Having been blessed with a love of reading and writing, I have often wondered what it must be like to not be able to see well enough to do the things I so enjoy. My local PBS station has a program called RISE: a subscription radio program for the blind and print-disabled, whereby subscribers can log in to hear the daily newspapers read to them, as well as magazines and books. Years ago, I’d looked into RISE but my work schedule never allowed me to volunteer. After quitting my job in March to concentrate on my writing career, I revisited the idea. I happened to be driving near the station one day, so on the spur of the moment I went in to ask about registering. I met with Joyce, the volunteer coordinator and filled out an application.
In August, Joyce called to tell me she was scheduling training sessions and would I come in for an interview? After chatting for a while, however, she suddenly said, “Why don’t you just read me something over the phone?” I picked up the first thing at hand—a literary agency’s instructions for submitting a manuscript—and read her a paragraph or two out loud. When I‘d finished reading, Joyce said, “I think we can waive the interview. When will you be available to come in and observe a session?” (I think my British accent probably helped.)
My ultimate goal is to read best-selling novels on the air, but Joyce told me I should first gain experience by reading the newspaper. Two pairs of volunteers do this live on the air daily: one pair from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and the other from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. For my first day of observation I had to arrive at the studios at 8:00 a.m. (ugh, early!). Coffee from DD helped, but it does tend to make me pee a lot. I met the morning volunteers—very warm and welcoming people—and watched them prep for an hour. This involved circling the headlines and the tags at the ends of the articles so as to easily see which pages the stories continued on to and hopefully read seamlessly from one page to the other without pausing too long--especially if the first part of the article ended on the first page in the middle of a sentence.
Besides the national and local news stories, they also marked the editorial, Letters to the Editor, Dear Abby, horoscopes, birthdays, death notices, weather, lottery results, TV listings, sports articles, and rankings. The latter two are totally out of my comfort zone because I’m not a strong sports fan. They also marked a few articles to read as fillers, in case they had a bit of extra time to fill.
Then it was time to move to the studio to watch them in action.
The volunteers sit facing each other, separated by big, sloping stands for holding the oversize newspaper pages. One volunteer works the control board and mics; the other takes care of reading the lead-in intros: one at the start and the next after the mid-point break at 10:00 a.m. It was exciting to watch them work. They were obviously pros because they’d been at it for years. They even invited me to read an article on the air. I was surprised at how extra-British I sounded as I carefully read at a slower pace than I usually do—my mom always accuses me of gabbling.
After observing a second session a week later, I told Joyce I felt ready to give it a go. When she needed a fill-in volunteer the next week, she e-mailed me to ask if I’d like to take it. I took a deep breath and said Yes.
I arrived promptly at 8:00 a.m. to start prepping. My co-reader, Nancy, arrived soon after. I peppered her with questions, most of which I thought I knew the answers to, but just to reassure myself that I DID know the answers. As 9:00 approached, I felt more and more nervous. What if I screwed up? What if I couldn’t find what I was supposed to read next by the time my turn came around? What if I caused DEAD AIR? All these scenarios screamed through my head as we pushed open the heavy soundproofing door and entered the studio.
Nancy was handling the control board, so I was the one to start with the lead-in intro. I managed that okay, and then Nancy started reading the main national story on the first page. We were off and running!
The first hour wasn’t too bad because we just read the national and local news on the first few pages. What’s more, none of the local stories on the Empire page carried on to other pages.
We broke at the halfway point for about one minute—barely enough time to catch our breath—then started on the second hour of reading. This turned out to be much more difficult because we had to jump from one section of the paper to another without pausing. You had to be organized.
After I’d read the standard second-hour lead-in, we started with the death notices, alternating on reading the obituaries. Whoever read the second-to-last death notice would begin the next section of readings: the editorial. I thought I had myself organized, but somehow my pages had gotten themselves all mixed up. Panicking slightly, I tried to locate the next section. Each time Nancy read a death notice, I quickly did another search, keenly aware that one must NOT shuffle the pages too loudly, as listeners have been known to comment on the volume of same. Do you know how hard it is to search through a newspaper without rustling? Kind of like trying not to giggle in church.
As each death notice takes about ten seconds to read, I was thus limited to quick ten-second forays into my by-now-hopelessly-disorganized mishmash of pages, then swiveling back round to the mic just in time to read the next death notice—hopefully not the same one Nancy had just read. We're supposed to mark the items with a red X once they've been read in order to avoid reading the same one twice. I didn't have time to perform this vital function, however, because I only had ten seconds to find those elusive editorial pages. At this point, I had newspaper pages scattered all over the floor, on the table behind my chair, and stuffed into a little cubby beneath the tabletop out of the way because I had thought I didn't need them anymore.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I found the editor’s section in the nick of time. Then it was on to Dear Abby. Pheeuw! That went okay too.
