MS. JOCK

Debbie Ullman has programed, engineered and announced radio shows at WBCN, Boston; KVRH, Salida, Colorado; KRNW, Boulder; WHCN, Hartford; and WMMS, Cleveland.

She is currently recuperating from an accident last January.

I want to write about how I feel as a woman in this age of rock-'n-roll. Since my medium is the microphone and not the typewriter, I feel like I imagine someone in Bordeaux, France, would feel with a message for someone in Barcelona, Spain, whose message gets translated into Basque on its way through the Pyrenees (and there's no such thing as a bilingual Basque). I'm part of an oral tradition, so this is meant to be read aloud to your adolescent niece.

I'm lying in the sun by the clean Cuyahoga River, 20 miles before it gets to Kent and 40 miles before it's rendered immortal by flame and Randy Newman (in "Burn On" from his Warner Brothers album called "Sail Away"). And I'm waiting for money in the mail in true '50's beatnik style, with Star, my white lady cat, pleading for food, and no way to turn five years of d.j. copies of drek vinyl (read-the hopes and dreams of countless musicians) into catfood. Ever since I read Jack Kerouac (Dharma Bums, Big Sur and On the Road) as a 14 year-old kid on Cape Cod, getting closer to peace of mind has been my only real goal. There've been other short-term aims, but each one has proven its own temporary nature upon realization. In my midteens I was consciously eager to "get out in the world and suffer." All it took was being alone in Boston after my first big heartbreak to realize I didn't have to seek out suffering. As a teacher there'd be plenty of it no matter what.

My next plan was to get married and live happily ever after. Those were the three lonliest months of my life pregnant, living with my husband in an unairconditioned cheap hotel just off Times Square in New York City in the heat of the summer of '67, accompanying him to John Wayne movies night after night, getting up at 7 a.m. and riding the subway to my job as a receptionist for Tommy Shondell's accountant, The lonely part was that suddenly all my dreams and future life plans had been traded in on one man and my own and his restrictive image of my role as his wife. So much for that one.

After the baby was put up for adoption, I went back to a period of indulging in what I now see as the ego trip of thinking I had to save the world. The difficulties there were two-fold. With my moon in Gemini, it's always been too easy for me to understand things from several vantage points at the same time and it's hard to actively support an angry faction when you're preoccupied with understanding why the enemy is the way he or she is. Exclusive factionalized political movements have always left me alienated. The only group I've ever been able to support whole-heartedly is the all-inclusive one, the one that leaves nothing and no one out. So now we're talking about universal energy or God and if I try to save the world by hipping it to God, I'm just another preacher or missionary. And the irony there is that when you get caught up in the preaching process you're likely to lose touch with what it is you're trying to preach. And that's a hell of a way to waste a lifetime.

As a teenager I wanted very much to be famous some day. But after getting into radio and accumulating local fame in several cities I learned. that when you're "famous" you spend most of your time hanging out with other people who are famous and are therefore not impressed by

vs. COCK ROCK

your fame. Having a lot of people believe that you're "real" and "important" because they've heard you on the radio helps a little when you're plagued with self-doubt but the other side of that coin is that the "you" they all believe in is really. their image of you and trying to live up to someone else's image doesn't make getting in touch with your true self any easier. On the contrary, I've

· often fallen into believing I'm a disc jockey first and all the other things I am secondarily because that's the feedback that I get.

You might call collecting techniques that en courage a peaceful mind my hobby, although I've intended to indicate that it's my primary.occupation, enlightenment being my only consistent goal. I've practiced integral yoga, Tai Chi Chuan (an esoteric martial art, or movement meditation), macrobiotics, transcendental meditation, humanistic astrology, tarot, living in the country, veg. etarianism, Kalso earth shoes and Eastern mysticism in general.

I understand why it took a car wreck (in my '55 Buick, a la Tom Wait's "Ol' ′55′′), a broken jaw, an incapacitating lisp (disabling me too much to collect unemployment insurance but not enough for disability insurance), and partial paralysis of my left (receptive female) side, for me to realize I've been looking away for half a dozen. years, every time the / Ching has told me that

1..al

a yin line is a dark line and a yang line is a light one. It's all part of the international cock conspiracy, I know.

