Posted by Ugh on January 13, 2009 at 06:51:44:
Poster's note: Sometimes if you beat a dead horse too much, you wind up getting some reward. "Oh, look at us! We're going to DC for the inagural ball!"
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From Tim Cuprisn's column in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
"Shtick-to-itiveness pays off for morning duo with inauguration ball invite"
The morning duo on WQBW-FM (97.3) are on their way to Washington, D.C., next week for the Midwest Inaugural Ball.
And it's all because Connie and Fish took one of their radio bits and kept hammering away at it.
It started when Barack Obama was on their show last February.
Obama still had months of battling ahead to win the Democratic presidential nomination. His main opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had already been on the radio show, then based out of Madison. And she had made a promise to the morning team that they'd be on the guest list for an inaugural ball.
Says Connie: "Then, like the next day, we had Obama on, and we said, 'Now, Hillary invited us to the ball if she won. Are you gonna do the same?'
"He kinda hemmed and hawed, you know, he was a little more stiff," she says.
Obama finally said yes.
"But you can't bring all your rowdy friends," Connie quotes him as saying.
Pipes in Fish, "We kept that audio, and when he won, we started sending it out to everybody."
"On the air, we're like, 'This'll be the first promise this guy breaks if he doesn't invite us,' " says Connie.
The invitation finally came last week from Sen. Russ Feingold's office.
"So when Feingold's people got a hold of us, they're like, 'See, he didn't break his promise,' " she says.
Connie and Fish won't be broadcasting from the ball on the night of Jan. 20 - since they're not in the media area for the event. But they'll be calling in to talk about their experiences on Inauguration Day, and the ball is certainly going to be the focus of their Thursday morning show.
Connie and Fish - whose show is now based out of Milwaukee on the station known to listeners as "The Brew" - are on weekdays from 5:30 to 10 a.m. The show is simulcast on their longtime Madison station, WZEE-FM (104.1).