Rasa is his days as a local star on NPR radio in Massachusetts.
Rasa writes with some news about the Hilaritas Press podcast:
"I just updated the Hilaritas Press Podcast page. Zach West hosted a podcast in the past, and we are working on a new one for him to host that Mike thought would be cool for Zach to cover. More on that soon!
"Meanwhile, I added Zach to the sidebar info on our podcast page as a Guest Host. I also added some info for me. I removed the notes for our previous engineer, Ryan Reeves. He did a wonderful job for us during the first two years of the podcast, but got a new job that didn’t leave him time to continue. I’ve taken over the editing role for both audio and video presentations of the podcast. [I also notice that Eric Wagner is now listed on the page as a "guest host" -- Tom.]
"Just as a bit of humor, the photo of me on the page is from my first audio job fresh out of college, working as a board operator at an NPR affiliate, WFCR, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Starting out there, I first was given the worst shift, turning on the station at 5am, and running the station's first 8 hours of programming. I soon got promoted to a better shift, and then I became a producer of short features that ran during our local portion of the network's broadcast of All Things Considered. At one point I created a children’s program, that was hosted by talented 12 to 14 year olds from the community. The program was called KidsWord. It was pretty cool and innovative at the time. This was in the 1980s.
"At one point I was the newscaster for local news during the All Things Considered broadcast. Because of that exposure, I was amused that people who heard me talking at the grocery store or at a cafe, would recognize my voice. The station covered all of Western New England, and a couple times in Hartford, Connecticut, people heard me somewhere and said, 'Hey, don’t you do the news on WFCR?' That was fun and surprising to have some local minor fame!
"A while back I found an old tape of an interview I did with Allen Ginsberg and put it up on YouTube… That was exciting. Allen was really nice. He requested I send him a copy of the feature on cassette after it aired, and in return, I got a really nice note of thanks from him. [Note that in Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson calls Ginsberg "our major living American poet -- Tom.]
"BTW, my name at the time was Rick Casreen. Casreen was a name my wife at the time and I made up for our married name. That name got me in a little bit of trouble when I was still using that name and I traveled to Israel for a job I had later for Hampshire College doing PR work for the college. In Amsterdam, before I got on my flight to Tel Aviv, I was pulled into a room with Israeli security and questioned about the purpose of my visit to Israel. They were suspicious, it turned out, because 'Casreen' sounded just like the name of a city in Tunisia (Kasserine) that was famous during WWII for a battle where allied troops didn’t fair well. After a good half hour of grilling, they figured out I was not a threat!"
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