It didn’t last.
It was now 10:30 a.m.: time for ten minutes of sports, and woe betide if you didn’t start reading them right on the dot of 10:30! I'd asked Nancy to read the rankings because I didn't know what they looked like or what the abbreviations meant, such as "GB." I didn't know that stood for "games back." What does "games back" even mean? Anyway, we're supposed to read as many major national and local sports articles as we can but to look for a good stopping point where the main story ends and the list of play-by-plays begins. The first article I read was fine because it was about horse racing at Saratoga, and I happen to like horses. After Nancy's turn, I launched into the next article--I think it was about a baseball or NFL team.
So, I was reading this thing and, before I knew it, it had morphed into play-by-plays. Uh, oh. I'd forgotten to prep that part. I should have stopped reading already, but now I was trapped. Having read the first set of play-by-plays, I felt I had to continue. I didn't really understand what I was reading, so I didn't know where it was safe to stop. I mean, one score might lead into another, and I might stop in the wrong place. I soldiered on through a seemingly-endless litany of confusing play-by-plays.
By this point, my throat was parched, my mouth was dry, and I was finding it increasingly hard to enunciate properly because my tongue kept sticking itself to the roof of my mouth. Then the inside of my top lip started resolutely gluing itself to the front of my teeth. That ten minutes of sports was lasting a lifetime. I found myself opening my mouth wider and wider in an effort to pronounce the gummy words more clearly and heaved a sigh of relief when I finally reached the end. I grabbed my glass of water and gulped it down to the last drop.
We had a few minutes to go before horoscopes at 10:50 a.m., so Nancy started reading a local-interest piece as filler. I swiveled around and almost fell headfirst off my chair as I bent double to rummage through my mishmash of pages for another filler story. Ah! Found one! I laid it out on my stand, located the page that it carried over to, and set it next to the first page so as to continue reading from one to the other without interruption.
When my turn came, I started reading the headline. However, as I started on the byline, something made me glance quickly at the next page out of the corner of my eye, and I realized it was the wrong one! The story I was reading only had two paragraphs on the first page, so I couldn’t just stop there. What if it stopped in the middle of a sentence? All these thoughts raced through my head as I continued reciting the byline.
I believe I said something like, “Excuse me. I have to locate the right page.” I swiveled round to bend over the pages lying on the floor behind me, hoping against hope that the correct one would somehow magically appear on top. No such luck. I think I muttered something to Nancy. Hopefully I was far enough away from the mic so as not to be heard by the listeners. Fortunately, after observing me suddenly disappear from view mid-sentence, Nancy realized the newbie was in trouble and calmly introduced another fill-in article as if nothing had happened.
Still trembling with fear, I realized the next section was birthdays. Due to the timing, it would be my turn to do them as soon as Nancy finished reading her article. I knew the list of birthdays was located on page A-2, but where was A-2? I also needed the D section for horoscopes after that. Lord, help me! I managed to spot the D page on the floor which contained the horoscopes. I also located the TV-listings page. But could I find A-2? It was nowhere to be seen.
Desperately trying not to rustle papers too loudly, I scrabbled in the cubby hole beneath the tabletop for the pages I’d stuffed in there earlier to get them out the way. Maybe A-2 was in there? No such luck. By this time Nancy was approaching the end of her article. I’d be on the air in two seconds, and I still hadn’t found the dratted A-2.
I don’t know if Nancy possessed ESP, but she ended her article and seamlessly moved on to reading the birthdays. What a relief! How did she know? At last we were in the home stretch. Ten minutes to go, and then the nerve-wracking ordeal would be over!
I started to relax as we began reading the horoscopes, followed by the TV listings. Then, since it was one minute before 11:00 a.m., Nancy put on a 60-second promo. We were done!
I left the studio in a daze. Despite reassurances from Nancy that these things happen to everyone, especially when they’re first starting out, I felt like a dismal failure. All I wanted to do was go home with a fattening frappe from MacDonald’s, munch on chocolate and chips, and feel sorry for myself. When Joyce asked me how my first time went, I plastered a smile on my face and said, “Fine, thanks . . . with the exception of a few hiccups.” “Good,” she said. “Great! I’ll let you know when I draw up the next two-month schedule.”
