Christopher Calandro

(Layout provided by Kit Forshee .)

I was born on November 10, 1970, at St. Luke's Hospital in Sioux City, Iowa. Little is known about my early life. My father, James, and my mother, Barbara, kept me with them in Sioux City. Often I would play outside, and then, invariably, I would be given ravioli. When I was almost two, my brother Anthony was born. (Recently with PricewaterhouseCoopers, he currently resides in Denver, plotting his next move.) 1975 saw the birth of my baby sister, Stacey. (She's currently married to a sweet and devastingly handsome black man named Joe Winston, living in Hong Kong, and no, my parents couldn't care less. About him being black, that is.)

One day we moved to West Des Moines, where I saw my first squirrel. On my first day at Sacred Heart Catholic School (where my father was the principal), I was asked to do something I refused to do: skip. At various times, the Calandro family went on vacations to Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, and The Magic House in St. Louis. I attended Green Mountain High School in Lakewood, Colorado, which is in the same school district as the now-infamous Columbine, where I took my SATs and competed in speech tournaments. After graduating high school in 1989, I attended summer session at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I took Fundamental Western Massage and a Hitchcock film course, soon realizing I would NEVER GRADUATE if I stayed there. It was then that the Registrar at the University of Iowa called saying that by virtue of the fact that my mother paid taxes on the family farm in Iowa, I could get in-state tuition there. Booyah. So much for NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. During my freshman year at Iowa, I ran into a dimunitive lad of Filipino descent named A.J. Bautista, who noticed that I had "a good set of pipes" and asked me to be the announcer for his college radio show on KRUI -- my broadcasting career was launched!

Then I met Cristin Enelle (Nell) Fuller, who offered me a joint, and so began our college romance. Last I heard she was still dating the guy with which she rebounded from us, living in the Pacific Northwest after finishing her Masters degree at Yale. After completing my undergrad at Iowa, I moved to Springfield, Missouri the day after Christmas, 1993, where I spent a miserable year and a half doing radio, writing women's clothing catalog copy, and bartending at a pool hall. In March of 1995, a dramatic and spiritual event involving my television set opened my eyes to the strange and freaky recurrence of the numbers 606, which I ultimately took as a sign to pick up and move to Lexington, Kentucky, where I spent the four (4) best years of my life. During that time, I had my only six-figure year in 1996, as a result of selling cell phones, a number-one-rated morning radio show, and a kids' show on the local Fox affiliate. After those glorious years of building the nom de aire, RadioBoy, an altercation with the midday goof and a bloodless coup by some ass-licking industry tool resulted in my termination. Thirty (30) days to the day of my firing, the same company that fired me, Clear Channel Communications, rehired me to come to Atlanta in October 1999 to produce 96rock's Regular Guys program.

Since then, I have been an airborne traffic reporter for market-leader NewsTalk 750 (WSB-AM) and Atlanta's ABC-TV affiliate (Channel 2, WSB-TV), in addition to being a morning show producer and air personality for heritage modern rocker, 99X (WNNX-Atlanta). On October 30, 2004, I sustained the most stupid work-related injury ever, tearing my right ACL doing a stunt for a morning radio show. Shortly thereafter, I got a lovely post-surgical staph infection, resulting in the incredibly painful removal of the transplanted ACL, a Peripherally Installed Central Catheter (PICC) to fight the infection, and months in bed with two home-health nurses, one of which gave me a charity handjob on her last day. With a glove on. If that's not deadsexy, I don't know what is.

2005 was easily the darkest year of my stupid little life. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." By the grace of God, and the help of my three (3) best friends in Atlanta (Kit Forshee, Bill Powers, and Jon Ross, my webmaster, a cop, and an architect, respectively), 2006 has been a great year to date. Jon has been an especially awesome catalyst for great things, most notably getting me into the FLC (Family Life Center) where I've been getting back into the best cardiovascular condition of my life, and where in mid-February I met a certain Special Someone.

A ravingly beautiful and also very sweet girl, her elegance, charm, wit, and ever-curious mind make me want to strive to get better every day. After sending her an unsolicited e-mail to her place of employ (a date now known as the Day of Testicular Fortitude), she disclosed that she had a boyfriend that she was dating "seriously", to which I replied that's okay, I'm looking to date someone "hilariously" anyway, so let's just be friends. As our friendship developed, she has since kicked said boyfriend to the curb, resulting in me dancing a jig on the inside, while remaining cool as a cucumber on the outside, so says she regarding the latter. Certain outside observers in my Camp think we should be Together, and I'm inclined to agree with such a notion, as she seems to have optimum interpersonal ergonomics and makes me stupidly happy whenever she's near. Henry David Thoreau once said, "Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." As I patiently wait for her to have an Epiphany during her Period of Self-Reflection that We are a seed, perhaps, to be sown and grown, I turn my suffering into Great Art, like this compelling web content. So yeah.
No one knows what the future holds in store for me.