In Taoism, the ancient Chinese religion laid down by the sage Lao-Tsze, the entire universe is made up of "Yin" energy and "Yang" energy and everything fits on a relative scale into one or the other of those categories. "Yin" refers to fruit, cold things; wet things, soft things, females, the left side and receptivity. "Yang" means anything loud, fast, hard, meaty or male, and the right side).

But the point is, I'm seeing now that the esoteric martial art, Tai Chi Chuan, is based on the conquering power of the one who yields, and I've been pretending it ain't so all my life, rather than rallying behind it and conquering with my cunt.

This morning, after taking a piss in the outhouse overlooking the river, I checked the toilet paper for blood and thought how women have been doing that since way before men started producing the paper for us to wipe with, and I felt a strong sense of camaraderie with my sisters throughout the ages, as I hope this month, the first time I've mixed semens since I swore off abortions four and a half years ago, won't be the one. I fell into a passionate affair with a biker who since went to jail for trying to kill his mother with a meatcleaver; and another beau, my lover and friend of long time standing, walked out the door singing "Ladies Love Outlaws", a song recorded by Tom Rush. He's as much a pop-culture image-junkie as I am. He went straight from my door to the Water Street Saloon in Kent to revel in amorous fantasies about Mary Dushane, Scorpio fiddling lady of country-rock-swing band, Good Company, "The Queen of the Silver Dollar" as it were-the image is derived from a Shel Silverstein song recorded by Emmy Lou Harris on her superfine solo Warner Brothers Reprise I.p. called "Pieces of the Sky." I wonder if he'll be by my bed next year to see whether the fruit of someone's folly resembles him or the outlaw. The only person I know for sure will be there is me-that is if I made the classic miscalculation. (As I finished writing this story, my period came. So much for melodramatic paranoia.)

I have a pedal steel guitar between my legs. Pedal steel is that soft, lilting instrument you hear in most country music. Mine is a standard ten-string. I was born with it. Some people call it a cunt; I prefer the word "yoni" (Sanscrit for female genitals; see Gong on Virgin Records for further use of the word "yoni".) It's a pedal steel, for sure. I'm as sure of that as I am that it takes a good, hard 25 year-old Les Paul guitar shoved deep inside to make me come.

I've watched and listened over the years as

me and my fellow "ladies of the airwaves" have pursued our assorted clitoral rewards. In Cleveland there was Carolyn (WNCR) and of course Shauna (WNCR & WMMS and later KLOS in L.A.). Toward the end of her reign in Cleveland, Shauna became "The Queen Bitch" and was much influenced by the cock force behind Cleveland progressive radio, Billy Bass, as he championed David Bowie-which leaves us wondering what need there was for her in that bed. Joyce Halasa, another WMMS Billy Bass protege, and mercurian lady-about-town seemed to have decided she enjoyed working as an act manager more than working as a radio announcer. (Joyce has managed several northeastern Ohio acts including recording artists Lefte End and Alex Bevan and has only just returned to the airwaves doing two weekend shows on M-105.)

Another ex-WMMS jock, Donna Halper, formerly of WCAS, Cambridge, who was also music director at MMS speaks of herself as an "old folkie" whose first love is radio. But it was in pushing Canadian hard rock group Rush that she made sufficient impact on the rock industry to land a job in A&R (artist and relations department, discovering new talent) for Mercury Records in New York, a position she expects will be hassle-free compared to female jockdom in Cleveland.

WMMS's only remaining female announcer these days is Betty Korvan who is into being "one of the boys" and playing mostly German space rock and glitter crunch. She's handling a full academic load while doing six radio shows a week and says she's out to get her PhD in phil. osophy so as to guarantee that the name "Bezkorvan" as well as the name "Betty-the-K" cont, on page 8

page 5/What She Wants/June, 1975