I left the building, never to return. I couldn’t handle it. I’d screwed up ... ON LIVE AIR! I was sure the phone lines were already buzzing with listener complaints, even as I drove away from the station. Of course, I turned the wrong way out of the parking lot and got lost in the sprawling complex of office buildings. By the time I found my way out of the maze, I was feeling frustrated as well.
During the ride home, however, I started to calm down. So, the first hour hadn’t been too, too bad. It was just the second hour I had to work on: organize my pages better, and so on. Maybe I would return to WMHT and give it another shot. Now that I’d suffered through my baptism of fire and made it out the other side relatively unscathed, I was forewarned and forearmed.
A week or so later, Joyce circulated an e-mail looking for people’s availability over the next two months. I sent her a couple of dates I couldn’t do and verified I could only do morning shifts because I have grandma duty in the afternoons. The schedule soon arrived. I was down for three sessions in September, and the first one started on September 2nd. Yikes! No. None of that! This time will be better, I told myself.
On the evening of September 1st, I watched the news on TV so I would have an idea what stories the next day's newspaper would contain. I also went over my cheat sheets again. I'd need a new one soon. The current one was getting a little too covered in notes, arrows, timelines and highlighter.
September 2nd dawned. I showed up at the station at 8:00 a.m. on the dot, armed with my new pass card to get in the door, a pad of sticky notes, and a bright yellow highlighter—all the better to find things with. I didn’t drink coffee on the way in this time for fear of bathroom breaks between 9:00 and 11:00. I took the bags of newspapers into the RISE cubicle and set to work, circling headlines and tags, death notices, and extra stories for fillers. I stuck large Post-It notes on the edges of carry-on pages, with the page numbers written large in red pen. That way, I’d be able to locate them easily without too much rustling. I looked over the sports articles to mark places where I could stop reading before the lists of play-by-plays began. I felt more in control. Once I got in the studio, my pages were going to stay in order. No more papers on the floor or stuffed into cubbies!
My partner arrived: another warm and friendly volunteer willing to help the second-time newbie. Not too many questions this time, but I did ask her to do the sports rankings. Duly prepared, I entered the studio feeling somewhat more confident than the time before.
The first hour went fine. The dreaded second hour went fine too. I was an ultra-organizing machine. Before I knew it, it was time for me to read the sign-off. This had actually been a lot of fun! I’d even relaxed enough to engage in some lighthearted banter on the air with my partner. I left the building with a swing in my step.
And now I can’t wait to do it all over again!
In August, Joyce called to tell me she was scheduling training sessions and would I come in for an interview? After chatting for a while, however, she suddenly said, “Why don’t you just read me something over the phone?” I picked up the first thing at hand—a literary agency’s instructions for submitting a manuscript—and read her a paragraph or two out loud. When I‘d finished reading, Joyce said, “I think we can waive the interview. When will you be available to come in and observe a session?” (I think my British accent probably helped.)
My ultimate goal is to read best-selling novels on the air, but Joyce told me I should first gain experience by reading the newspaper. Two pairs of volunteers do this live on the air daily: one pair from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and the other from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. For my first day of observation I had to arrive at the studios at 8:00 a.m. (ugh, early!). Coffee from DD helped, but it does tend to make me pee a lot. I met the morning volunteers—very warm and welcoming people—and watched them prep for an hour. This involved circling the headlines and the tags at the ends of the articles so as to easily see which pages the stories continued on to and hopefully read seamlessly from one page to the other without pausing too long--especially if the first part of the article ended on the first page in the middle of a sentence.
Besides the national and local news stories, they also marked the editorial, Letters to the Editor, Dear Abby, horoscopes, birthdays, death notices, weather, lottery results, TV listings, sports articles, and rankings. The latter two are totally out of my comfort zone because I’m not a strong sports fan. They also marked a few articles to read as fillers, in case they had a bit of extra time to fill.
Then it was time to move to the studio to watch them in action.
The volunteers sit facing each other, separated by big, sloping stands for holding the oversize newspaper pages. One volunteer works the control board and mics; the other takes care of reading the lead-in intros: one at the start and the next after the mid-point break at 10:00 a.m. It was exciting to watch them work. They were obviously pros because they’d been at it for years. They even invited me to read an article on the air. I was surprised at how extra-British I sounded as I carefully read at a slower pace than I usually do—my mom always accuses me of gabbling.
