Radio Romance Quotes

I think everyone’s a bit bored with boy-girl romances anyway,” he said. “I think the world’s had enough of those, to be honest.

Caught in a bad romance. Whoaaa-oh-ooooh!" Nellie wailed along to the XM radio blaring from the enormous speakers. "Can I uncover my ears now?" Dan called from the back, where he was reclined across the leather seat. "Has Nellie stopped her Lady Gag Me impression?

Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. "What are they watching?" After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin." "People like me.

This is my grandson, Hudson Mitchell, the famous rockstar you like to listen to on the radio. Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

Unlearning the colonialism I was taught, the stories I've been told and I've told myself, is a daily practice, like learning a new language. You learn it by watching films, listening to the radio, reading books. Your ear gets attuned to it. You pick up the vocabulary, learn the system's grammar and mechanics. From there, you can understand and deconstruct it. Sure, learning a language is a solo task, but it helps to have conversation partners.

I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio

A sideways rain quickly soaked the pair as they made their way across the street toward a small diner. Inside, the smell of coffee permeated the air and Benny Goodman’s band could be heard from a radio in the corner.

Based on what we hear on the radio, see on television, or read in magazines, we might get the idea that love is a wonderfully indescribable something that happens to us, an uncontrollable and unpredictable thing that comes and goes. That makes for great romance novels, but it doesn’t offer much hope for our marriages.

You know what I love? The spaces between I love you. The tap of your fork against the plate and how my cup of wine clicks against our table. The scratchy voice coming from the radio in the other room. The quiet sound of your hand reaching across the table and whispering over mine. How your voice sounds like your mouth on the back of my neck. The soft murmur of our easy conversation. Between these quiet Tuesday night routines, following every comma and right after every pause for breath, is I, love, and you. In the middle of every I love you is a sink full of dishes, whisper of socked feet tangled in white sheets, and gentle kisses against curved cheeks. We lyric ourselves into the laundry that needs to be finished, into the ends of every smile that follows me repeating your name. We write ourselves into the grocery bags we need to carry, the cracks running up our rented walls, the sides of the bed we choose to drag up the sails of heavy eyed dreams. Like the spaces between our fingers, in the spaces between I, love, and you, we wait. The in-betweens have always been my favorite.

In both runs, Curtain Time attempted to play to the same sizable audience that had made The First Nighter Program a radio powerhouse. It had a theater setting, announcements that the curtain was “about to go up,” and the same fare, generally bubbly boy-girl romances. There was an usher in the later run, who called out “Tickets, please, thank you, sir,” and escorted “theatergoers” to their imaginary seats in “seventh row center, seats seven and eight.” The announcer, Myron Wallace, became famous decades later as the tough TV reporter on 60 Minutes.

It doesn’t matter how someone in a romantic comedy affords their absurdly nice house, or whether or not their profession makes sense, or if technically they’re sort of stalking someone they heard on a call-in radio show. What matters is that they have hope. Sure, they find love, but it’s not even about love. It’s the hope that you deserve happiness, and that you won’t be sad forever, and that things will get better. It’s hope that life doesn’t always have to be a miserable slog, that you can find someone to love who understands you and accepts you just as you are.

Da sam ja car radio bih ovo: Nastupajući na prijestolje okrunio bih se svim krunama koje bi mi donijeli. Prisegao bih na sve ustave koje bi mi predložili. Potvrdio bih sve privilegije što ih ima povijest. Okupio bih na dvoru u blještavom sjaju sve velikaše, plemiće i sve popove. Zasuo bih te ljude častima, naslovima i ordenima. Iskitio bih njihova prsa, a onda bi radio mimo ustava, mimo privilegija. Kršio bih iz dana u dan sve što sam potvrdio. Radio bih po svojem i sa svim zanosom uvjeravao ih kako je sve to laž. U korist velikaša i plemića i popova! Kad bi prigovarali priredio bih bogate dinee, sjajne svečanosti; odlikovao ih ljubaznim prijateljstvom, obasipao ih novim titulama kao pokladnim prhuticama. Vozio bih se s njima u svečanim sjajnim povorkama u kojima bi imali prva mjesta. Gospoda bi uživala, a narod zadivljen dvorskim sjajem, klicao bi svima. Da, velčanstvo, masi treba blještavila, carskog sjaja, a ne jednostavnosti. Vjerujte, veličanstvo, masi svih staleža više imponira sjajan šesteropreg nego tucet plemenitih ideja; više imponira carska krunidba, za koju se potroše milijuni, i parada u kojoj se pregazi desetak majki s djecom, nego stotinu tisuća bijelih hljebova kojima biste nahranili sirote. Ja bih na sve pristao, sve prevario: neprijatelje bih vezao, progonio i uništio, prijatelje bih tovio, i tada bi pobjeda bila sigurna.

