ROX #28: The Great Midwestern Watershed

B: ROX #28 is my nominee for Most Embarrassing Episode. Yet the reason is not abundantly clear unless you pay really close attention. The show itself is not notably worse than any of the other crap we've produced. But we called this “The Great Midwestern Watershed” because we were beginning our plan for expansion. Starting with this episode, ROX would no longer be a local show. Instead, it was now to be a regional program, seen on public access stations throughout the Midwest. I was confident enough in this plan that I can be heard to boast, “This is the first time that J&B on the ROX, the program that you're watching now, is being seen all across the Midwest, as opposed to just in Bloomington, Indiana.”

The embarrassing part is that it didn't happen. Distribution is a bitch, man! Frankly, we were too busy making our weekly show on a shoestring to commit the necessary resources to getting our program out to all those stations. But at the time of the “Watershed” we were full of confidence in our own abilities.

What paltry waifs are mortals such as we!

Eventually, of course, we did get ROX out of the local market, onto cable access in Indianapolis and then onto approximately 65 cities via FreeSpeech TV, not to mention the whole damn world via internet and satellite. But that was years later.

Nevertheless, from this point on, we began producing our shows with an eye to a larger audience. So this program was a watershed of sorts, after all.