When people talk about the "college experience," they don't mean the University of North Alabama. It's not a bad school, but it's not the institution you dream of one day attending. It's a tiny liberal arts school in the northwest corner of the state and I wound up there because I had to go somewhere - that much had been made clear by my dad. I wound up there because they had a communications program and it didn't occur to me I might be qualified or interested in anything else.

UNA had a lot of the things larger schools have, just in smaller doses. There are bars and hangouts, although you couldn't get a beer in town on a Sunday. They had fraternities and sororities that were proportionally annoying. There were sheltered girls reveling in their first taste of freedom as second semester lesbians, and guys who wooed them by becoming sensitive, stylish singer/songwriter wannabes well-schooled in Elliott Smith. There was a campus newspaper where I got to try my hand at writing and editing. Of course the best thing that happened to me while on the newspaper staff was making the acquaintance of the mysterious 11, a friend and brother-in-arms these many years later. The college is also where I got my first taste of radio, working overnights at a classic rock station that broadcast out of an old house in the middle of a neighborhood in Tuscumbia.

My first stop, though, was Calhoun Community College. The cultural and learning center of the universe it wasn't. We had nicknames for it. Some called it Redneck Tech. Others called it UCLA - University of Calhoun 'Longside the Airport.  That was a cleverly unsophisticated nickname, although to call the two runways in the cotton field behind the school's main campus an airport was a bit of a stretch. Calhoun wasn't a cathedral, but it's the place where I tried my hand at a new identity of sorts.

I moved to Alabama my senior year of high school. My first week, I made friends with a fellow headbanger by the name of Cary. He is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met, and he laughed at my jokes. He made his way to Calhoun first. By the time we re-teamed, he'd become deeply involved in the theater program. I was skeptical. Community college theater? Calhoun Community College theater? You had to be joking. It turns out he wasn't. Such a program not only existed, it flourished. I didn't have the acting bug, but through Cary I was meeting some great people. They seemed to be enjoying it. Why not?