When I heard that Dan Mushalko would be at this year's Graduate Research Exhibition, I didn't know quite what to expect. This is, after all, a man who announced the birth of his second child with an e-mail message headed, "The Clone Experiments, part 2."
Mushalko, a Penn State alum, is the brains (and voice) behind The Amazing Science Emporium, an award-winning three-minute radio program sponsored locally by this office. Among its many attributes, the Emporium, as we aficionados call it, single-handedly obliterates the notion that public radio is an elitist medium.
It does the same for science. With its loopy dialogues, painful puns, and elbowed-in snatches from the entire spectrum of western popular song, the Emporium, I am convinced, is what would happen if Spike Jones and Carl Sagan were locked together in a cyclotron until they melded.
From its manic opening mantra - Science. Science. Science science science. —chanted by some unacknowledged relative of Alvin the Chipmunk, to its closing credits, which roll over a phat sax version of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein," Mushalko's show sounds like nothing you've ever heard.
It used to come on at afternoon drive time in State College, which was perfect programming: a jolt of espresso (or helium) at the low ebb of the day. Some days it would leave me hooting into my steering wheel right there in the parking lot, which did wonders for my reputation among my co-workers. But beyond the crazed music, the fearless pace, the skewed impersonations of talking atoms and Baron von Leibniz, there was something else. Once hooked, I'd listen closer, and invariably I'd learn something - about the mating practices of zucchini or the early days of the solar system or the physics of an egg shell.
What would Mushalko be like in person?
I had seen a (non-computer-enhanced) photograph of the man in white lab coat, stretched out full-length in mid-air, clinging to a stone pillar on Old Main lawn as though caught in a gale-force wind. Could he actually defy gravity?
Almost. At the Graduate Research Exhibition, where he had come to tape interviews for a 30-minute special (underwritten in toto by this magazine), Mushalko wore running shoes, headphones, and a ginger-colored beard that did not quite make it clear to the top of his head. Oh, and shamrock suspenders. And a rich gleam in his eye. What came across, in addition to a hint of early Monty Python, was an unblemished love for science - a love of the knock-you-down, Labrador-retriever variety.
I mean, I was excited to be at the Exhibition. I knew there would be a lot of neat stuff to see. But Mushalko was transported. He was zipping around the HUB Ballroom and Fishbowl, his face fixed in the sort of look that might ordinarily cause other people to back gently away. He was sidling up to people, beaming, sticking a microphone in their faces, and asking them to talk about science. "I feel like a kid in a candy store," he actually said to me, more than once. This kid undoubtedly spent long adolescent days alone in a closet, using a soup spoon for a microphone to broadcast his own moon landings. (Now he spends long days in his basement in Dublin, Ohio, i.e., "Mushalko's Radiophonic Laboratory," and his equipment is a bit more advanced.)
The funny thing is, people didn't back away. Grinning that grin, evincing such unabashed interest, Mushalko is simply irresistable. He sweeps you up in his enthusiasm.
I know because the next time I saw Dan, about a month later, he got me to pose as a scientific prop before a live audience in a hotel ballroom. To demonstrate something about gravity, I stood, left ankle and left shoulder pinned to the wall, and tried to raise my right foot off the floor. (Try it!) I have never felt so much like Gertrude the Arithmetical Mule.
This was at a conference where Mushalko had been asked to speak to a bunch of "research communicators" about creativity. The organizers gave him the deadly 5:00 p.m. spot on the program, when the last of the blood sugar is long since burned and the brain cells are crying for mercy. They knew their man. Within minutes he had a room full of tired, hungry science writers up out of their chairs, singing along gustily to some awful ditty about Enrico Fermi.
I can't get the Emporium at drive time anymore. WPSU, the local NPR affiliate, has bumped Mushalko into early evening. Now I have to pick him up while I'm washing the dishes. Even so, I realize I'm among the fortunate few. The Emporium is only open for browsing, as of this day, in central Pennsylvania, Columbus, Ohio, and the odd locality in Wisconsin.
But that may change. The good news is that after eight years of producing The Amazing Science Emporium as a labor of love, Mushalko may at last be able to wangle enough backing to make it worth his while - maybe even to go national.
He deserves it.
Science deserves it (I think).
Stay tuned.
Dan Mushalko graduated from Penn State in 1981, with a degree in Speech Communication and a certificate in Broadcasting. He started out in biophysics, Dan reports, but was diverted during his freshman year, "and I've yet to get back on track." The Amazing Science Emporium has been heard for a number of years on WPSU, the NPR affiliate in State College, Pennsylvania.