Thursday night I watched a television broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion on PBS. For years I have listened to the radio show, and it’s nice to be able to see the performers performing. I was amazed to discover that the sound effects man, Fred Newman, was the same Fred Newman who hosted Livewire, a kids’ talk show on Nickelodeon in the 1980s. He is doing one of the jobs I would love to do, and I can tell by watching him that he’s loving it. For that matter, I would love to do what Garrison Keillor does. I have always loved radio shows. Years before I was exposed to Garrison Keillor, I was an avid collector of old radio shows from The Shadow and The Green Hornet to The Goon Show and Dimension X. I fantasized about producing, writing, directing, and acting in my own radio shows. When I was very young, my parents would let me play with the reel-to-reel tape recorder and a microphone. I would pretend I was a news broadcaster or I would improvise a play and do all the voices or I would just tell stories I invented. When I was a university student I even came close to embarking on a hobby in radio broadcasting and getting an FCC licence with an eye on possibly pursuing a career in the field. Opportunities in creative radio broadcasting have steadily declined since the 1950s, though, and that decline has been accelerating since the early 1990s. Such is the way with almost everything I care about. Again I am reminded how truly I am in the wrong time.