Last Friday I returned to KEXP for the first time since the pledge drive. My task this time was (officially) to hand out swag to donors who personally came into the station that afternoon, but in the four hours I was there, maybe a dozen people showed up, so I passed the time by stuffing membership letters into many envelopes.
The swag pick-up was in one of the live performance studios - boxes of two kinds of bags, and incrementally larger shirts, from baby sizes to extra large adult garb, sat arranged upon the floor where many a music legend and local indie kid alike have grooved and jammed.
One volunteer is already there folding letters. She is a KEXP veteran, from deep in the KCMU days. We sit at a well worn folding table, stuffing envelopes and waiting for donors to trickle in. My swag partner (whose name escapes me at the moment; sorry, swag partner) and I pass the plentiful idle moments extolling KEXP, and she relates anecdotes about the station's past, from when it was operated out of a little mouse hole at the UW to it's various radical changes in format and programming. Relatively new as I am to the station, I feel like Luke Skywalker hearing tales of the Old Republic.
This day is also the end to KEXP's stint in Austin, Texas as part of SXSW, so many people, including most of the regular DJs, are absent from the studio, basking in a much sunnier place than grey Seattle. As such, the station is comparatively quiet and depopulated juxtaposed with the bulk of my experience during the characteristically beehivy pledge week. Also because of this, I am thrown by the lack of free food sitting around. I then realize that a great deal of that food was spirited here by me, so if I want food when I come here, I'm going to have to bring it myself. Perhaps I will make a pie.
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