Lost-n-Found on the Answering Machine
“Lost-n-Found Sound,” as far as I can tell, is a project that has public radio stations collecting bits of audio - music, spoken word, even (apparently) answering machine messages. Tonight I heard the story Portrait of An Artist as An Answering Machine on WABE. If you care to listen, and I do recommend listening, there’s Real Audio (sidebar: NPR, I beg of you, ditch this Real Audio crap!) of the story on the page. In a nutshell, actor/comedian Taylor Negron gave his answering machine archives to some audio editors, and they created a set of snapshots of his life as told by messages left on his machine. Messages like the woman raving about a little half-$1,000,000 hacienda in The Valley (that she thinks Negron should buy), where she’s “been thinking about moving,” or the call from the vetinarian’s assistant about his dog’s health.
Then Judy calls at 03:15 in the piece:
You left me a message saying you were concerned that I’m wasting my time on the internet…? Well, look - wooo! - boy are you wrong! I am finally using my time correctly! … I’m using my time being a professional dater! And the only thing I’m doing incorrectly, maybe, is writing the wrong things in my profile.
At 09:50 Judy calls again. She’s got to have our answering machine owner’s opinion on this guy she’s seeing. She explains:
I was highly attracted to his writing over the internet, and his voice on my phone. And so I’m so already into him. And we got to know each other very, very well over the internet and over the phone, which are both modern technologies that I would like to stick to instead of having to meet the person actually face to face, because the phone and the internet seeem to really work much better!
Hmm. I’m pretty sure that’s Judy’s dry sense of humor speaking. Let’s hope so.
Well, it turns out that as great as this fellow is at writing e-mails and breathing on the telephone, there’s a hitch: a woman he met in Israel is coming to stay with him. Their meeting is postponed. But then, a ray of hope:
We decided to meet each other and make sure we wouldn’t have sex. So, we met each other, um, on a Saturday night, and, of course, immediately had sex. Immediately. And did not stop having sex for, like, two days straight.
When I first heard this I thought she was absolutely mad. Then I remembered: some relationships are doomed to be nothing more than a series of hook-ups, with at least one of the parties thinking it might be more than it actually is. We can only hope that actor/comedian Taylor Negron was able to set her on the right path.