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Newstalk '74
Dec. 22nd, 1985 02:10 pmWhen I was a kid, one of my favorite toys of all time was a battery-powered tape recorder. It was about half the size of a shoebox, and had a handle you could clutch while running around the house making farting noises.
My siblings used it too. In 1985, when she was eleven years old, my older sister had an idea: She would be a radio interviewer. She didn't discriminate: I remember interviews with Mom and Dad, visiting houseguests, the dog, the neighbor's dog, and us playing (badly) various celebrities, all recorded to tape, which we'd play back a hundred times.
Against long odds, ten of the interviews have survived. Here they are, along with a little commentary from 2026 as I write this.
My mom wasn't interested in politics for a long time, right up until Obama ran in 2008. Having spent her teenage years in Berkeley in the 1960's I assume she just got burned out on it for a while.
Petrea's friend Jessica had as big as a crush on Sting as Petrea had on David Bowie. This interview where Jessica pretends to be Sting survived, but there was another equally ridiculous one where Petrea played Bowie.
My older sister switches things around, and has her friend Jessica interview her as The President. Welcome to an 11-year-old's vision and knowledge of Ronald Reagan.
This one is noteworthy because it is exactly the sort of idiotic accent-based humor that would get a young person crucified if it appeared in a social media post any time in the last 15 years.
Some time in the 1980's after this was recorded, us kids spent some time hanging out with a lovely Chinese man named Jin, a visiting university student whom we all adored. This was quite exceptional: Most of the people in our town - adults included - had never even seen, let alone met, a Chinese national in person before. I'm pretty sure we would have been mortified if Jin heard this interview, and felt appropriately bad about it. Luckily he never did.
We're all so old now that the chances of anyone's career being ruined by this dumb recording are zero. I think it's worth preserving because it serves as evidence that yes, suburban kids from the 80's really did live in a pre-internet bubble, and the only real difference between the kids of this decade and the kids from that one, is that our crap went mercifully unrecorded. (Except for this! Oh dear.)
People don't like humor that seems to be "punching down", and I think the one saving grace in this recording is that Miss "Brownang" doesn't come across as an idiot, while at the same time the interviewer mocks the person doing the accent for knowing jack squat about Chinese history.
Compare and contrast with the "southern accent equals stupidity" thing going on in the interview with the President above. Way more palatable in this century, mostly because an American mocking the President of the USA has a long-honored First Amendment penumbra.
Family members and neighbors! We're all silly, but I'm definitely the worst!
