I HAD ALWAYS avoided Learning Annex classes. If I was going to take a class, it wasn't going to be in some annex, but in the actual Learning Place, or, as I like to call it, "a school."
But I've always wondered who does take these classes. The latest issue of the Learning Annex catalog has incredible range, from $50 classes with comedian Wayne Brady and documentarian R.J. Cutler to a $60 class called "How to Grow Hair in 12 Weeks." I imagine the professor stresses the technique of not getting a haircut. This is the trap most people fall into about week eight.
Not many pages from "Learn Telepathic Communication with Animals" with Amelia Kinkade, author of "Straight From The Horse's Mouth: How to Talk to Animals," was a class on becoming a radio star, taught by Danny Bonaduce. I needed to meet people paying $49.99 to get life advice from a guy who slit his wrists on a VH1 reality show.
The class was made up of 20 other adults -- most older than Bonaduce -- sparsely populating a small conference room in the Holiday Inn by the airport. For the first time in anyone's life, someone -- me, that is -- felt sorry for Bonaduce.
Though I don't think he needed the microphone to reach the back of the room, it turns out Bonaduce is an awfully good teacher. He treated the students as equals by referring to radio as "our business" and not referring to them as "the freaks."
When an older woman who wanted to do a call-in show about art raised her hand and shared a tip about how it's effective to follow a program director home from work because "finding someone at a carwash is a lot easier than trying to get them on the phone," professor Bonaduce gently mentioned how such a practice could backfire. Like with a restraining order.
People in Learning Annex classes, I quickly found out, aren't so much about the learning as the talking-out-loud-in-front-of-a-group-ing. The few actual questions weren't so much about radio as about Bonaduce's self-destructive behavior. After questions about therapy, his marriage, his firings, his suicide attempt and Don Imus' stock option plans, someone asked him how long he'd been sober. "How long I've been sober is less important than if I get out of here sober," he said.
