A Star Is Born
“Joseph, you wanna anchor the news?”
It took me fully thirty seconds to realize that she meant tonight. Did I want to anchor the news tonight? I had volunteered to do it eventually, at some nonspecific future date, but I’d never even seen a radio newscast happen live, let alone try to anchor one.
I am not, it turns out, a prodigy. I always sort of wondered if maybe I’d step into the studio and discover that I was just preternaturally good at being on the radio, but it turns out that there’s some technical stuff I’m not very good at. When you finish reading a news story, you’re supposed to point at your co-anchor, or at the engineer, so that they can know you’re done and it’s time to fire some tape or read the next story.
The worst . . . no, the second-worst. The second-worst was when I got caught up trying to remember who I was supposed to point to and flubbed the hell out of a really long story about something. It was pure vertigo, like a dream in which you’re riding shotgun in a car that’s crashing, but then you realize, no, I’m not riding shotgun, I’m supposed to be driving this thing! I have no memory of what the story was about. But I did get through it. Eventually.
I’m not sure I made it all the way through any single story without stumbling. I imagine this is the sort of thing that improves with practice, but I kept getting stuck on simple words, words I say all the time, having to say them once or twice before they made sense to me. The feeling of vertigo did disippate after a while. That was good. Eventually I kind of forgot that there might be people listening, which I imagine is both good and bad.
The worst, though, was launching into a story that either (A) I had written, only to discover it had been substantially altered on edit; or (B) I had written, only to discover that someone had just thrown away the copy and re-written it, worse. I mean, composition class-level bad sometimes, verbs and nouns not agreeing, subjects of news stories referred to by their first names . . . I almost wish I could just brandish one of my degrees at someone and go, Yo. Don’t fuck with my story. I already wrote it better than you could ever imagine.
My co-anchor — who am I kidding, she was really the anchor, I was just there to fill up space while she was gathering her thoughts — turned out to be a local Catholic school product who graduated a year after I did. After we did this, we eyed each other for a while, and collectively decided we might have known one another once, almost twenty years ago. Not very well. That was strange. It’s a small town, this.