The Almost Naked Car Wash

No, really.... radio is ridiculous

Eleven years ago I moved to Chico, CA for the opportunity of being a Program Director at what is sort of a legendary Active Rock radio station.

If you don’t know what’s up with Z-Rock, you can peep the history here.

If legend is correct I was the second female PD in the Chico location ever, the other one leaving after six months.

I had already successfully programmed an Active Rock station here in San Luis Obispo, complete with helping to re-brand it, etc after I got here when I was 23. The station was a Clear Channel station and we were part of some of the first massive sales back in 2006. Another company who I will just call the Chip Factory bought us and my expensive ass lasted jusssssst long enough to lose my Clear Channel severance package.

After a year of not having a job, I went to work in top 40 at a station I will never not love, as a Production Director, the person who makes the commercials.

I, however will never not be a programmer and when the siren song of this opportunity called, I applied.

I was not their first choice. I wasn’t even their top 14th choice but I was the only one willing to say “fuck it,” and go.

The unfortunate part of taking this station on was there were a lot of promotions that had been in place for years and we still had to do them, because they were a big part of Z-Rock history.

Chico is an entirely different place than San Luis Obispo. People like to compare them because hey college life and both of them have a Woodstock’s Pizza, A Mo’s BBQ and a Kona’s Sandwich shop.

Yeah and Taft and San Luis Obispo both have a McDonald’s… doesn’t make them the same place by a country mile.

If you don’t live in California you probably think San Francisco is Northern California and Los Angeles is Southern California.

When you pass San Francisco and Sacramento you get closer to Northern California… In this place that people decide every few years they want to break off and call the Jefferson State, which is as disturbing as it sounds, so my opinions even as the Programmer of this station weren’t spot on. I had no idea, I’d only been to Chico for about 12 hours previous to when I took this job. This was an entirely different culture to me. I moved from a beach town where we played reggae on a rock station and had a punk show and skate competitions on the regular to a place where people got excited about Monster Trucks.

(Monster Trucks were surprisingly pretty cool.)

Imagine my absolute surprise that one of the first events that had already been sold and we were going to do, if I liked it or not was a car wash at a strip club.

Wait, what?

(This is me wondering what the fuck I just stumbled into.)

Yes, every Father’s Day weekend (and yes this story can get worse… I dragged my poor Dad to this one year because I couldn’t get out of going while he was visiting,) the World’s Saddest Strip Club, Centerfolds, just outside of Chico had this bikini car wash.

You drove up, paid whatever it was to get your car in the tent and strippers washed your car and pushed their boobs on to your windows while doing so.

I’m not a prude and I love seeing women succeed and if these women were making that paper, good for them, but meeting some of the listeners who were coming out for this thing, I can’t believe all the girls were having a good time. But what the hell do I know? Just that this wouldn’t even remotely fly where I had just moved from.

(Me and my coworker/BFF making the best out of the 110 degree weather next to a station vehicle that broke down during this thing.)

It was the first of a few “racy” events I worked in that first month. Literally we had a golf tournament a few weeks later with these same girls. But hey, who hates getting paid to drive a golf cart around all day drinking PBR?

(just another day at the office)

I always felt bad for the women because it was so hot, the tent smelled like moldy ass with sunscreen and soap and the inside of the club was worse. Some of the ladies were more colorful than others, but they were shocked sometimes when I was at these events. I always had fun talking to them and as you can tell by my rainbow belt over there, nothing they did made me uncomfortable.

Usually what would happen after the Almost Naked Car Wash is that we’d head back into town and my BFF and I would “go to there,” which was whatever bar we drank at back then. One year it was Normal Street after having to call the tow truck for the Hearse again, another year it was the End Zone, which was the bar closest to both of our houses. We’d laugh and try to drink the smell of that tent out of our noses.

This wasn’t even the weirdest event we did, but that’s another story.