirdness.

I include some of the text of this opening sketch because it offers a plethora of insights into some of the layers that make up local identity in Bloomington: politics, economics, physical space, virtual space, sociality, and a tense relationship to its broader geographic setting. Simply reading a transcript, though, offers only partial insight into the capacity of community radio performances to shape and express different configurations of these layers. The Firehouse Follies assemblage, comprised of scripts, writers, actors, musicians, announcers, sound artists, engineers, in-person audiences, at-home audiences, and technologies connecting them all through earth and ether, is meant to be experienced not in the form of the isolated written word but as a performance event defined by dimensions of sound, space, and time. It is experienced differently by in-person and over-the-air listeners, but it is meant for both, following in long traditions of live radio theater: before the show and during breaks, a producer gave instructions to those of us in the Waldron to help enhance the radio listening experience, such as asking us to clap twice as fast as we normally would to make the audience presence sound stronger on the air.

Dimensions of sound, space, and time in this performance are impossible to pin down in any complete and certain way, even for me as an audience member (and ethnographer) physically in attendance at the show. For one, witnessing the show in person, focused on the events in front of and around me, was only one way to attend to it. Others may have been tuning in simultaneously on their radios or via the station’s online stream, perhaps specifically for the Follies or perhaps not. Some may have been hoping to tune in for the regularly scheduled program, Planetary Caravan, while others may simply have been turning the dial and landed however briefly on WFHB. More still might have sought it out on the WFHB website after its initial airing for on-demand playback, which was what I did to verify the above transcriptions. In its broadcast/archival form, the audience feedback was much less audible than in person, with only the loudest and most unanimous laughter typically making it to the airwaves. Further, trouble with the equipment relaying the production to the radio transmitter meant that the first half-hour or so of the program sounded grainier in quality than in real life, an issue I confirmed with other listeners who had tuned in from a distance. Another obstacle to full knowability, insurmountable in its own way, is my own subjectivity as an audience participant with ties to Bloomington. How trustworthy are my above descriptions of audience reactions? To what extent was I influenced by my own opinions on the issues at the core of the parody?

I raise these issues not because they need to be resolved but because they and the Follies production as a whole speak to exactly the kinds of questions and frictions that are often present in community radio, calling back to mind ideas of collectivities that I discuss in the introduction: the turbulence that Muñoz (2020) cites as vital to a thriving brown commons, the often conflictual mobilizations that Beliso-De Jesús (2015) describes in discussing her expansive understanding of assemblage theory, and the unintended emergence characteristic of Holland’s (1992) complex adaptive systems. Ultimately, the complexities and tensions within community radio systems are simultaneously great strengths and major challenges for organizations aimed at complicating top-down notions of what it means to belong in local, national, and global spheres. Along these lines, it is worth analyzing a note inside the program booklet for Keep Bloomington Weird!

Figure 5.3: A note from Firehouse Follies producer Richard Fish inside the paper program for Keep Bloomington Weird! Picture clearly taken at the show, with lights overhead making the shadow of my cell phone very visible.

It read:

Hello! And THANK YOU for coming out for our Firehouse Follies broadcast!

The original Firehouse Follies variety show was created in 2007 by the late Mike Kelsey. Mike was a wonderful person with a great many friends. He produced the Follies, booked the talent, chose the themes, served as head writer, made all the arrangements, handled the financing…it was very much his vision and his show.

Today we have a new and expanded vision. The Follies is a collective, collaborative group effort, aimed at a much wider—and younger—audience. It’s a celebration of diversity, a showcase for the best talent that can be found in our area—all ages, all genders, all varieties of family heritage.

Last time, we had some listeners literally from coast to coast, and we can attract a very large audience by using the internet, and offering the show as a podcast. Because audio theatre is the most cost-effective performance art in the world, we believe the Follies can succeed on a surprisingly small budget.

Aside from putting on shows that get better and better, and having a LOT of fun along the way, the Firehouse Follies can benefit the whole community. We have an amazing pool of world-class talent, who deserve wider exposure…and a wonderful community that deserves more attention, and more investment, from the rest of the world.

The Firehouse Follies needs wider support, and more people to join in the organization. Thanks again for coming out, and what do you know—and who do you know—to help make the Follies a major success?

Richard Fish, Producer

Rich’s note encapsulates many of the major organizational and social phenomena inherent in community radio in the United States today, especially when taken in tandem with the show’s opening sketch. Community radio is often associated with antiquated concepts and technologies even as its participants work to push it forward, and the dedication of its longstanding volunteers can sometimes overshadow engaging possibilities for newer people who have not previously been interested or felt welcome in such spaces. WFHB as a station and affiliated programs like the Follies and WFHB’s Youth Radio, the latter of which recruits participants ages 13-19 and teaches them to produce their own work for the station’s airwaves, work to widen the metaphorical net of people who are familiar with and parts of the station assemblage. These are initiatives that require significant work to sustain, but which are vital parts of achieving community radio’s goals of encouraging a more diverse and expansive vision of community. These programs at WFHB and equivalent programs at other stations are worth deep future study.

At this point, I find it important to return to Lorenzo Milam’s NARK 2 keynote speech, in particular his argument for realigning the conference’s priorities away from focusing too much on economic capital and toward the idea of cultivating a space for volunteers of all kinds: “We have to make them welcome at our stations, no matter who they are. We have to at least try to give them contact with the air. We have to give them the chance to talk through our transmitter. And some of them are gonna talk funny and some of them are gonna talk bad and some of them are gonna talk wonderful, and we’ve gotta give them all a chance.”

We’ve gotta give them all a chance. The jokes and beats may not all land, the aesthetics and practices may be ad hoc, and the textures may be mismatched, but they are all interconnected in a complex radiophonic system the goal of which is to foster and transmit a grassroots vision of the local that feels like an inclusive, imperfect, turbulent kind of community and resonates with as many listeners as possible.

[1] As of this writing, the episode is available for on-demand listening at the following link: https://wfhb.org/the-firehouse-follies-keep-bloomington-weird/