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex

There was beginning to be a sense of history, made immediate by the fact that an English king had given up his throne for a woman: “the woman I love,” the king said and they thrilled to hear him say it, huddled about their radios as for warmth. Romance wasnt dead, they told themselves. Even in their time such things could happen—and they were on hand, almost a part of it, leaning toward the loudspeakers. Yet there was something weak and sordid about the affair: they could not help but feel this and they were vaguely dissatisfied, knowing it would not have been so in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time. Amy

I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her? Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart. Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity. Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom. ("New York Blues")

It was foolish to feel like a girl getting ready for a date. Gennie told herself that as she unlocked the door to the cottage.She'd told herself the same thing as she'd driven away from town...as she'd turned down the quiet lane. It was a spur of the moment cookout-two adults,a steak,and a bottle of burgundy that may or may not have been worth the price. A person would have to look hard to find any romance in charcoal, lighter fluid and some freshly picked greens from a patch in the backyard. Not for the first time, Gennie thought it a pity her imagination was so expansive. It had undoubtedly been imagination that had brought on that rush of feeling in the churhcyard. A little unexpected tenderness, a soft breeze and she heard bells. Silly. Gennie set the bags on the kitchen counter and wished she'd bought candles. Candlelight would make even that tidy,practical little kitchen seem romantic.And if she had a radio, there could be music...

Excerpt from Forehead Kisses: "I woke to the sizzle and smell of bacon, fresh brewed coffee, and the soft patter of rain on the window. Cooper was nowhere to be seen. My clock radio read 7:35 a.m. I rolled over on my stomach and just laid quietly in bed absorbing the sweet sounds and smells. About 10 minutes later I heard Cooper come into the room. I felt the bed rock as he kneeled on and crawled across it, ultimately straddling my body. He pulled the sheet down exposing my naked back. He placed gentle, wet kisses down my spine, “Good morning Beautiful.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for. Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’ I don’t know when we started drifting apart. When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful. Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.

of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured. I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched. In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by

Still dark. The Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through a file of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?” “An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.” “You’ve been awake a whole hour?” “My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide out. I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.” “You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.” I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?” In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?” “Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.” I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.” She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.” “I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.” “Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.” I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.” Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?” “No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.” Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?” “Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS AND LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and the a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.” She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?” The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.” “But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.” I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.

I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology [...] I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific [...] Sarariman on subway listen For Sushi K like nuclear fission Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro He my always big-time hero His mutant rap burn down whole block Start investing now Sushi K stock It on Nikkei stock exchange Waxes; other rappers wane Best investment, make my day Corporation Sushi K [...] Coming to America now Rappers trying to start a row Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen! We can’t handle competition!” U.S. rappers booing and hissin’ Ask for rap protectionism They afraid of Sushi K Cause their audience go away He got chill financial backin’ Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’ Sushi K concert machine Fast efficient super clean Run like clockwork in a watch Kick old rappers in the crotch [...] He learn English total immersion English/Japanese be mergin’ Into super combination So can have fans in every nation Hong Kong they speak English, too Yearn of rappers just like you Anglophones who live down under Sooner later start to wonder When they get they own rap star Tired of rappers from afar [...] So I will get big radio traffic When you look at demographic Sushi K research statistic Make big future look ballistic Speed of Sushi K growth stock Put U.S. rappers into shock

She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she’d made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst. The radio clicked off. The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world. Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer. Martin obeyed.

I went at one stage to turn on the radio, but he glared at me so ferociously that I hurriedly lean't back in my seat and looked out the window instead. - heller 1

That was his biggest regret. He loved playing for a living, loved hearing his songs on the radio, loved being on a stage and the road, but some days, he wouldn’t have minded going home every night to a sweet wife and a couple babies and fried chicken on the table. That was what Lindsey had taken from him. He’d fallen hard. He’d seen what his momma must’ve felt for his daddy, he’d felt his world crack right down the middle when the girl who had become his everything ripped his heart out of his chest.

