Şternu’ şi Românu’

Tocmai intenţionam să ma bag singură în seamă cu un subiect cât de cât „glamoros” şi nu ştiam ce să aleg. Noua colecţie Dior pe care nu o voi putea purta niciodată în România decât ascunsă în casă? Pe Jeanne D Arc a sinistraţilor a.k.a. noua Miss Diaspora care şi-a (ex)pus sânii la bătaie (a vântului) contra sumei de 6000 de euro, sumă pe care aparent o va dona celor loviţi atât de crunt de ape? În final, nici una nici alta. Şi asta pentru că întâmplător am dat peste un post de aiurea în care un nene de-al nostru s-a apucat să scrie răvaşe tocmai unuia mai nebun decât el. Lui Howard Stern. No comment. Just smiling. :-)

Letter from the Past: Howard Stern & post-commy Romania

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Letter to Howard Stern

Hey, now!

Howard, Robin, Garry, Artie, Bubba….

I know what you’ll all say…Howard never traveled to Romania!…He barely mentioned it in a 1995 show, when he talked about Americans not adopting black babies, but getting free ones from the streets of Bucharest.

Well, however, unknowingly, he became a hot topic on Romanian FM airwaves, only months after the brutal communist regime collapsed in December 1989. This is how he changed lives in a country that have just escaped from 45 years of communist hell…

Let’s start with the beginning. In 1945, the Soviet Union invaded Romania, they took half of Moldavia and fucked-out any sense of civilization left after the WWII in the country. In December 1989, an anti-communist popular revolt started, and people took out on the streets protesting against Ceausescu brutal regime. The tanks were sent out to fight the protests, and bullets were fired. Eventually, 3000 dead civilians later, including women and children, Ceausescu was executed by a firing squadron and the second echelon of communists, his former friends and relatives, took the power, trying to promote a communism with “human face”, based on Gorbachev’s perestroika.

Well, it did not work out! Romanians have just finished getting fucked by communism for 45 years, and had no intention to take Stalin’ ideology in their asses again.

By January 1990, small businesses started to spread around, tens of new newspapers were born, however no TV stations yet. Among them, small FM radio stations, with equipment donated by several Western media groups, universities, etc. They were ran by unpaid but super-enthusiastic students with different backgrounds, and with no idea about what the radio business is all about, other than it should promote the Freedom of Speech and a lot of good music.

One of them was Uniplus Radio Bucharest. They started off in the attic of University of Bucharest with vinyl records and hundreds of meters of magnetic tape. The play list concept has not yet been discovered, and every broadcast was live.

One day, a young student in her 20s, on her name Diana Singer, came with the idea of running a midnight-to-next-morning talk show (the first one ever in post-communist Romania), where people will call and talk about anything. So “The Night Asylum Show” was born, in a cold and old attic, with almost no furniture around.

Her first night show was also the one that made her famous in the big city…entirely by accident. Almost nobody would know about the show yet, so phone calls were rare. Till a young guy called, depressed and announcing his incoming suicidal attempt. Diana kept him on the phone till next morning, convincing him to live another day. Meanwhile, the people that were listening started calling others about the drama that was taking place on the airwaves. The legend of the Night Asylum Show was born and brought Diana and Uniplus as #1 on the Bucharest market (the capital of Romania).

Meanwhile, a man was preparing to enter Diana’s life, on his name Bobby Torok. Back in the ’70, still a young chap, Bobby escaped from communist Romania crossing the border to Yugoslavia, and eventually made it to America, the country of his dreams. A die-hard rocker fan, he made ends meet as a cabbie in New York and then slowly started his own business. It’s not clear how and when he heard Howard Stern for the first time, but that will change his life forever.

As soon as he heard about the collapse of communism in Romania, he made it back to his native country. Dressed in jeans, with a wild beard, and driving the first Jeep that Romanians ever saw, let movies aside, Bobby Torok became a strange but well-known appearance in downtown Bucharest. One day he heard about Diana’s night time show and decided to get involved by helping out, and eventually he became a co-host of The Night Asylum Show.

And this is how and when all the trouble started.

Romania was still ruled by the neo-communists, which were trying to smash any Opposition party or independent media, by rogue legislation or pure physical force.

Bobby was like a sponge full of American democracy ideas, and he let it all out. He started weekly attacks against the neo-communist regime ran by Ceausescu’s former friends, on the radio. He would tell stories about his life of 20 years in America, about the freedom of speech, about the power of liberty. He loved America more than he loved God.

I was only 19 or 20 back then, and I couldn’t sleep when Bobby was on the microphone, in the night. A huge number of teenagers and students were almost hypnotized about his stories, told in a deep and addictive voice. It was only 7 years later, when I made it to North America myself, and Bobby was dead already, that I’ve realized that Bobby Torok was actually our Romanian Howard Stern, and Diana Singer our Romanian Robin Quivers. He would talk, next to Diana, in the studio, about human rights, about Constitution, about the First Amendment, about the how the former members of the Romanian Communist Party would try to run the country again and censor any democratic liberties, about sexual issues, etc.

Romania got by then it’s first FCC-like organism, called CNA (The Audio-Visual National Council).

Bobby Torok became soon the public enemy #1. The only way he could curse the neo-communist regime ran by an old reformed stalinist, Ion Iliescu, was in…English. The law did not explicitly mention any barred insults in foreign languages.

On another radio station, Radio Tinerama, another Romanian host named Max Banush of Jewish origins, also just returned from his exile in United States. The guy was a butt kisser and very friendly to the neo-communist power in Bucharest; he started daily dirty attacks against Bobby Torok in his newspaper and on the airwaves, and compared him with…attention, everyone!…HOWARD STERN.

That spring morning of 1990, making my coffee in the kitchen, I was stunned! WHO THE HELL IS HOWARD STERN? Max Banush would describe non-stop how that Howard Stern fellow takes calls from crazy American people that like to get cursed, insulted and hanged on the phone, that this Howard Stern is a fascist on radio, a scumbag of the American society, and that Bobby Torok is his disciple and that he should be taken out of the air.

How that can be, I wondered ? Bobby will talk to us about liberties, about his life in America, he would give advice on life issues to teenagers, and he would talk about sexual issues that nobody ever heard or dared to talk about. Most of all he hated the fucking neo-communists that were still running the country. I started to hate that fucking Banush, and wished him to rot in hell like a rat.

I’ve started to ask around, who is Howard Stern? Nobody knew. No Internet back then, or foreign magazines. I became addicted to Howard Stern in 1997, on Q107 Toronto radio station. Then, on the one in Buffalo. Now, every day, on Sirius radio, the space doggy.

15 years later, nobody knows Max Banush name anymore…Bobby Torok died of a heart attack in the late ‘90s, when boarding its plane for a vacation in USA. Diana Singer is a marketing manager for a record label company; she wrote a book about those times, but for some reasons, most of the local publishing houses avoided to get involved with it.

Most of the independent and free radio stations from early ‘90s got bought by corporations and became part of large networks, serving political or business interests of large business groups. Uniplus Radio Bucharest was sold out and became part of Star Radio network.

Few years ago a local TV station played your “Private Parts” movie.

Howard, you’ve influenced, among millions, the life of a guy that you never met, named Bobby Torok. That guy has influenced on your behalf the lives of a whole generation of Romanian kiddos in their 20s, teaching them about freedom and the courage to fight for it.

God bless.