October, 1997: October usually is a busy month for me, and this one was true to form.
My first trip of the month was to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where I conducted a full-day programming seminar (How To Critique Air Talent, The Great PD Challenge, Radical Station Imaging) for the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. This was the third year in a row the WBA brought to me Wisconsin for such an event.
The seminars went quite well, but the trip itself produced two small inconveniences:
1. I lost my luggage cart at the airport in Wisconsin.
When I arrived, it was raining, and I recall struggling to maneuver all of my stuff to the car rental shuttle bus. Somehow I managed to leave my trusty cart behind.
Yes, I did check with the airport’s Lost & Found prior to returning to Los Angeles. Yes, they did have a luggage cart that someone had lost. No, it wasn’t mine.
2. During this trip, I had been reading IN EVIL HOUR by Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is a spell-binding yet demanding author; he requires the reader’s full concentration. (His 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE wins my vote for World’s Greatest Novel.)
As I settled into my airline seat for the flight to Chicago (which would connect to a second flight to L.A.), I was proud to have completed the first half of the book.
I was on Page 122. Turning the page, I was confused by the next sentence. I turned back to re-read the last paragraph, then returned to the new page.
Still it made no sense.
Had I accidentally skipped a page? No.
But it turned out the book I had so carefully selected as my travelling companion had been misprinted: It skipped from Page 122 to Page 155.
With Márquez, you can get lost if you overlook a single sentence. A 33-page gap? Forget it. Sadly, I put down the book and picked up the somewhat less compelling in-flight magazine.
