“Voila” is French for “Ta Da!”

The above koan is a gift from Kitten.

I was reminded today how much I truly love technology; a friend with stronger Google-Fu than I sent me some movies I had been trying to track down. When I opened the envelope and the discs slid into my paws, labeled with his neat handwriting, I fell into reminiscing about afternoons spent next to my AM/FM/Cassette recorder – blank tape cued up – diving for the Record button after every commercial break or station identification, because that one song was going to come on soon, and I didn’t want to miss a single note of it. Back then, the deejays didn’t talk over the entire intro or fade another song into the ending bars, so it was entirely possible to get a perfect capture if you were quick enough.

I remember making a big sign for my door that said “QUIET! RECORDING!” because my player had an external microphone, and would record any ambient noise along with the music. Many a pre-teen hissy fit was thrown because I had finally gotten a song I’d wanted, only to hear on the playback my mother calling me to dinner, or my dad pushing the lawnmower past my bedroom window. I really wanted one of those lighted “On Air” signs to mount in the hallway so everyone would know to be quiet, but they were beyond the price range of my $3 a week allowance, and no amount of hints or wheedling caused one to materialize under the Christmas tree.

When I was a little older, I got a new stereo system with a dual tape deck for my birthday. “Now you can get rid of that old one,” my Mom said, looking askance at the battered soldier on the desk in the corner. The plastic over the radio band guide was too scratched to read through, but it didn’t matter because the selector indicator didn’t move back and forth anymore. It was fine for me because I knew where the stations were in relation to one another, and could find the one I was looking for pretty quickly. The antenna was long gone, probably a casualty of falling off of my bicycle in transport to our latest fort, so I had some cheap wire leading from the antenna mount, taped up along the molding, and run out through the top window. The battery compartment cover was held on with scraps of electrical tape, and the cassette door was held to the frame by a nail.

Get rid of it? Unthinkable! Many an awesome mix tape had been patiently compiled on that machine. I could no more get rid of it than I could my left arm.

Besides…I had plans.

My new system had tripled my deck capacity, and I already knew how I was going to exploit it. I took some of my birthday money (Dear Aunt Ida, Thank You for the Money and the Card, but Mostly the Money) and bought a multi-pack of Radio Shack Red-Label High-Fidelity Audio Recording cassettes. That was the secret to my mixing success, by the way; all my other friends bought the blue label cassettes. Not that they were any worse in quality (they were all pretty mediocre), but the Blues were only sixty minutes long, and the Reds were ninety.

Later that evening, I tuned into American Top 40. I waited as Casey Kasem counted ‘em down, and when there were forty-five minutes left in the show, I pressed Record on Old Faithful and walked away, quietly shutting the door behind me.

I now had forty-five minutes’ worth of perfect captures – sure, it had commercials and Casey’s intros – but I had between four and six more songs on my cassette than my friends did on theirs. And with the new stereo system, I could dub those songs straight onto another cassette. Since I could pause either deck while I was recording, I was able to fill the entire cassette with music, never overdubbing or leaving long gaps between songs.

Not long after that, our record stores started carrying “Cassingles,” which were the deck equivalent of 45s, and I was over the moon. Studio-perfect songs that I could collect onto my own blanks – TDK Crystals by this point – with a much bigger selection than was available over the airwaves. I was probably in 8th or 9th grade before I ever bought a real album on cassette, preferring to make my own.

I’d go off to sleep watching the LEDs on the new stereo system track the beat, changing from green to red as the bass pulsed, while the flickering, fading red-orange glow of the power supply on the other side of the room reassured me that my old comrade-in-arms was there in the corner, faithfully monitoring the airwaves for me.

Because that one song was going to come on soon.