Here’s my long-distance dedication to the late US radio DJ Casey Kasem.
Dear Casey,
As a child, I listened to the radio all day Saturday. When American Top 40 would come on I’d avidly track the hits as they climbed and dropped on the charts. I knew them all. Maybe not all all, but enough that now when 80s music starts to play I often sing along word for word, because that is one of the things I did with my life as a little girl: I wrote Top 40 lyrics in a little book and learned them by heart.
And though your show was called “American Top 40,” it was mine, too, in Trinidad, and everybody else’s in the world. You’d read “long-distance dedication” letters—the weepy, sentimental missives about lost loves, loves reunited, unrequited loves, one lonely soul reaching out through you to contact that special person. They would get everybody crying, from “coast to coast and around the world.” Your listeners sent you these letters, these romantic Hail Marys, because the letter-writers knew everybody listened to you, Casey. My best Casey Kasem story doesn’t actually involve you.
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