Peas Porridge Hot! Peas Porridge Cold!
Hello friends out there in radioland… I’m Buddy, INO/SRE’s good, well, ‘buddy.’ We’ve been together since way back when… Boy, I could tell you some stories about good ol’ Dan Michaels. (Come to think of it, he can actually tell some pretty fantastic stories about himself! His infamous security check at the Portland Airport certainly comes to mind…)
Anyway, you know those deep, philosophical questions you humans constantly deal with? Like:
- If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound…?
- I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away…
- If you’re robbing a bank and your pants fall down, I think its okay to laugh and to let the hostages laugh too, because, come on, don’t you think that is totally funny…?
- If a man does something wrong and his wife isn’t around to witness it, does he still wind up sleeping on the couch…?
Ya know, tough life questions like that? Well, after listening to Mark Harris’ monster smash (as opposed to “Monster Mash” – fun song! Ha – guess what I went out as for Halloween last year? A fencepost!), “Find Your Wings” which, of course, brought a tear to me eye (hey, even dummies have feelings, too, ya know!), I had a dream last night that I, mere Buddy, was actually interviewing THE Mark Harris himself about this song! Wow, I can still remember the dream, too…
[cue: ascending harp music]
Buddy: That new single of yours – “Find Your Wings” – sure is a heart-melter. Tell our PD friends out in radio land about the time you saved 34 lives on an airplane…
Mark Harris: Yeah, that’s a pretty interesting story. We [4Him] were flying back to Nashville from a one-off concert out in Rapid City, SD. It was a magnificently hot and humid day, like one of those Alabama-fry-an-egg-on-my-forehead kind of days, and we connected in [I think it was West Virginia somewhere] when all of a sudden, about 15 minutes into take-off, the pilot actually faints from heat exhaustion, right there in the cabin…
Buddy: …No! Seriously?
Harris: …Sure, as far as you know...
Buddy: …Go on…
Harris: So the plane – it’s one of those 2-prop dealios – starts going into a power dive; the cockpit’s gyroscope starts flipping around (and we all know how painful THAT can be; am I right, guys?); and the flight attendants start shouting – “Does anybody here know anything about radios? Our communication system’s down!” So Andy [Chrisman] and I calmly look across the aisle from each other and we sort of raise our hands sheepishly. (BTW, Marty just has his head in his hands praying and Kirk’s just keeps on snoozin’ throughout the whole ordeal!) So the flight attendants wave us up front, and we go into the cockpit and it’s just chaos in there! The co-pilot is trying to pull the pilot off the console and he’s wide-eyed, just shouting at us – “Help, our radio’s out, and we need to re-tune the harmonics on our flux capacitor! If only I had a spare tuning fork…! Well, Andy and I look at each other, and I say: ‘Only Thing I Need’? [the 1999? hit song ‘The Only Thing I Need (I Already Have)’ from the Streams project] because there’s a note that Andy and I sing at the end of each pre-chorus: ‘…show me what it means to be free…’, which is a really high ‘A-flat’, even for Andy and me. So we both just started singing that part of the song a cappella at the top of our lungs, hit them high notes, and click – the attenuator on the capacitor starts steadying! The plane levels out, the pilot re-gains control of our craft, looks at us and says: ‘Who ARE you guys?!’ He grabs his radio mic, radios the control tower, and 4 minutes later, we’re making an emergency landing in Smyrna, TN local airport!
Buddy: Holy bat bells, Mark - we didn’t know any of that!
Harris: Yep, still gives me chills every time I re-tell it.
Buddy: Wow, thanks. Amazing story.
Harris: Yeah, man. Hey, you wanna buy a bridge…?