From the Green Room: Off to the Ranch!

Every summer, for the past eleven years, the I-Man has done his program from The Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer in New Mexico.  One can only hope that when he throws the switch this Monday for the inaugural broadcast of the 2010 Season, there will not be any technical difficulties resulting in digital video ‘jaggies’ or ‘tiling’ that will cause him to appear as though he was the subject of a living Picasso painting, or audio that will result in an echo greater than the one experienced by Madonna’s gynecologist. 

Right out of the box, the program will HAVE to be better, because we are now on the high-tech Fox Business Network. Last summer, we were simulcast on RFD, which has somewhat less than “state-of-the-art” video production values.  Back then, the live feed from the ABC radio studio was of the quality normally found at the Kwik E Mart; you know, the security measure they employ to keep you from stealing the Cheese Doodles and Slim Jims. Warner Wolf looked as though he was making a hostage tape in a Bangladesh Root Cellar, using the video camera on his cell phone. Osama Bin Laden’s TV messages from the cave looked better than the shots on RFD’s broadcast.  Internet porn chat hostesses sport better picture quality from their bedrooms through the built-in lenses on their laptops than the pictures we put up last year. But, to be fair, it is a daunting process to broadcast a radio and television program, live, in real time, from three or more locations: Imus in Ribera; Charles, Tony and me in the Fox Studios; Bernie, Lou and Warner from ABC. Throw in a feed from an on-camera guest or correspondent, and you’ve got a complicated scenario, with a bunch of individual boxes put up on screen to accommodate everybody, making your television look like a cross between the Hollywood Squares and the opening title sequence of The Brady Bunch.

There is still the potential for technical difficulties, albeit much less so now that Fox is in the mix.  But if and when that happens, you can expect there will be some consternation from the Quentin Crisp in the Cowboy Hat. After all, Mars, depending on where it is in orbit, can be more than 250 million miles from Earth, and yet those tang-swilling velcro jockeys at NASA are able to provide live video footage from its surface without too much trouble. How hard should it be to get the video and audio right when he’s only 1,800 miles away from the rest of us?  At the mere hint of a half second delay between Imus’s question and Dagen McDowell’s pithy answer, you can expect Imus to threaten one of the cameramen in the studio with him, using gun he keeps ostensibly to ward off coyotes, but in actuality to intimidate the crew.

And I may be somewhat callous when I say, “Better them than us.” For the next 12 weeks, they will experience what we do the other 40 weeks of the year. For three blissful months, when the tension, anxiety and anger levels rise and the inevitable Mt. St. Helen’s style eruption occurs, we will be able to just turn the sound down and watch his face turn blue as he rants like one of those weird dudes you see hanging out down at the Port Authority Bus Station.

…and fix ourselves another Bloody Mary.