Happy Valentine's Day from the Lost Moon

Well folks, I had a blast this weekend subbing in as host of the popular romantic call-in show Love Notes with Veronica. For a thrilling hour on Saturday night, I calibrated the Lost Moon's radio transmitter for Southern California's KUPD and beamed down a line-up of my all-time favorite love tracks. It felt great to be on FM radio again, even if just for one evening, and the whole experience only heightened my resolve to get Lost Moon Radio back on the air in a permanent way in 2011!

I took some listener calls between the tracks (boy, have I missed those!) and while dispensing a bit of encouragement to a Lonely Heart in Encino, I ended up relating an anecdote about my old friend Mary Jankowski and our personal Valentine's Day tradition.

It all started back in the 8th Grade when I decided to ask Mary to the big dance with a homemade Valentine: a picture of Rod Serling glued onto a construction paper heart, upon which I'd written, "Submitted for your approval: will you go to the St. Michael's 8th Grade Cotillion with me?" I slipped it under her desk during morning roll call. At the end of the day she told me she was already going to the dance with Kevin Donnelly, but that my card was the weirdest thing anybody had ever given her.

The next day in my locker I found a construction paper heart just like mine, except glued on the front was a photo of Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta, and Roosevelt was saying, "Will you go to cotillion with me?" And Stalin was responding, "I wish I could, but I have a pogrom tomorrow." And then under that it said, "Happy Valentine's Day from Mary."

I ended up going to the dance with Shelby Kolcek, my neighbor's niece from another school. She was kind of a nightmare. But Mary and I ended up becoming really good friends. We kept in touch when she moved away in high school, and every year in February, we've each sent the other the weirdest, creepiest Valentine we can think of.

Some of them have been strange and desperate, like the one Mary sent the year after she got married that was just a picture of the cord from a vacuum cleaner tied into a noose, under which she'd scrawled, "Can we please hang out?" Others were a bit more spontaneous, like when I sent her one that said, "I don't want to miss a thing," over a photo of Steven Tyler sustaining a pretty serious injury from a microphone stand. Last year, she sent me a graphic illustration of a giraffe giving birth to twins, and she had just written, "Let's do this." This year I mailed her an opened deck of erotic playing cards with a note that said, "I found these in a bus station."

The whole time I was doing Saturday's broadcast, I had Mary's Valentine for this year with me, still sealed in its envelope.  It had just arrived on the Lost Moon by space mail that morning, but I was trying to resist the temptation to open it before the actual holiday.

Anyway, right before the end of the show, I got one last listener call from a woman who at first presented herself as a sexually aggressive Ukrainian, but who then revealed her true identity: Mary!  It turned out she'd been listening to the whole broadcast (on the internet, from her current home in Cincinnati).  She thanked me for the playing cards, which she described as "truly disgusting" and smelling "like a hobo," and then she told me to open her Valentine.  Well, Mary had really outdone herself.  She'd somehow found a photo of me and Shelby at the 8th Grade Cotillion, and in the background Mary had Photoshopped a picture of herself leering through a window and saying, "You've got a pretty mouth."  (A subtle request for another Steven Tyler card?)  And to top it off she'd included one of those little candy hearts that just said "McCain Palin."  Bizarre... but tastier than you might think.

It was a terrific surprise ending to a delightful night, and it reminded me of an important lesson about Valentine's Day. You know, it's a day that often gets a bad rap. People say it's a Hallmark Holiday, or that Geoffrey Chaucer invented the whole thing because he needed a rhyme in a poem about birds, or that it's just an occasion to make all the singletons feel bad. But I think all that's missing the point. Valentine's Day doesn't have to be about just boyfriends and girlfriends. It's about all the love in your life. And I think the best thing we can do is to find a way to celebrate that love, whatever fun or strange way that is, and to find a friend to share it with.

So Happy Valentine's Day, Mary. And Happy Valentine's Day, Earth!