AleVida: Recent Episodes
Alejandro A. Alonso Galva
This summer, I teamed up with University of Wisconsin Professor Catalina Toma to record a podcast all about our relationships and how technology is changing them. You can already hear episodes on 89.9 WORT FM every Wednesday on the 6PM News. In October, we roll out the podcast. Below is a special piece we recorded on video games after the World Health Organization classified them as addictive.
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After a gunman opened fire on DJs at WORT Madison, volunteers at the community radio station began picking up the pieces.
WORT is a Madison community radio station. For the past two years I’ve spent more than 40 hours a week working or volunteering as a producer and reporter. It’s pillar of the Madison community and my home away from home. I put this story together to show the different reactions from folks across the WORT community.
Audio Transcript Below At approximately 3:12 a.m. Sunday morning, a man wearing a mask and hood entered the WORT station and opened fire on three DJs in the broadcast studio.
Witnesses say five shots were fired as the DJs ran from studio to studio looking for cover. One DJ was shot in the backside and a window between studios was left with a large bullet hole. They were able to seek shelter in the vinyl library and call 911.
Madison police officers secured the area, searched for the runaway gunman, and sent the injured DJ to the hospital where he was quickly discharged. The incident ended with only that one minor injury and no fatalities. It also ended with no arrests.
In the meantime, police sealed off the building and the station went radio silent for a few hours as detectives investigated the crime scene.
Yet before police reopened the station, volunteers were already lining up to get WORT back on its feet.
Chali Pittman was one of those volunteers. She showed up after rolling out of bed and hearing dead air on her radio dial, which is always tuned to WORT. She didn’t hesitate to walk down the street and check on a station that she calls her home away from home.
“I feel like that’s one of the great things about WORT. It has this incredible community of people who really care about it and are willing to pitch in at strange hours,” she said.
Eventually, police allowed volunteers back into the studio.
Then at 9:38 a.m, Sunday morning, Board President David Devereaux-Weber went on air to make an announcement regarding the shooting. And WORT returned to regularly scheduled programming.
But just as the station got back on the air, phone calls, Facebook messages, flowers, even food and financial donations started coming into the studio. A statement put out via Facebook was shared 2,000 times.
I was able to sit down with Devereaux-Weber to catch up on the day’s events. He says support from the community and from other media outlets is heartening. “The concept that media in general, and WORT is a great example of this, we provide people with information which helps them make intelligent decisions… The feedback I’m getting from the different media I’ve talked to in the last two days is a concern about how we keep going, how do we keep doing this job?”
He went on to discuss the role volunteers played in getting the station back up and running. “It’s very gratifying. When that happens, you know you’re on the right track. You’re filling a need that’s a real need and you’re filling it in a way that’s useful to people.”
Word continued to spread as the day continued on Sunday, with volunteers reacting to the news in diverse ways.
Just before 3 p.m., Helena White walked into the station to host her world music show, only to discover what had happened. “I was broadcasting out of a studio that had a bullet hole through glass just to my right while I’m broadcasting. It just felt crazy to be broadcasting out of the same room where three people were when somebody came in and were shooting at them.”
Lang Schmitt was the first late night DJ to broadcast after the shooting, taking over the turntables at 2 a.m. Monday morning.
Schmitt was one of many volunteers to leave voicemails with the WORT news team, expressing their feelings and concerns. Along with shock and concern, he wants to make sure people don’t connect the incident to any specific genre of music. He says, “The minute that we blame the genre, that’s some racist dog whistle stuff. Gun violence is an American problem. It was a shooting at a radio station, that’s what’s important.”
Many volunteers responded with concerns over the current political climate, with worries about how elected officials are treating the media, with concerns over gun violence.
One thought on everyone’s mind is security.
Pittman, a late night DJ, says there have been times she’s felt nervous being the only person alone at the station in the late night hours. “I remember doing a show in the middle of the night and feeling kind of freaked that something might happen just because you’re kind of a sitting duck in a radio station.”
Finding that balance between new security challenges and WORT’s core identity as an open, community space is the next challenge.
I checked in with former staffer and Board member Laura Gutknecht. She has been a volunteer for the past 20 years and calls the dilemma a tightrope. “With video cameras and that sort of angle, I don’t want people to feel though that they come near the station and they are under surveillance”, she says. “The security of the volunteers is primary.”
Devereaux-Weber says security changes are coming. He’s getting bids on new locking mechanisms for the doors and more cameras around the building. The station had installed a video camera at the front door for the first time only a few month sago. It was created for receptionists and hosts to see who was outside. But all this will cost money.
