It's 1:04 a.m. on April 16, 1997. It's almost an hour before any thought of a 16 to Midnight production would ever begin. Things have changed in the 3 ½ years since Dan and myself gave birth to the world's smallest phenomenon. Dan is going to broadcasting school and works almost 3 jobs (much like Danny). I'm engaged and working for a textbook publishing company. On the showbiz side Dan has been entrenched in local cable productions, a few short films and was cohost, with our mutual playmate Mike Vertenten,  of a Sunday afternoon rado show out of Dekalb, IL. I have been working with the comedy group Gag Reflex. Our time together is few and far between but always precious.

A few weeks back Dan and myself recorded what will probably be the seed from whence a new series of 16's will spring. We are now multitracking some pieces, which is just another way for us to explore the misfiring synapses and cortextural collages that made up the life blood of 16 To Midnight.

16-2-12 (as we insiders call it) was born on October 6, 1993. It was an extremely cold autumn night. I had just finished a performance of Autumn Stories, an outdoor,  story telling show produced through a local theatre company. Dan had to work the overnight shift a WKKD, a local oldies station. I went along just to hang out. The job required little since the station switched to satellite feed from Dallas at night. On a previous overnight, Dan and his friend Steve had gone into the vacant, unlocked production studio and made some recordings. I thought it sounded like fun.

We decided that we would work to make it sound like an actual radio show. It would be complete with commercials, production music, sound effects and no swearing. My theory is : give a novice and on-air mic and they will swear. There is nothing more inane that a grown man leaning into tens of thousands of dollars worth of sound equipment just to say "fuck."

The first episode, since titled "The Waiting Bar", was extremely formative and fumbly. A few parts of it came out brilliantly, but most of it sounded like what it was: a newborn thing crying for direction.  We both walked away feeling that something very new had come out of us.  It's very obvious that I was trying very hard to make this a comedy. On the subsequent listens to the episode over the following weeks I,  through some act of divine intervention, saw my folly. I decided to follow Dan's lead and let it take me when my mind flowed. I ditched the overt sketch comedy mind set and found this other thing inside me.

Over the subsequent episodes, the 16 became a collage of philosophical meanderings wrapped in the comedy and satire formats. We experimented with short stories and well developed characters that bordered on method acting. We found the rapture of the weird. We found the miracle of the arbitrary recurring phrases like "about 9"  and "stop jumping on the bed". It was this ever shifting mass. It was incredible.

As for the title of the program. I don't know. To the best of my recollection, I came up with it. I could be wrong. I think the idea was, as stated in "The Waiting Bar", the show begins one moment before our fame. Other that that there is nothing special about eleven fort-four p.m. The name seemed to fit. It seemed to echo the stream of consciousness of the show. If there is a running theme to the shows it's that the audience is hearing the thoughts hat one thinks as they are drifting into that "idea soup" between wakefulness and sleep. That's why the beginning is usually lucid and then Linus & Lucy kicks in as an uptempo lullabye to ease the listener into that place.

I'm probably reading too much into this.
Of all the things I have been a part of, 16 is the nearest and dearest to my heart. I feel, and I'm sure that Dan would agree,  that it's not our best work but it's probably the work that's most important to us as people. It's the only thing I've ever done that I can actually call art. It exists for its own sake and that's why people like it. It never demands that people like it or laugh at it. It just it.

(July 21, 1999)

Going back over these notes, that I wrote over two years ago, in an orange notebook,  I am struck by the fact that it feels that I just wrote them. The feelings I have about 16 are exactly the same. So much has happened  since I wrote the above paragraphs. Dan and I did record three more episode of 16 in 1997. Recording in my home added new dimensions yet again.  The experimental short fiction in those episodes have prompted the writing of a novel called Pult.  And again, three weeks ago, on my newly purchased  Sony Mini-disc, we planted the seeds of a new series of 16.

Over the years we've tossed back and forth the idea of recording a final episode and moving on to something new. What would that be?  It would be the same thing, just a different name.  We could record something that is completely unrecognizable from "The Waiting Bar" or "Uncle With The Horns On Top" and it would still be 16 To Midnight.  That title no longer denotes this one thing. It denotes the synergy that occurs when Dan and I turn on recording equipment. 

In hazy, sad/happy moments I can see Dan and I recording 16 later in life. Playing it for our wives. Our kids. Our grandkids. Laughing hysterically at the strange things we say. Booby Shalot and Liberty Barnabus  sitting on an autumn parkbench. Bent. Sharing a winded laugh at how we still don't believe anybody but us would understand it.

Dan, buddy, I'm waiting to hear the laughter the first time one of us tells our offspring to stop jumping on the bed.

  Eric
  July 21, 1999