After observing a second session a week later, I told Joyce I felt ready to give it a go. When she needed a fill-in volunteer the next week, she e-mailed me to ask if I’d like to take it. I took a deep breath and said Yes.
I arrived promptly at 8:00 a.m. to start prepping. My co-reader, Nancy, arrived soon after. I peppered her with questions, most of which I thought I knew the answers to, but just to reassure myself that I DID know the answers. As 9:00 approached, I felt more and more nervous. What if I screwed up? What if I couldn’t find what I was supposed to read next by the time my turn came around? What if I caused DEAD AIR? All these scenarios screamed through my head as we pushed open the heavy soundproofing door and entered the studio.
Nancy was handling the control board, so I was the one to start with the lead-in intro. I managed that okay, and then Nancy started reading the main national story on the first page. We were off and running!
The first hour wasn’t too bad because we just read the national and local news on the first few pages. What’s more, none of the local stories on the Empire page carried on to other pages.
We broke at the halfway point for about one minute—barely enough time to catch our breath—then started on the second hour of reading. This turned out to be much more difficult because we had to jump from one section of the paper to another without pausing. You had to be organized.
After I’d read the standard second-hour lead-in, we started with the death notices, alternating on reading the obituaries. Whoever read the second-to-last death notice would begin the next section of readings: the editorial. I thought I had myself organized, but somehow my pages had gotten themselves all mixed up. Panicking slightly, I tried to locate the next section. Each time Nancy read a death notice, I quickly did another search, keenly aware that one must NOT shuffle the pages too loudly, as listeners have been known to comment on the volume of same. Do you know how hard it is to search through a newspaper without rustling? Kind of like trying not to giggle in church.
As each death notice takes about ten seconds to read, I was thus limited to quick ten-second forays into my by-now-hopelessly-disorganized mishmash of pages, then swiveling back round to the mic just in time to read the next death notice—hopefully not the same one Nancy had just read. We're supposed to mark the items with a red X once they've been read in order to avoid reading the same one twice. I didn't have time to perform this vital function, however, because I only had ten seconds to find those elusive editorial pages. At this point, I had newspaper pages scattered all over the floor, on the table behind my chair, and stuffed into a little cubby beneath the tabletop out of the way because I had thought I didn't need them anymore.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I found the editor’s section in the nick of time. Then it was on to Dear Abby. Pheeuw! That went okay too.
It didn’t last.
It was now 10:30 a.m.: time for ten minutes of sports, and woe betide if you didn’t start reading them right on the dot of 10:30! I'd asked Nancy to read the rankings because I didn't know what they looked like or what the abbreviations meant, such as "GB." I didn't know that stood for "games back." What does "games back" even mean? Anyway, we're supposed to read as many major national and local sports articles as we can but to look for a good stopping point where the main story ends and the list of play-by-plays begins. The first article I read was fine because it was about horse racing at Saratoga, and I happen to like horses. After Nancy's turn, I launched into the next article--I think it was about a baseball or NFL team.
So, I was reading this thing and, before I knew it, it had morphed into play-by-plays. Uh, oh. I'd forgotten to prep that part. I should have stopped reading already, but now I was trapped. Having read the first set of play-by-plays, I felt I had to continue. I didn't really understand what I was reading, so I didn't know where it was safe to stop. I mean, one score might lead into another, and I might stop in the wrong place. I soldiered on through a seemingly-endless litany of confusing play-by-plays.
By this point, my throat was parched, my mouth was dry, and I was finding it increasingly hard to enunciate properly because my tongue kept sticking itself to the roof of my mouth. Then the inside of my top lip started resolutely gluing itself to the front of my teeth. That ten minutes of sports was lasting a lifetime. I found myself opening my mouth wider and wider in an effort to pronounce the gummy words more clearly and heaved a sigh of relief when I finally reached the end. I grabbed my glass of water and gulped it down to the last drop.
We had a few minutes to go before horoscopes at 10:50 a.m., so Nancy started reading a local-interest piece as filler. I swiveled around and almost fell headfirst off my chair as I bent double to rummage through my mishmash of pages for another filler story. Ah! Found one! I laid it out on my stand, located the page that it carried over to, and set it next to the first page so as to continue reading from one to the other without interruption.
When my turn came, I started reading the headline. However, as I started on the byline, something made me glance quickly at the next page out of the corner of my eye, and I realized it was the wrong one! The story I was reading only had two paragraphs on the first page, so I couldn’t just stop there. What if it stopped in the middle of a sentence? All these thoughts raced through my head as I continued reciting the byline.
