Who's Asking?

The free tickets have dried up. For me, anyway. I used to count on at least a show a year that I could attend with a guest courtesy of a local radio station. I don't listen to a lot of radio, but it wakes me up in the morning, and it is on in the background as I go about my morning preparations in my classroom. It is a lingering remnant of a life that contained a lot more radio. Before streaming services. Before mp3s.
I grew up in a world filled with disc jockeys, not DJs. Hot Dog Harold Moore. Charlie and Barney. Tiny Tim Tindall. Dennis Constantine. Rosalie. Alex Bennett. Dave Morey. While nothing can compete with the "Quarter Hour of Dave," fifteen minutes of music aimed directly at me from my friend in his college radio station booth, it was with Dave Morey that I had my last solid connection with morning radio. Dave was a wealth of musical knowledge and dry wit, a perfect cocktail for me as I made my way through those pre-dawn hours. By the time the sun was up, the radio was close to being turned off, but not before Request-O-Rama. This was the segment I waited for, the one that kept me listening. The prize for answering Dave's trivia question was the chance to hear any song from the station's music library.
And sometimes there were bonus prizes.
But that's not what kept me listening. I was hanging on because I wanted a chance to impress the rest of audience with my own pop culture acumen. Knowing that Ross Bagdasarian (aka Dave Seville) won one of the first Grammys ever awarded was worth showing off, after all. Looking back, it seems as though this thread of "Dave" may have had a certain magic to it, but when I won tickets to see REM in addition to getting to hear Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland," the die was cast. Access to a radio, the ability to hit redial when a busy signal thwarted my initial efforts, and this head full of mostly useless knowledge earned me a good bit of satisfaction. 
And some free tickets. Some were to see artists that I had little or no interest in prior, but I bought a T-shirt and enjoyed the free-ness of it. 
Right up until the radio station I listen to became a "We'll take the tenth caller" station. Now it's almost completely a random operation. Speed dialing doesn't really matter, since it's the order in which the switchboard fills. If you can burble out your name and email address when they answer your call, you win. Knowing the name of the Ben and Jerry's ice cream dedicated to Barenaked Ladies does me absolutely no good in this milieu. "If I Had A Million Flavours" in case anyone asks. Because they don't anymore, you know.