The show has good chemistry, with Carrie Cougan playing Johnny's too straight pal, T (in the role of Mancow's Tard) playing the defensive one, etc. But anyway, the 'show' mainly consists of people who have a book or a movie to hype submitting to phone interviews in between the banter of the host and crew.
So I'm listening this morning, and Johnny's 'friend' Dana was in the studio with a baby monkey. I'm half asleep, keep in mind, so I'm going, Yeah, cute baby monkey, blah blah.
Then Johnny is telling a story about how one of Dana's other monkeys, a Macack, kicked his ass a few years back. Still, at best, this is mildly distracting.
John tells about what a man of adventure Dana is, a former bounty hunter, a sometime private investigator...
Then Johnny starts in about how Dana taught him to skydive. About a drop zone over Harrisonville.
And I realized, I know that dude. I ate at a Denny's with the guy as follow up to the time I went skydiving for a write-up.
I even remember the damn monkey, hanging out in the hangar in it's diaper (an adult, but you gotta keep things contained sometimes).
The write-up was the yellow journalism of a couple jobs back. We published singles papers, shoppers, tabloid political rags, and I wrote in addition to design, layout, even delivery duties.
The deal was, a restaurant would buy a full page ad and we'd make a quarter page ad and run a three quarter page 'review' of the restaurant in which I, under the banner 'The Frugal Gourmand' would tell the reader how awesome a particular restaurant was. This was whether it was awesome, like The Grill on Broadway (remember that line from Ferris Bueller: 'we ate pancreas?'), or whether I wondered if the food-born illness I was about to get might be life threatening. Sometimes I ate well beyond my tax bracket, sometimes the meal was more or less a dare.
So when our alcoholic lead salesperson, a woman who would later be the first person tried under Missouri's felony animal cruelty law for murdering a family of cats in front of her five year old son, came back with Horizon Skydiving on the hook for a page, I was volunteered to review a skydiving school.
I think Vickie was disappointed that I didn't resist. She had a sadistic streak a mile wide (see the fate of those kittens who wouldn't box train fast enough), and I think when she told Dana I'd jump out of a plane without consulting me on the decision, she hoped I'd be somewhat reluctant.
But I was, Hey, I always wanted to do that. Never thought about it, but now that I have, that's an itch I gotta scratch.
And it was a really good skydiving school. They did NOT say 'this is a safe thing.' I've seen ads for other schools that say it's 'safe, fun, and easy to learn.' Fun, yes. Easy to learn, relatively, but safe?
There are more dangerous things: downhill skiing, scuba diving, etc., many of which people think nothing of, but in now way is skydiving safe. Besides the death thing, a friend who paid to go with me (mine was covered) sprained his ankle badly on landing. His insurance paid nothing because he was engaged in an idiotic pursuit (I think that's actually the industry term), so he put his ankle on his credit card. This was fourteen years ago and the guy still has a limp. For real. And the mistake he made was one they warned us about thirty times or so in in the eight hour course prior to the jump.
An instructor at the school, I remember, talked of having nightmares about falling to his death. And a real fear of heights. He ate dirt a couple years later and the school went out of business because even though he'd been jumping for 22 years and packed his own 'chute, it's a litigious society.
Anyways, I'm sure Dana doesn't remember me, but I sure as hell remember him. And his weird monkey.
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