This being our inaugural edition and all, I feel the need to confess something and be as upfront with our readers as possible.
I am in love with Colin McEnroe.
Who is that, you ask? Shame on you.
Colin is the only reason to listen to WTIC 1080 other than the Red Sox. Colin is a smartass. Colin is Connecticut’s very own John Stewart… minus the money, the charisma and the talk show on national television. Colin hates The Hartford Courant, almost as much as I do, and he loves Bill Curry. He is also several decades older than I am.
This all started back around 9/11. I was commuting back and forth from UConn to Glastonbury at the time and was addicted to talk radio – trying to find out anything I could about the crisis at hand without expending too much effort. That was when I discovered Colin, chatting it up with his buddy Bruce from 3-6 p.m. every weekday afternoon on 1080.
Before I knew it, I was hooked. Mostly, I liked the way he would 1) let jerk off callers have it when they called up to say something stupid 2) patronize the jerk off callers so slyly that they barely noticed and made them look like morons.
Also, this is the part where I should say that because his name is Colin and the only Colin I had to associate him with was the one from The Real World: Hawaii, who was a young, handsome, down to earth kind of guy who made the terrible mistake of making out with Amaya. So, every time I thought about Colin McEnroe the picture of Colin from Hawaii popped into my head.
Soon, I started referring to him as my “Radio Boyfriend.” My real boyfriend at the time didn’t seem to mind. One night, I even got a call from the Real Boyfriend who happened to work at the Bushnell and was there on a night when Colin was hosting a CT Forum.
“Guess who is here?” Real Boyfriend asked.
“Who?”
“Your Radio Boyfriend.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and guess what else…”
“What?”
“He’s old, with gray hair and he’s kind of fat.”
“No way…”
“Yes, sir…”
But don’t fret, dear reader, this information did not compromise my love for Colin McEnroe. It’s much like my love for Bill Clinton; unwavering, no matter what terrible things he does or how old he gets.
A few years later, I was driving home from work and heard that Colin and his buddy Bruce were down at Somerset Square in Glastonbury at the Salvation Army Holiday Store, collecting canned goods.
I burst through the door to my house and yelled at my roommate to start ransacking our cupboards for canned goods. Unfortunately for Connecticut’s poor, all we had were the castoffs we’d gotten from family members which included, among many other heinous things, canned clams. We loaded them into a bag and headed on down to the holiday store – with visions of Colin dancing in my head.
I was a ball of nervous energy as I presented the volunteers with my bag of sub-par canned goods and stared past them to the table where Colin was broadcasting. Real Boyfriend had been right. He looked nothing like Colin from Hawaii, but that was fine, what I was more upset about was that he didn’t toss his microphone out of the way and come running toward me the minute I entered yelling, “Where’ve you been all my life?”
After milling around for as long as we could without looking suspicious, my roommate and I left and headed toward The Gap.
I don’t really live in 1080-territory anymore but sometimes I still tune in to hear Colin through streaming audio on the radio station’s website. So, Colin…if you’re “somewhere out there, underneath this same big sky,” give me a shout. We’ll make fun of stupid people together.
