Until I got a call from Louisiana Public Broadcasting several years ago, the only time I’d performed in front of people was in 1986, when my high school drama class qualified for something called the Australian Rock Eisteddfod. The Rock Eisteddfod was an annual dance and drama challenge run by a Melbourne radio station, for which high school teams performed original dance routines to pop songs of their choosing. Eisteddfod is a Welsh word for a competitive music and poetry festival, which explains the weird spelling, but doesn’t explain why an Australian radio station would use it to describe their dance competition. At the time I don’t remember wondering about that; our school was just excited to have gotten their team to the finals, which were to be televised. Our entry involved a routine in which twenty-five kids (including yours truly), sporting fake leather and an unbelievable amount of hair gel, flopped around the stage pretending to be bandits while a band named The Art of Noise played a cover of the Henry Mancini song “Peter Gunn” (hey; it was the eighties). We didn’t win but we did get on TV, which when you’re sixteen years old is a pretty big deal.
The thrill of victory (OK, of coming in third) had faded thirty years later when an LPB producer got in touch to ask whether I’d be interested in hosting a show the station was launching. Art Rocks, she explained, would be a weekly show profiling contemporary Louisianans doing interesting things in the visual and performing arts. It wouldn’t be hard, she said; all I’d need to do would be to suggest artists whose work we’d profiled in Country Roads; then once they’d been visited by a camera crew, come in to the station to pre-record intros to each segment in a studio setting. Not for the first time in my life when offered an opportunity for which I wasn’t qualified, I accepted—and quickly learned that writing about art for the printed page isn’t the same as writing about art in a way that makes sense when spoken aloud on TV. I also learned that it’s easier to sound authoritative about art—or anything else, probably—if you’re sitting at a computer in your pajamas, than while sweating beneath blazing studio lights and trying to decide what to do with your hands. “Take four,” the cameraman would sigh, patiently, while a producer explained that I’d look more natural if only I could stop twitching, waggling my eyebrows, or waving my arms around like someone selling Toyotas. It took more than a few episodes to start feeling comfortable, but by the time that first season ended we’d told some terrific stories, no one had called the station to complain, and strangest of all, people had started recognizing me in the grocery store. I assure you that doesn’t happen in magazine writing. With a season of shows to my credit I chalked up my stint hosting Art Rocks as a special privilege and prepared to sink back into the magazine-editing, pajama-clad obscurity whence I came.
[Read this: An accidental career as a TV host]
So I was pleasantly but undoubtedly startled when, at the end of that first year, the producer called back to propose a second season, with the caveat that I should probably go to the mall and buy a couple of new jackets … and maybe pick up a tube of wrinkle cream while I was there. Believe it or not, Art Rocks will embark on its seventh season this month, with new episodes beginning Friday, September 20, with a profile of Lake Charles painter Heather Ryan Kelley. (You’ll find a companion article about Heather and her unique exploration of the literature of James Joyce on page 78 of this issue.) Episodes air statewide on Friday evenings at 8:30 pm, repeating Saturday afternoons at 5:30 pm. If you haven’t seen it, I hope you’ll tune in. I promise not to dance.
