When I designed props for a production of Waiting for Lefty years ago, I bought a small radio for the character of the newspaper man. I bought it with my own funds because the show budget was so tight. I don’t think it worked when I bought it; I think I found it in a Fells Point antique store. It’s a Philco brand tube radio from the thirties with an oak chest that’s open in the back, a dial with frozen hands, and a curved handle on its top. It sat for nearly a decade, silent and unplugged in my living room.
Then one night as I wrote upstairs and my housemate Terri knitted on the living room couch, it began to make noises. Its dial lights didn’t come on but it emitted static that was wet and constant with the drone of many voices underneath, distant, fogged, and urgent.
Terri called me downstairs. “Make it stop!” she squealed.
I stood helpless. “How the hell am I going to do that?” I strained, listening, trying to decipher words but the static was too thick and the voices too far. I needed a Rosetta Stone. “What do you want me to do?” I asked it.
“It’s not stopping. It’s not plugged in!” Terri was still clutching her knitting needles.
Herb/spice sage, Salvia genus that is part of the mint family, is lit in dried bundles to smudge, cleanse and purify, based on a Native American tradition. Terri and I burned a sage bundle around the radio and down the stairs to the basement. By the time we returned from the basement, the static wails had subsided.
Every once in a while the radio will spurt one short blurt of bubbling static but the voices have not returned. Good thing. I need a translator.
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