Howard ' s weird Day Off

Saturday morning, 4:20 a.m., almost time to leave for Hawaii Public Radio to do my weekly volunteer classical music program Howard's Day Off, I was checking email when the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law Windy, calling from Nebraska, to tell me there was a tsunami warning for Hawaii. She had reached me just in time to (a) not lose any sleep, since I had gotten up already; (2) tell Bernadette not to go to the KCC farmer's market because the entire market was likely to be cancelled; and (3) leave my prepared program home and go with classical fill music, prepared to spend two hours talking about the tsunami warning. Fill music? I grabbed a bunch of CDs from the Minimalist era, but wound up playing just two works, an orchestral piece by Steve Reich and "Light Over Water" by John Adams. The original show, Bartok mostly, will air some other time. Less than an hour after the show was over, I was "vertically evacuated," in my 33rd floor condo in Waikiki, reporting live on WTOP Newsradio in Washington, D.C. I couldn't help but needle my old friend Nathan Hager on the air about not seeing any snow outside my window.

Comments

[G]

Thankfully you didn't have La Mer scheduled