The Professor, Live From Hawaii

After the show, we finally left the suite in mid afternoon and dined at the nearby Hali'imaile General Store, which is a historic property which has been converted into a very nice restaurant with Hawaiian theme entrees. I am fascinated how people like the continuance of history in architecture.

Wed -- On Wednesday, with the three full days left on trip, we stayed in the Paniolo Suite at the North Shore Lookout all morning past breakfast, as I needed to prepare for my weekly Badlands Media podcast that, because of the time change, would air at the early hour of 1:30 in the afternoon. 

Over time I have prepping for the show more and more in the last 24 hours before broadcast. Often I odn't have a firm idea for the show until Monday or Tuesday, and even with my work schedule, I have gotten efficient and putting together a set of slides at the last minute, and on most weeks, miraculously producing an 8-10 minute standalone video intro. 

The week before, which was the day before Thanksgiving, we had been in transit on our flight and I had told my audience I was going to take the week off, but some of them in the chat urged me to air a rerun at least. I have discovered, to my delight, that I have a core audience that actually looks forward to my show every week.

Part of this is the continuity of community. While it is true that some of them genuinely enjoy my monologues, it is also true that many of them come to my show to interact with each in the live chat, which they do on other Badlands Media shows as well. I am probably the least watched of the shows. Any illusions I had about being a popular media star have vanished over the last two years. 

One endearing feature is that my regulars call me "the Professor" and some pretend they are entering a classroom. I love them for this. I am sometimes hard on myself for technical issues (we had dreadful wi-fi issues in the suite during the broadcast that almost ruined everything), and also for my tendency to longwindedness and self-indulgence. But it is not easy doing the kind of show I do. No one else on Badlands, to my knowledge, does the kind of show I do, which is typically 75 minutes of unrehearsed impromptu monologue. Every other show, to my knowledge is done with cohosts or Zoom style multiple talking heads. It is WAY easier with a co-host. You don't even need a fully fleshed out concept before hand, just a starting point, and then you discuss it on the air like you would with a friend. Solo is an order of magnitude harder. My worst fear is running out of material to say. I make Keynotes slides as notes. No one else even touches me as far as that kind of weekly effort in the showmanship.

Of course I started out with a co-host. It wasn't even my show at first. I was added because the original cohost dropped out because they were unreliable, and to this day, many shows are canceled. It is one thing I've been impeccable at for the last two years--showing up. I knew that would be the key from the start, and it is what kept me on the air.

In a way, I am like the floor show at a dinner theater, providing a common point of focus and entertainment for people who came to interact with people they know.  Realizing this was actually quite freeing.

The theme for this week's show was a no brainer. I had already told my audience I was going to be "Live from Maui" that week. In tangible terms that just meant I would set up a portable broadcast studio in our BnB and talk about whatever I wanted. But somehow it could be special. I leveraged this into my intro video and the show itself---Americans ideas about travel to Hawaii over the last century. Of course I included clips of the Brady Bunch going to Hawaii, and popular television shows set in Hawaii. It was a fun intro video make. It was easy to dig up clips to use and to edit together.

For the meat of the show, I concentrated on the Lahaina fire. I had done a show about Lahaina just after the incident last year, so I felt it was mandatory to followup. I discussed the results of the investigation, added my own observations of the town as I have here in my blog, including especially the insightful conversation with our host at our first location, which was as far as "investigative reporting" as I got. I said that it would have been inappropriate to ask people about it, exactly as my host had confirmed. My shows never go very deep into any particular topic, so it was perfect. I felt like it was one of my best shows to date (link to the replay of the broadcast)

Finally after the show was over, I let out a big sigh of relief, as I always do, still on the high from the interaction with the audience, with the best part of the whole thing, to be honest.