Regardless of the challenge, receptionist and WORT Board member Kathy Hoveland believes WORT volunteers have a strong spirit and will overcome this latest challenge.
“We are going to continue to do what we do. I’m a native Madisonian and this is my radio station that I grew older with from the 70’s on… I’m just really, really proud to be a volunteer, ” Hoveland says.
Police have not yet made any arrests in the case and have not identified a suspect.
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My father died 20 years ago. My sister (and fellow journalist) Andrea Alonso wrote a piece about the ways we hold onto him in our memories. Together we crafted her written work into a radio essay.
Death is just the scapegoat.
Time is the real killer.
The day after my dad died, I could still hear his laugh, his funny Cuban accent. I could still see the way he moved his hands when he was thinking.
But 5 years, 10, 20 years later… it’s not as easy. Time finishes off what death couldn’t. We try to hold onto it, but the harder we squeeze the more it slips through our fingers.
These memories can feel as ephemeral as water cupped in your hand.
Psychologists say when you lose your arm it takes just 60 days for your body to realize it doesn’t have that arm anymore– what they call the phantom limb syndrome. The body processes and disregards. Pretty much the opposite of what you want to happen when someone close dies. Just 60 days… what happens when decades pass?
Today is the 20 year anniversary of my father’s death– a car accident. We had breakfast on Saturday morning, by that afternoon he was gone.
I can picture my dad sitting, one ankle resting solidly on the opposite knee, his left hand bringing a thick cigar to and from his lips rhythmically. His favorite songs play on the stereo behind him.
As the years pass he never seems to be as concrete anymore. Sometimes I picture him at our old kitchen table or on our back porch, the creaking chair moving back and forth, high-pitch, low-pitch, high-pitch, low-pitch. The best is when he sits in our living room, the apricot-tinged leather chair molding to fit his body as he taps a cigar on the thick glass ashtray nearby—the ashtray that never moved, even long after he was gone and it no longer served a practical purpose anymore.
He’s there. Sometimes it’s a faint. And sometimes it’s just a blind feeling.
I hold onto these snapshot memories, some faded, others sharpened through invented projections. Twenty years later I struggle to find pieces of my father in the lines and the notes of each day. But when I do they are reminders of his existence, an existence that defies the absence brought upon by death.
I’m four. It’s 8 PM and we are sitting down for dinner. My mom insists we wait for dad to come home before we eat each night. This time he stops for Chinese food on the way home. I can’t read yet so when he opens my fortune cookie he tells me it says “Andrea es la niña más bella del mundo,” … “Andrea is the most beautiful girl in the world.” I know he’s pretending, but I pretend to believe him.
In the next memory it’s late at night, well past my bedtime. I’m five. My dad is lying face up on the floor, his feet lift me up into the air transforming me into a miniature airplane. My mom shakes her head, smiling.
“You need to go to bed,” she says.
“But I’m flying!” I yell back.
It’s two days later, February 7, 1998. I’m still five. And my mom brings me to the doorway of his hospital room. I look at him, motionless, underneath impeccably white sheets, shrouded with machinery. Mom tells me to speak to him, to give him a kiss goodbye.
But an oxygen mask has turned him into a robot. A stranger. I don’t speak. I give an emotionless kiss on the cheek. His skin is cold and rough and foreign. I hate how quiet it is, I hate how dark the room is, I hate that my mom is watching, I hate being here, but mostly, I hate that I understand what is happening, yet I can’t understand how to act. This is the last time I see my dad. And I say nothing.
If he would have waited three weeks, he would have seen me turn six.
When you’re that young, there’s not a lot of memories to fall back on. So you look for glimpses in the present day.
And once you have a glimpse, it becomes almost impossible to stop searching for more. The problem is cleaving reverie from reality, days spent attaching meaning to the ordinary, wanting the extraordinary.
Six months after the accident, we visited the grave to celebrate his 40th birthday. His name is etched into a granite flat tombstone; my mom says an upright headstone one would have scared us. We write letters and tie them to balloons to let them go into the big blue sky. Mine is red, and I write my dad a letter, eager to show him my newly perfected handwriting. We let the balloons go at the same time, while my mom sings Happy Birthday in Spanish, her voice low and fragile, each note risking a break.
“Send back a picture of heaven,” the letter on my balloon reads.
For the next year, the same dream visits me each night. I stand at the top of a staircase that’s suspended in air. The whole scene is blindingly white, like an overexposed photo. But the dream can best be described by the feeling it provokes, pure weightless ecstasy.
I’m flying again.
My balloon had made it.
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