Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

Six months after I started producing “For the Birds”, as my little daughter Katie’s third birthday on December 10 approached, I wanted to do a special program just for her. We watched Sesame Street together every day, and she was especially fond of Big Bird, so I decided to do a program about him. It was pretty over the top humor, but a lot of listeners called the station to say how much they enjoyed it.

If my goal was to promote the love, understanding, and protection of birds, I knew that injecting humor was a good way to achieve that. A few months later, I did my April Fool’s Day 1987 program about how the Cornell Lavatory of Orthinology had cracked the code of all bird language. Two of my favorite KUMD volunteers, Tim Winker and Dan Procter, voiced a crow from Chicago and one from Duluth. That’s also when I introduced my fictitious underwriter—Baker’s Blue Jay Barn. My friend John Keenan provided the voice of Jim Baker. Many people thought I’d gotten my inspiration from “A Prairie Home Companion,” but I’m afraid I’d never listened to that—Saturday afternoons and evenings were for our children. No, any inspiration I got to make a fake commercial would have come from “Saturday Night Live”.

For April Fool’s Day 1988, I did a parody of Duluth’s famous John Beargrease Sled Dog Race—my version was the John Chickenfat Sled Bird Race, in which the teams were made up of homing pigeons pulling their sleds through the sky from Grand Marais to Hawk Ridge—that year, my fictitious Jim Baker was fielding a team of Blue Jays. This program marked the radio debut of my son Joe, who was six at the time, and of my neighbor Mary Tonkin, who portrayed Jaimie Honker, straight from the Alaskan Ichickenrod. In real life, Mary Tonkin was my kids’ emergency auxiliary backup grandma. That was also when I created Earth Angel Bird Emporium; Earth Angel was voiced by my friend Karen Keenan (the friend who got me that appointment at KUMD in the first place).

April Fool’s Day fell on a weekend for the next two years and I was getting stir crazy for an opportunity to get silly again. Fortunately, there were two full moons in December 1990, and I got the idea to name any month with a blue moon “National Blue Jay Awareness Month.” I did a few silly things that month, including one in which I compared Blue Jay intelligence with that of a little kid, using my five-year-old son Tommy. Cell phones were a new technology, so Jim Baker had an ad for Baker’s Blue Jay cellular phones.

My mother-in-law always listened to the local radio station that was in the “Music of Your Life” network playing old standards, so I of course had to do a parody of that for April Fool’s Day in 1991: “The Music of Your Blue Jays.” This time, I brought my whole family into the act in an ad for American Blue Jay Insurance, and introduced my own personal music group, the California Ravens, singing the parody song “Dancing Cheek to Beak” and a jingle for Baker’s Blue Jay Blend. It became something of a tradition: whenever April Fool’s Day fell on a day Duluth’s 103.3 FM station was airing “For the Birds,” I’ve tried to produce some sort of silly program.

I was lucky in my choice of a best friend when we moved here—Karen and John Keenan lived just a couple of houses away from us when our firstborn Joey and their daughter Britta were babies. It’s been enormous fun to write scripts knowing exactly how they would read their parts. John has done such an amazing job with my Jim Baker character that a surprising number of listeners over the years told me they thought Baker’s Blue Jay Barn, and Jim Baker, were real. I used them in my 1992 parody of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Segal’s Love Story, my own “A Farewell to Love Stories.”

After I saw the 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County, I read the book, which was so over the top that I simply had to parody it. The main male character actually says, “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went out to sea,” which gave me the idea to make the character a Peregrine Falcon; John Keenan did his voice and Karen played poor Francesca Pigeon, consumed by her love.

The funnest one I ever produced was a parody of the movie Where the Boys Are. Karen and I played two college girls heading up to Grand Marais over spring vacation to be “Where the Boids Are,” with Russ and John playing the two hitchhikers we pick up en route. We had to keep doing retakes because we were laughing so hard as we recorded, like Karen having to say, “I love that spotting scope of yours. It’s sooooo long.”

For April Fool’s Day in 1992, I did a program about the Winter Bird Olympics ending with a news headline about Lorena Bobwhite. In 2006, after I saw the video ostensibly showing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas, I had to produce an April Fools Day program about the rediscovery of a small population of Dodoes in the Duluth Harbor.

My daughter Katherine is a wonderful piano player, and I enlisted her help to provide accompaniment for the California Ravens singing such tunes as “Bohemian Rhapsojay.” “Have Yourself Some Merry Little Blue Jays,” and “Turn Around.” I needed more of a sixties band sound to do a parody of “Last Kiss” (“Where Oh Where Can My Blue Jays Be?”) so I actually paid three UMD students out of my own pocket to come to the studio for that one.

This year nothing in the news seems at all funny, but it’s nice remembering this simpler time. All these programs and more are linked on today’s blog post.