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The Mad Trivia Party
The Mad Trivia Party was a show on WHRW-FM, a radio station that was once Bingamton, NY's largest alternative media outlet. It was part game show, part improv comedy jam, like Mancow meets Hollywood Squares meets a whole lot of crack. The concept began with a lone DJ in 1979 and was passed down through generations of DJs.
The show eventually featured a "panel" whom callers would try to stump with trivia questions.
I became a panelist in 1994, under Jordana Dlugacz, a DJ who called herself "The High Mistress of Mosh." By 1996, I had taken over production duties for the show, creating the show's imaging. Greg Mollo ("The Buzzbomb") replaced Dlugacz in 1997, and I continued producing imaging for the show, now incorporating sketch comedy elements and absurdist humor. In 1998 Mollo moved away from the Binghamton area and I was asked to host in his stead.
Now fulfilling roles as board-op, producer, and host, the show took on my personality and style quickly. Whereas the show was relegated to a weird late night timeslot in the early 90s, Mad Trivia again became a prime-time juggernaut with a rabid cult following. A proper website for the show appeared in 1997, and in February 1998, we released the show's first-ever best-of CD, I'm Charles Foster Kane!: The Mad Trivia Party Archives 1997-1998. For the first month, CDs were only given to winners of each week's show, pumping up the competition. Later in 1998, Thank You Me: The Mad Trivia Party Archives Volume 2 was released, and the fans crawled over each other to win their copy. A third disc was planned for late 2000, but tensions began to surface with some members of the show who wanted to claim the work as their own (as in, I hadn't done any of it; or, they had). I shelved the album, fired the panel, and brought on a new crew the same week, which resulted in almost eighteen months of what is now considered a golden age of Mad Trivia.
I retired from the program in 2002, leaving it to a panlist and dear friend, Nick Venti, and releasing a special edition best-of CD featuring the most recent panel, with a bonus CD-ROM containing all of the previous albums and hours of unreleased material. 50 copies were handmade and sent to the first 50 people to sign up for one, for free. In 2007, during sweeping management changes at WHRW, I was asked back to host the program yet again (and it was awesome); but WHRW had changed, and my time there was short-lived.
We always tried to walk Mad Trivia down a fine line between the "mad" and the "trivia", often preferring the former. Where others had been too consumed by the rigid game show aspects, I aimed to find a frenetic balance between the structure and the "party" - much like friends playing cards, the outcome of which mattered, but not really.
I still occasionally hear someone say that there should be a best-of album for the Fall 2007 season when I had returned to host. But it was different then. There were some people involved who didn't represent the best interest of the thing. That's totally my fault. If there's an album, we want to make sure those bad things aren't represented. We owe it to the ridiculous legacy of this show. Maybe someday.