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ISSUE
3
The Realistic MTA-12: An Impromptu Review,
Leading to a Turning Point�
by Laura Lovell
A lonely secretary type is sitting in a medical office on a cool rainy Friday. The weather is keeping the walk-in clients at home, and the drizzle streaks down the windows in wavering lines.
Inside the office it is dry. The secretary has just imbibed a fourth cup of homemade rotgut caf�, and has the jitters. She has been forced by the radiologist to listen to a radio station tuned to such hits as, "You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling" and "Fooled Around and Fell in Love." Just as she is staring ruefully at the radio, contemplating chucking the whole lot right out of those rain-damped windows, a listener comes on with a "unusual" request, and the DJ plays it: "I Am The Walrus—Goo Goo Goo Joob."
The secretary jumps up and goes up to the radio, sits down on the wooden spindly chair with a soft mossy green cushion, and listens deeply, as she has recently learned to do.
"Mr. P’liceman pretty p’licemen, pretty little p’licemen in a row-ow -ow…see how they run like pigs from a gun..." She listens and observes. The sound is coming from a single speaker behind a fashionable brown speaker cloth. There is no indication on the age of this anti-monolithic beast crouched on the table before her, but she guesses the age as late ‘60s, possibly early ‘70s.
Deeply the sound tries to embed itself into her ears, but the waves gently touch eardrum and run around the curlicue and bound away. The gentle steady shhhhhhhh is almost hypnotic, however, and she remains glued to the radio, not enjoying the sound quality—so much is lost—but trying to dig the song itself.
She uselessly twists on the tone dial, obviously placed there by the manufacturer as a lark. The radio dial glows gently in the gloom of the onsetting evening, and her face, warm now with the coffee, glows along with it. Ahh, but her heart has not quite meshed with the music. The connection between ear and soul has not been completed, the circuit has a break, and so does her heart. She senses what she is missing in the music… all the highs and lows and everything in between.
She feels the last dregs of innocence slip from her.
A former Audiophobe, she has just entered into the realm of Pre-phile
Not quite there yet, but an appetite has been whet.
It is a hunger that must be met, and this little radio with its little speaker will barely pass as the napkin on the plate.