I'm not sure I'll be doing a lot of dancing in the near future." Marcus tucked the end of the bandage securely into place and reached for the radio to call his Da to turn the Serpent around and come get them. But first, he gave in to irresistible impulse and kissed Beka so hard their teeth clashed. "Just so long as you save a dance for me," he said. "I'll wait as long as it takes.

Era hermoso, su mirada azul me estremecía y su boca mmmm… no me cansaba de verlo, ah… Camilo Sesto, Camilo Sesto...” —suspiraba al ver a tan bello hombre en la revista que tenía en mano, mientras en la radio escuchaba “Amor, Amar” la cual tarareaba junto con él: “Amor, si tu dolor fuera mío y el mío tuyo, qué bonito sería... amor... amar

Entrevista com Eduardo Urze Pires e José Madeira na Radio Onda Livre - 17 de novembro - para conversarmos sobre o meu mais recente romance - Terra D' Encontros - escrito em parceria com Carla Guerreiro

I'm pretty sure something had happened to me. Like maybe my bathroom radio had fallen into the bath and electrocuted me and I was having that thing they say people have right before they die, when their brains misfire and give you happy images that many people associate with an afterlife. Because

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco. In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.

From my Book Talk Radio Interview: Barbara’s debut novel Starting Over is described as a sweet and sensuous, closed door romance. Q. Firstly I have to ask, what is a closed door romance? Closed door romances recognize that sex occurs, but they are not concerned with what occurs. That's up to the reader's imagination. Since I like sweet romances, I emphasize the building of relationships. What do the characters bring of themselves? What are their histories, their vulnerabilities, hopes, and fears? They are building intimacy. It is about the foundation for something long term.

Lovehandles, the station where love is more than just a song. This is Peter `Punch' O'Brien and Judy Bently. Punch and Judy in the morning.

This ancient Pinto was held together with sheer willpower and a whole lot of prayer. But she wasn't going to let her old jalopy ruin her perfect mood either.

Letting her gaze wander up, she felt a jolt of something she couldn’t put a name to zip through her veins. Why the hell was he looking at her like that?

Their romance was interminable, on again and off for seven years as one thing after another disrupted their lives. The disruptions were standard serial fare—Stephen’s self-pity, jealousy, spite, and the ever-present fickle nature of soap opera males. In 1943, Stephen ran off to California with Maude Kellogg. At another point, he was partly cured of his paralysis in an amazing operation, but lost his legs again in an accident. Enough was enough. In the sixth year, listeners began clamoring for a marriage, and writers Don Becker and Carl Bixby (identified as “Beckby” in Time, with no distinction as to who was speaking) yielded to the crowd. Chichi and Stephen were married, and almost immediately Beckby realized this was a mistake. Alone, Chichi had been the most exciting of daytime heroines. Saddled now with a whiny husband and then a child, she was hamstrung. Beckby did the obvious: “We had the baby die of pneumonia after Stephen had taken him out in the rain, and then we killed him off with a heart attack. For two weeks afterward we kept Chichi off the air in the interests of good taste, and that was that.” Stephen was never mentioned again.

In idealizing or romanticizing America, a Jewish songwriter would inevitably change it. Irving Berlin suppressed his own Jewish identity, but he also did something much more dramatic and extraordinary. In a memorable riff in Operation Shylock (1993), Philip Roth dubs Berlin “the greatest Diasporist of all” and writes, “The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” The passage is hilarious, the tone that of a tummler, but the argument couldn’t be more serious. “Is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”21 Though the passage is unequivocal in its endorsement of Berlin’s “means of defusing the enmity of centuries,” note that Roth himself, whom Jewish critics used to lecture for showing disrespect to the fathers and the faith, could not sound more Jewish in this passage and in Operation Shylock as a glorious whole. The

White Hollywood feeding us Black trauma porn, why not show more romances onscreen with Black leads?