I believe I said something like, “Excuse me. I have to locate the right page.” I swiveled round to bend over the pages lying on the floor behind me, hoping against hope that the correct one would somehow magically appear on top. No such luck. I think I muttered something to Nancy. Hopefully I was far enough away from the mic so as not to be heard by the listeners. Fortunately, after observing me suddenly disappear from view mid-sentence, Nancy realized the newbie was in trouble and calmly introduced another fill-in article as if nothing had happened.
Still trembling with fear, I realized the next section was birthdays. Due to the timing, it would be my turn to do them as soon as Nancy finished reading her article. I knew the list of birthdays was located on page A-2, but where was A-2? I also needed the D section for horoscopes after that. Lord, help me! I managed to spot the D page on the floor which contained the horoscopes. I also located the TV-listings page. But could I find A-2? It was nowhere to be seen.
Desperately trying not to rustle papers too loudly, I scrabbled in the cubby hole beneath the tabletop for the pages I’d stuffed in there earlier to get them out the way. Maybe A-2 was in there? No such luck. By this time Nancy was approaching the end of her article. I’d be on the air in two seconds, and I still hadn’t found the dratted A-2.
I don’t know if Nancy possessed ESP, but she ended her article and seamlessly moved on to reading the birthdays. What a relief! How did she know? At last we were in the home stretch. Ten minutes to go, and then the nerve-wracking ordeal would be over!
I started to relax as we began reading the horoscopes, followed by the TV listings. Then, since it was one minute before 11:00 a.m., Nancy put on a 60-second promo. We were done!
I left the studio in a daze. Despite reassurances from Nancy that these things happen to everyone, especially when they’re first starting out, I felt like a dismal failure. All I wanted to do was go home with a fattening frappe from MacDonald’s, munch on chocolate and chips, and feel sorry for myself. When Joyce asked me how my first time went, I plastered a smile on my face and said, “Fine, thanks . . . with the exception of a few hiccups.” “Good,” she said. “Great! I’ll let you know when I draw up the next two-month schedule.”
I left the building, never to return. I couldn’t handle it. I’d screwed up ... ON LIVE AIR! I was sure the phone lines were already buzzing with listener complaints, even as I drove away from the station. Of course, I turned the wrong way out of the parking lot and got lost in the sprawling complex of office buildings. By the time I found my way out of the maze, I was feeling frustrated as well.
During the ride home, however, I started to calm down. So, the first hour hadn’t been too, too bad. It was just the second hour I had to work on: organize my pages better, and so on. Maybe I would return to WMHT and give it another shot. Now that I’d suffered through my baptism of fire and made it out the other side relatively unscathed, I was forewarned and forearmed.
A week or so later, Joyce circulated an e-mail looking for people’s availability over the next two months. I sent her a couple of dates I couldn’t do and verified I could only do morning shifts because I have grandma duty in the afternoons. The schedule soon arrived. I was down for three sessions in September, and the first one started on September 2nd. Yikes! No. None of that! This time will be better, I told myself.
On the evening of September 1st, I watched the news on TV so I would have an idea what stories the next day's newspaper would contain. I also went over my cheat sheets again. I'd need a new one soon. The current one was getting a little too covered in notes, arrows, timelines and highlighter.
September 2nd dawned. I showed up at the station at 8:00 a.m. on the dot, armed with my new pass card to get in the door, a pad of sticky notes, and a bright yellow highlighter—all the better to find things with. I didn’t drink coffee on the way in this time for fear of bathroom breaks between 9:00 and 11:00. I took the bags of newspapers into the RISE cubicle and set to work, circling headlines and tags, death notices, and extra stories for fillers. I stuck large Post-It notes on the edges of carry-on pages, with the page numbers written large in red pen. That way, I’d be able to locate them easily without too much rustling. I looked over the sports articles to mark places where I could stop reading before the lists of play-by-plays began. I felt more in control. Once I got in the studio, my pages were going to stay in order. No more papers on the floor or stuffed into cubbies!
My partner arrived: another warm and friendly volunteer willing to help the second-time newbie. Not too many questions this time, but I did ask her to do the sports rankings. Duly prepared, I entered the studio feeling somewhat more confident than the time before.
The first hour went fine. The dreaded second hour went fine too. I was an ultra-organizing machine. Before I knew it, it was time for me to read the sign-off. This had actually been a lot of fun! I’d even relaxed enough to engage in some lighthearted banter on the air with my partner. I left the building with a swing in my step.
And now I can’t wait to do it all over again!
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