It was Tuesday, November 1<\/strike> 8, 1988.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although I fully expected to be moving to New York before too terribly long, I’d long since learned that job leads weren’t a gift horse you could look in the mouth.\u00a0 And there was a station in the east suburbs that wanted to talk with me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The program director was a guy who’d audibly lit up when I called, the previous Friday.\u00a0 “You’re Mitch Berg? <\/em>From the Don Vogel<\/em> show?”\u00a0\u00a0 He’d been a huge fan.\u00a0 He’s also heard my old weekend graveyard show – he’d caught it on the way to do his own airshift a few times.\u00a0 In fact, we had met, at one Don Vogel remote or another.<\/p>\n “I’d love to talk with you!”.\u00a0 He hosted the station’s morning show, and he wanted a news guy\/sidekick type.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sure, I was interested.\u00a0 Anything to get me out of the bars, until something in New York came through.<\/p>\n He gave me directions to a bar in Stillwater for Tuesday at 1PM.<\/p>\n Election day.<\/p>\n “Yeah”, he laughed when I quizzed him, “the bar is <\/em>open on election day.\u00a0 It’s kinda ‘under the table”, he said, audibly nudging and winking.<\/p>\n And so I drove out to Stillwater.\u00a0 I took a right off of Highway 36 and drove down a frontage road that led to the bar – the Club Tara, a funky-looking little roadhouse.\u00a0<\/p>\n I walked into the bar.\u00a0 “Miiiiiitch!”, the program director – a very Minnesotan-looking fellow in his early fifteis – yelled, waving.\u00a0 He had a half-empty pitcher and a big basket of fries on the table in front of him.\u00a0 Another guy, thin, sharp-faced and younger than me, sat with him.\u00a0 Both were nursing beers, although seemingly nursing them pretty quickly.<\/p>\n I sat.\u00a0 The program director introduced me to his Operations Manager.\u00a0 We chatted for close to an hour – mostly about politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.<\/p>\n The Ops guy checked out, and another guy – the Sales Manager, another, pudgier guy in his late twenties, checked in.\u00a0 We talked for about an hour and a half, polishing off another pitcher and a plate of mini burgers in the process as we talked about…politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.<\/p>\n It was about 3:30 when the Sales Manager left – just as another sales person, this one\u00a0Cathy, a\u00a0mildly zaftig and plenty-cute mid-twentysomething woman with light auburn hair and in high heels, walked in.\u00a0 We sat until 6PM, knocking off probably a pitcher and a half between us, talking about…yep, politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.\u00a0 Oh, I may have flirted a bit; Cathy lived in Saint Paul, as luck’d have it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, we all had to leave; the three of us talked until close to 7PM in the parking lot, exchanged business cards, and promised to call later.\u00a0<\/p>\n I took the back roads back to Saint Paul that night.\u00a0<\/p>\n I followed up a few times in the next year; they never quite <\/em>got the money bit worked out.<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 D’oh.\u00a0 As Flash points out in the comments, Nov 1 was not election day – November 8 was.\u00a0 I forgot that election day was the first Tuesday after <\/em>the first Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n I get the dates (and, occasionally, info) for\u00a0some of these “20 Years Ago” bits from various notebooks and journals I wrote over the years.\u00a0 Others, I reconstruct from proximity to other events.\u00a0 This’d be one of them; there was a long, sloppy loopy job interview at a bar on election day – whatever the date was.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Tuesday, November 1 8, 1988.\u00a0 Although I fully expected to be moving to New York before too terribly long, I’d long since learned that job leads weren’t a gift horse you could look in the mouth.\u00a0 And there was a station in the east suburbs that wanted to talk with me.\u00a0 The program […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}