Heated seats or talk radio? Or music? I can do all of them at once if you want.” He starts flipping switches, making the corresponding sound effects. Leave it to Dan to turn his super fancy Range Rover into the USS Enterprise. My body betrays me and I snuggle deeper into the warming leather seats. “Where are we going anyway?” “Why, the happiest place in Natchitoches, of course.” He waves his hands in a broad gesture to encompass the whole town. I panic for a second when he doesn’t immediately put his hands back on the wheel. “Oh my God, will you be careful!” He smiles at me then glances down at his knee, which can apparently steer just fine. “I’d never endanger your life, fair lady.” I roll my eyes and take a relieved breath. Something walks into my thoughts and takes a seat. Is he…flirting? “Looks like no matter how hard you try, you can’t stop talking like you’re in the middle of a LARP game.” I find myself scratching at my nail polish again, so I tuck my hands under my thighs. “I didn’t know I should be trying to not talk that way. In fact, I try to find every opportunity to practice my verbal skills. I can’t seem out of practice when Craytor returns again.” He holds a fist up in the air. “Heads shall roll, maidens shall be rescued, and elves shall be insulted!” I make sure he sees my blank stare followed by a slow blink before saying, “Right. You never said where we’re going.” “The Phoenix, of course. We don’t exactly have Disney World Natchitoches.” He puts on an über-cheesy smile, which is way more endearing than the fake mischievous one he tried back at school.That smile turns on the heated seats around my heart. Oh God, did I just think that? Gross. He nudges my arm. “Get it? Because I said the happiest place in Natchitoches. And that’s a well-known advertisement slogan for—” I hold my hands up. “I get it. Really, I get it

Like many of these romantic anthologies, the Grand Hotel format was mere window dressing to general romance. The opening had a switchboard operator (Betty Winkler) connecting calls to rooms. The people in those rooms became the story of the week. Arch Oboler wrote some early shows.

The passengers got off the train, and listeners went with one each week. There was no binding theme beyond that: once the Grand Central element was done, it was straight drama thereafter. The stories were generally light comedies and fluffy romance. Miracle for Christmas, telling of a bitter man’s return to faith, became the standard Yule show.

There was a certain ’30s silliness to cast off: a growth spurt that seemed to come to all timeless radio comedy around 1942–44. Suddenly Gildersleeve was a polished, smooth entity, a joy to hear. Well represented in this run is Gildy’s romance with Leila Ransom. The listener can hear the children grow up, be present at Marjorie’s wedding, share the birth of her twins. Leroy remains the same throughout: so do the wonderful Birdie and the equally fine Judge Hooker. It has the sound of a happy show before and after Peary’s departure. Listeners can judge that for themselves as well, as the series is solid on tape during the transition period. This listener’s opinion is that the show didn’t lose much. Waterman didn’t sing the solos, and the laugh certainly wasn’t the same (more a chuckle, Waterman later said, a deliberate attempt on his part to stay away from a characteristic that “belonged” to Peary). In all other aspects, the resemblance was remarkable

Just down the street from Gildersleeve, in the next block, lived the widow Leila Ransom. In the second full year she became a pivotal character who on June 27, 1943, got Gildersleeve to the altar and to the last line of the wedding ceremony. The show had much of the appeal of a serial, a 30-minute sitcom whose episodes were connected—sometimes into storylines that ran for months—but were also complete in themselves. Gildersleeve’s romances were often at the crux of it: he was sued for breach of promise, got fired from his job, and ran for mayor—situations that each took up many shows. In a memorable sequence beginning Sept. 8, 1948, a baby was left in Gildersleeve’s car. This played out through the entire fall season, the baby becoming such a part of the family that Kraft ran a contest offering major prizes to the listener who could coin the child’s name. But in a teary finale, Dec. 22, the real father turned up and took the baby away.

Frank Hummert was a Chicago copywriter in the ’20s. In 1930 he met Anne Ashenhurst, a former newspaperwoman who became his assistant and, five years later, his wife. The Hummerts had a formula that was surefire: appeal to the lowest common denominator, make it clear, grab the heartstrings, and reap the rewards. With writer Robert Hardy Andrews they created The Stolen Husband, one of radio’s earliest soaps. Hummert went on to do the most notable serials of the daytime. His name was added to the agency Blackett & Sample, though he was never a partner and owned no part of it. He left Blackett-Sample-Hummert and moved to New York. His new company, Air Features, Inc., turned out (among many others) Just Plain Bill, The Romance of Helen Trent, Ma Perkins, Our Gal Sunday, Lorenzo Jones, and Stella Dallas. It was estimated that Hummert at his peak bought 12.5 percent of the entire network radio schedule, that he billed $12 million a year, that his fiction factory produced almost seven million words a season.

The truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.

No drama, we had agreed. No broken hearts. No crying in our cars. No radio silence where once we had exchanged hilarious daily text messages.