Kind of Cafe Society, kind of MPSIMS, mods please have forgiveness. I couldn’t find a thread on this so I figured I’d start one.
David Brudnoy passed away yesterday – he was a wonderful talk radio host in Boston whose presence on the airwaves will be sorely missed by all.
Listening to the radio without David Brudnoy will never be the same. Three of my favorite radio personalities in the loss column this year…
Alistair Cooke
John Peel
and now David Brudnoy.
He certainly didn’t deserve to die slowly and painfully. Few do.
But frankly he wasn’t all that great a host - he’d only occasionally let a caller complete a sentence before going into yet another ideological rant about how only libertarians had a grasp of either reality or honor. Yes, they were rants, even if he kept his voice down and used multisyllabic words. That’s what got him the respect and influence he did command, and I think that’s pretty much all of it. Whatever the topic, he was completely predictable, and whenever I listened to what he said instead of how he said it, I realized I was wasting my time.
As a gay and an AIDS victim, he could have used his influence to support antidiscrimination and pro-research efforts, but since that would have meant more government involvement in society, he worked against who he was and what he could have been.
I have mixed feelings about Brudnoy. He once tried to get me fired. And yet, he was very kind to my girlfriend.
Allow me to 'splain.
Back in the day, he was a movie reviewer. I was a theatre manager. Our policy was that when the last movie of the day started, we’d wait half an hour and then lock the doors. One night we had a movie starting at 10:00, and another starting at 10:15. This means that we locked the doors at 10:45. At 11:00, I got a call. “This is David Brudnoy. Your policy is that you don’t lock your doors until 11:00. I demand that you let me in.” I had no idea who the hell this guy was, but I was easily intimidated back in those days, so I let him in. For free. (We had already closed out the box office.) When I did, he threatened to call my boss and get me fired because I couldn’t do my job in a timely fashion. This from a guy that was an hour late to a movie that he was reviewing.
A few years ago my girlfriend got a book published. He interviewed her on the radio. He was very kind, and the interview was a complete success.