Alone Again...Naturally

It's Saturday night, and Bobcat Whistle has radio station WTBP, "The Big Persimmon," turned up just loud enough that each person at the bar or at a table can hear it. It's time for "Alone Again," the humor show for anyone who doesn't have a date for Saturday night.

No one knows who the host is. He just calls himself "your host for a dateless Saturday night." The theme song, "Alone Again, Naturally," is playing, and so all the dateless denizens of The Whistle & Thistle are eating or drinking quietly as they prepare to listen to the host's hilarious tales of romantic woe. It is time for what Bobcat calls "radio silence." Tonight the radio silence is especially poignant, for tomorrow is Valentine's Day.

The host sings sad songs of lost loves, with funny twists, and tells stories of his dates, and what went wrong with each. The girls he dated have names like Ura Hogg or Ann Tietam. Tonight he tells how he took Ann to a Civil War re-enactment, but she ran off with Abe Lincoln.

But he also tells the story of his first date as a college student. It wasn't actually a date, it was just an invitation. He asked a girl--he just calls her Susie--if she would go on a date with him, but she said, "Of course not. You're so old-fashioned you might as well date the radio." So that's what he's been doing, every Saturday night since.

It gets even quieter at the W&T as "Alone Again" plays the show out. People suspect that the story of Susie is true.

They don't know that the show is taped. They don't notice the stranger in the corner who gets up and leaves when the show is over, the one who, like all the rest of them, came to the W&T to listen to the radio, together, even if alone.